My review of "The Mars Room" by Rachel Kushner in the Seattle Times.

By Jeff Baker

Special to The Seattle Times

Book review

Rachel Kushner is having her moment. Her new novel, “The Mars Room,” has earned her the holy trinity of literary publicity: an excerpt on National Public Radio, a long profile in The New Yorker and a 12-page excerpt in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Kushner’s been compared to Don DeLillo so often he should ask for a percentage of her royalties; it’s now mandatory to mention “Orange Is the New Black” when writing about “The Mars Room” since both are set in women’s prisons and have an edgy cast of characters.

Kushner’s got the talent to justify the hype. Her first two novels, “Telex from Cuba” (2008) and “The Flamethrowers” (2013), were National Book Award finalists, and the DeLillo comparisons started when he wrote her a fan letter praising “Telex from Cuba.” (She framed it.) The 50-year-old Californian writes in a spiky, big-brain style that sounds a little like Mary Gaitskill and a little more like Robert Stone (another “Telex” admirer). Her settings are colorful — Cuba in the 1950s, the Nevada desert, radical Italy, the New York art world in the 1970s — and she goes deep into them and comes back with the goods.

“The Mars Room” comes in carrying not just the expectations of Kushner’s talent but her ambitions. She wanted to write an important book about incarceration and the way money and class determine fate in America. She quotes extensively from Ted Kaczynski’s journals and kicks around the idea that maybe the Unabomber and Henry David Thoreau had more in common than a cabin in the woods. Sexual politics, inside prison and out, get a thorough going-over. Country music’s violent history, the gritty side of San Francisco, the Iraq war — all this heaviness would collapse a novel that wasn’t built of reinforced plot and character.

What Kushner offers instead is a collection of observations and some terrific scenes. She opens on a transport bus carrying 60 women to a prison in California’s Central Valley. Romy Hall, a 29-year-old stripper doing two life sentences for killing a man who stalked her, is on board, horrified at the dead-end future that’s closing in on her. A woman who killed her baby talks nonstop about kidnappings and the Manson Family. Another collapses in her seat and falls to the floor. “Nonresponsive,” says the guard, and they drive on.

Romy escapes into her memories of working at the Mars Room, where “if you’d showered you had a competitive edge … If your tattoos weren’t misspelled you were hot property. If you weren’t five or six months pregnant, you were the it-girl in the club that night.” She grew up hard in the Sunset District, which was “San Francisco, proudly, and yet an alternate one to what you might know: it was not about rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets but fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway, where a sea of broken glass glittered on the endless parking strip of Ocean Beach.”

Kushner’s sentences are so strong that they overcome a narrative that’s riddled with fragments and false starts. “The Mars Room” is not an easy read, but it’s never dull and it does build to a redemption that comes from hard truth, sharp and broken and shaped by an author of exceptional power and grace.

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“The Mars Room” by Rachel Kushner; Simon & Schuster; 338 pp.; $27

Rachel Kushner will read from “The Mars Room” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 15, at Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., Seattle; 206-624-6600, elliottbaybook.com