“ Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture ” edited by Roxane Gay An elegantly crafted story that animates vital, difficult topics, “The Mars Room” is a harrowing read about survival in the face of injustice. While illustrating the horrors of poverty and prison life, the novel never encroaches didacticism in the way that many books about Big Issues do. “The Mars Room” excels in presenting a complete universe, one that is brimming with life and stories, and Kushner expertly captures the nuances of a cultural scene on the cusp.
As much about San Francisco in the ’90s as it is about prison, the novel crackles with a sordid, claustrophobic atmosphere in which the city looms omnipresent and labyrinthian, a backdrop filled with pockets of skeeviness and clusters of crime. The characters in Kushner’s work dance in and out over the flash of a few sentences, their lives distilled to jarring anecdotes and images that bolster the seedy undercurrents in the novel’s world. As the incarcerated protagonist mulls over the events of her life, the story flits back and forth to San Francisco in the waning decades of the twentieth century. It was a life of inescapable poverty punctuated by drugs and sex work and casual violence, a life propelled by inequitable forces. As she copes with the quotidian indignities of prison life-the unceremonious brutality, lack of privacy and Kafkaesque bureaucracy-she reflects on her upbringing and the life she led prior to arrest. Romy Hall is staring down two life sentences for murdering her stalker. “The Mars Room” by Rachel Kushner is a dizzying noir set in a California prison during the early aughts. In this collection, Crosley builds upon her trademark style-one of dry wit peppered with hilarious asides-to tackle topics that are actually not all that funny: death, aging, the fickle nature of relevancy, chronic illness and, of course, fertility.įans of her earlier collections, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” and “How Did You Get This Number,” will find comfort in Crosley’s ability to lend her consistent style to the topics we’re all a little afraid to touch.
In “The Doctor is a Woman,” Crosley recounts the horror of realizing she had accidentally frozen the $1,500 worth of drugs she needed prior to having her eggs harvested, only after having attempted to acquire some nearly expired drugs via the “black market,” at least a very Upper West Side version of the black market, anyway. I started the book’s concluding essay “The Doctor is a Woman,” in which Crosley recounts reckoning with her infertility, and deciding to freeze her eggs, as soon as I sat down with my Styrofoam cup of coffee.Ĭrying in Jiffy Lube, which is what I was doing by the time I had finished this particular essay, is a theatrical metaphor for this entire collection-funny, sure (it’s Jiffy Lube!) but actually kind of sad. I finished Sloane Crosley’s latest collection of essays, “Look Alive Out There,” while I in the waiting area of my neighborhood Jiffy Lube. “ Look Alive Out There: Essays ” by Sloane Crosley Living like an Italian, a prison noir, and new essay collections to check out this month.īy Jordan Bascom, Daley Farr, Annie Metcalf, Kaylen Ralph, Samantha Rose, Marit Swanson, and Sarah Waller