2018 Booker Prize Longlist: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

This thread is for discussion of The Mars Room by Rache Kushner. No unhidden spoiler comments, please.

There's something about this book that keeps me from calling it "great and important" and that has also kept me from posting a comment here for days. Basically it is great and important, but it has an element I can't put my finger on that makes me want to step away from it, and it's not the prison scenes. There's something fluttering, something undecided, something... I don't know. Sorry. It will certainly be shortlisted. Oh, and I rated with 3.8 = 4 stars.

This accounts for my 4th Booker 2018 read and unfortunately I had to give it a 2 1/2 out of 5. I was hoping for something new here but it reads like a story line from the Netflix series, "Orange is the New Black". For the most part, I found the story boring. On the upside, I did enjoy Romy's first person observations and probably would have enjoyed the story more had it remained in her voice throughout.

I am not a fan of books about drugs and poverty, I have read too many of them. This one is about a poor, drug-using and lapdancing woman who ends up in prison. Books and films about prisons have its own clichés, and they are all here in the book: lousy lawyers, corruption, women being touched and hassled by male policemen not standing a chance, the poor circumstances in prison, the fights among the women, etc. Kushner writes well and I kind of liked Romy Hall, but that’s about it.

I wonder however, is this really reality in the US, this lousy criminal justice system and those circumstances in prison? Or are books and movies exaggerating?

I started reading this a couple days ago and I'm not that far into it. I liked her Flamethrowers and Telex to Cuba quite a lot though so I expect a kind of high standard. To me she is easily one of the best contemporary American writers and there's not that many living who I think are that good. Anyway for what I have read I would say so far it's been very good.