Prison Is When You Can’t Get Out

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.  Scribner.  338 pp.  $27.00. *****

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.  Viking.  462 pp.  $27.00 ****

“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” –Mephistopheles, in Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

Rachel Kushner writes at a different level of intensity from the rest of us.  She’s one of those writers (Jim Harrison comes to mind, which is enormously high praise from me) with whom you don’t care where the novel is going, because you’re so fascinated line-by-line.  From the first page I knew I was in good hands.

She jumps into her story in the middle, when her protagonist, Romy Leslie Hall, is being moved from one California prison to another—“from Chino up to Stanville”—late at night, because that’s the best time to move prisoners.  In that bus are a number of characters who will be important to the rest of the novel, but none more important than Romy, who is the center of our focus.  The novel’s point of view drifts around slightly, focusing on another inmate or two, and on a young man who is teaching Continuing Ed at the prison, but Romy remains the center of the story.

All of these women strike me as survivors (except for one extremely obese woman who slumps in the middle of the bus ride and collapses—the women yell at the guards that she needs help, but they do nothing for her—and who at the end of the trip is found to have died), women who are so used to prison life that it isn’t much different from anything else.  In the prison they arrange to get their own food, they can get alcohol and drugs, they have sex.  A woman named Conan—who is at least as much man as woman, actually did some time in a man’s prison—talks about how she used to party at one prison all the time; it doesn’t sound much different from her trip to Orlando.

“’I dropped twenty G there,’ Conan said.  ‘In three days.  Brought my girl.  Her kids.  Jacuzzi suite.  All access pass.  Alligator steaks.  Orlando is dope.  A lot doper than this bus, that’s for sure.”

In that regard it seems significant that this novel is entitled The Mars Room, rather than Stanhope.  The Mars Room was the “Gentleman’s Club” where Romy made a living as a lap dancer, a second-rate sleazy place where she nevertheless managed to make a living, at least enough to raise her child (who is living with her mother now that she’s locked up).  It was a place where people were living in addiction: the patrons were addicted to the phony relationships they had with the women who worked there, and the workers were often addicted to drugs and alcohol, also to this way of making a living.  As feisty and intelligent as she is, Romy couldn’t seem to escape that life, and it is there that she met the man who became obsessed with her and stalked her and whom she finally killed (in a scene that we see only at the end of the novel) in order to protect herself and her son.  She’s received two consecutive life sentences.  She isn’t getting out.

I’m reminded of a play about Death Row, written and enacted by Death Row inmates[1].  When you heard about their lives—growing up as the children of addicted parents, in neighborhoods where the only real money-making option was a life of crime, you had the feeling that their lives had set them up, the texture of their lives combined with the fact that none of them could afford a decent lawyer, so that grotesque errors were made in their cases.  The women in Stanhope are the same way.  They didn’t have to commit their brutal crimes (one woman had killed her own child) but you have the feeling something was going to get them.  One of Romy’s friends gets out toward the end but you have the feeling she’ll be back.

Rachel Kushner is like Charles Bukowski (I’ve never compared anyone to Harrison and Bukowski in the same piece) in that she’s writing about people whom we rarely hear about in literature but writing with great authority, as if she’s been there (a recent piece in the New Yorker lets us know that, not only has Kushner worked in prison, but she grew up in a sketchy milieu as well.  She could easily have been one of the women she writes about).  This isn’t a feel-good journey to a woman’s prison like Orange Is the New Black[2], despite all the feisty and interesting women we meet; Stanhope Prison is a sad, desperate, hopeless place, not likely to show up on Netflix.  These women’s lives are the same way.  When they’re not in a literal prison, they’re in one their lives have created.

A Gentleman in Moscow is another kind of book altogether, almost the inverse of The Mars Room (though weirdly enough, it was one of the Death Row inmates who recommended it to me.  He had started the book and found the prose remarkable. I agree).  Count Alexander Rostov—in contrast to these women who are imprisoned by their lives—was raised an aristocrat, with all the advantages of an advanced culture, and nothing can really put him in prison.  He’s a free man wherever he goes.

He isn’t in anything like Stanhope.  The year is 1922, and his prison is the same luxury Moscow Hotel that he’d already been inhabiting, though he must leave the huge suite he’d been living in for a tiny attic room.  He was an aristocrat during the Russian Revolution, and as such there are those who would “have you taken from this chamber and put against the wall,” as the committee tells him after his trial.  But because “there are those within the senior ranks of the Party who count you among the heroes of the prerevolutionary cause,” they allow him to return to his hotel.  “But make no mistake: should you ever set foot outside of the Metropol again, you will be shot.”  It’s a life sentence.

A Gentleman in Moscow is a kind of fairy tale, a charming story about a charming and witty man who is imprisoned in a luxury hotel and needs to make his life there, surrounded by those who love him and others who—because he was once an aristocrat—have it in for him.  I never had the feeling—as I did the whole time with Rachel Kushner—that I was reading about something real.  It was more like a fable, by a person whose first novel, a bestseller, was entitled Rules of Civility.  That title would have served for this book as well.  I have to admit that, when the Count’s first relationship back at the hotel was with a little girl, I was afraid that this was going to be one of those kindly-older-man-with-a-cute-little-girl books, and I wasn’t sure I could stomach that no matter how good the style.  But the book soon moved beyond that single relationship and traversed a great deal of twentieth century Russian history.  How the American writer Amor Towles knows all this, or why he is so interested in it, I do not know, but he’s written an enormously charming story (I keep using that word) that keeps us happy and smiling, even when things get difficult.

I’m constantly aware, in my work with inmates, that the Buddha would say a person can be as free in a prison as he can be out of one (likewise, that a person on the outside can be utterly imprisoned).  That’s not something I ever actually say to the inmates (they often tell me how bad things are “in there,” and I listen and bite my tongue, because things often seem the same out where I am, though my physical setting is far nicer).  A Gentleman in Moscow is a book about a man who would be free anywhere.  And though this is an unfair thing to say—these are completely different artists, with different interests and intentions; it’s sheer coincidence that I read them together—I would be a little more convinced if Rachel Kushner had created such a person, rather than Amor Towles.

[1] A group of us at the Chapel Hill Zen Center meditate with some men on Death Row at Central Prison in Raleigh.  The inmates—working with an outside program—wrote their life stories, which one of their teachers fashioned brilliantly into a play.  I had the great good fortune to see a rehearsal—a quite finished one—one day when I had gone in to meditate.  I was stunned by how well the play held together and how well the men acted.  But of course they were literally being themselves.

[2] I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen a few episodes of the TV show.