Examining Mass Incarceration: Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner's 2018 novel The Mars Room examines the nature and causes of mass incarceration in the United States. The novel follows American prison literature conventions in showing what prisons conceal, and departs from them by not having its characters undergo personal transformations or speak for broader communities. Most distinctively it employs several narrative voices, which facilitates a multidimensional analysis of mass incarceration, and by distancing the reader from the engaging main character, helps Kushner deliver a structural critique. Beyond immediate factors like harsher sentencing laws and plea bargaining lie poverty and abuse that track mostly lower-class people into prison. The violence Kushner depicts saturating American society suggests the difficulty of ending mass incarceration.