The Mars Room
by Rachel Kushner
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

IN HER previous work Rachel Kushner's focus was on colonial exploitation and the fraying of Fordism and now, in The Mars Room, she turns a novelist's eye on the carceral capitalism of the early 21^st century United States.

Unlike the dystopian turn of much US writing in the Trump era, best crystallised in the success of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kushner’s novel serves as a rejoinder to this trend. It rudely reminds us that dystopia is here already.

We’re thrust into the thick of it right from the beginning on the bus journey to the Stanville correctional facility in northern California, as witnessed through the eyes of San Francisco stripper Romy Hall.

Upon her arrival, Kushner dexterously draws the everyday lives of the inmates under the disciplinarian regime of the prison, as well as detailing their petty squabbles and small acts of defiance, such as using the sewage system as a secret postal service between cells.

Despite being set during the Iraq war years, the novel runs the gamut of issues in current left discourse — police brutality, institutional racism, trans rights, precarious work and white supremacy among them.

Some may view this as a contrived piece of social justice warrior box-ticking, but this would miss the nuance and delicacy with which Kushner approaches the issues at hand. As with her previous novels, she sinuously weaves human stories and the political structures they are caught within.

Plot-wise, The Mars Room may lack the supple elegance of the author's The Flamethrowers but its tangle of narrative threads only underscores the lack of cohesion of the lives it seeks to narrate. How does one comprehend the intermeshing forces of capital that have marginalised the disadvantaged and the poor?

Fragments of Hall’s biography accrete over the course of the novel, sutured with stories of fellow inmates, until the revelation of her crime. Its shock is numbed by the humiliating state machinations she has had to endure since then.

Kushner subtly teases out the tacit prejudices and contradictions that have permeated US notions of justice for decades, with one character musing on how the inmates may have committed unspeakably violent crimes but the state is given carte blanche for the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians. These observations about justice, suggestive but never didactic, are always hovering on the peripheries of the novel.

The Mars Room joins a venerable tradition of the US political novel that seeks to campaign on a pressing social issue — think Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle — and as the collective imagination there seems more concerned with rushing headlong into a grim future constructed on the principles of inhumane demagogy, Kushner gives us a coruscating insight into the lives of those already living there.