Cluster Critiques

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Romy Hall, main character and narrator of The Mars Room is a 29-year-old drug addict and lap dancer at the skanky San Francisco Mars Room strip club. She has lost custody of her son and is serving two life sentences in prison for killing a man.  I felt so disoriented by Romy’s narration of her sordid life, until in chapter 23 she says something along the lines of: 

“When you’re a kid you eat whatever you can find, your mom’s a junkie with a boyfriend who sexually abuses you, there’s nobody around to make you go to school so you drop out and start prostituting and doing drugs until you get caught and go to prison, then you get out, get caught again and go back, but that’s OK because that’s the culture you live in, it’s normal for us, expected.” 

Suddenly it all made sense. People who live what feels like a gutter-level Greek tragedy, live that way because it is their “normal.”

The Mars Room is a work of fiction as is Romy Hall, but author Rachel Kushner’s writing felt so authentic I had to keep reminding myself The Mars Room wasn’t an autobiography and Romy doesn’t really exist. The story ping-pongs back and forth between Romy and her prison mates’ disaster-movie lives that predestined them for prison, and their similarly grim lives behind bars. I felt like a rubbernecker at a roadside wreck with a morbid inability to look away, wanting to rub my own nose in the horror of Romy’s life to appreciate the thin line that separates her existance from mine.  

And then, when Romy said things like, 
“At the Mars Room 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,” 
I sort of illogically swooned from the richness of Kushner's imagery. 

Read The Mars Room.

Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty

After reading about the making of the movie Caddyshack, I’m surprised they didn’t name it “Clusterfuck.” Caddyshack (the movie) is a secret guilty pleasure of mine because it requires no mental heavy-lifting, while providing classic comic bits by Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase.  The book is full of gossipy tidbits about the personalities and relationships of most of the players. 

Dangerfield’s part in the movie was originally small until his outrageous ad-libs won him more celluloid. There was a hot feud between Chevy Chase, who’d recently hit it big and left Saturday Night Live, and Bill Murray, still at SNL and extremely resentful of Chase’s success. Chase and Murray only showed up when they felt like it, creating frustration for everyone involved in the film. 

The brains behind the movie (if one can imagine any were) was Murray’s brother Brian. And the whole mess was fueled by the ubiquitous drugs of that time-period (late 1970s). Not unlike the movie this book is mostly junior high-level entertainment (fun).

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

I waited patiently for this book to go somewhere, and maybe it did for some, but  for me it felt like I boarded the wrong plane and was stuck sitting on a lifeless literary tarmac. A family acquires a beautiful ocean-front property on a long-ago paid off bet, and converges in summer over several generations to share their life’s disappointments. 

I’m fully stocked up on my own personal family drama and have little patience for people whining about first world problems. Sullivan can write, but her characters didn’t inspire me, unless you call wanting to throw the book across the room inspiration. Meh...

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

In 1969 Brooklyn, four siblings ages of 7 to13, hear of a gypsy woman who can tell you the exact date of your death. So, they gather up their nickels and dimes and go see the gypsy, who one by one seals each child’s fate – or one might think. 

Benjamin’s book, which has generated a lot of discussion in the literary community, follows each of the siblings over 50 years as their lives play out under the glare of a date-certain death sentence. 

Although the descriptions of their lives’ might not look that different than say a typical family saga, it is told within the context of something the characters in the story know but we do not, the date each character will die. It is this underlying theme that makes all the difference.  We anguish over the characters’ every decision, and it is this dynamic that makes The Immortalists interesting and worth our time.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Justice should be absolute, simple, cut and dried. But, like life, or just about anything, nothing is as absolute or simple as it should be. I’ve been binge-watching true-crime on TV at night, and one thing I have learned is that criminal justice is much more complicated than it seems on the surface– even with a confession, even with witnesses. Like an iceberg, you can only see 10%. The other 90% is below the surface.

Author Bryan Stevenson has made it his life’s mission to bring due process, and perhaps justice and mercy to individuals languishing destitute on death row. The bulk of Just Mercyis about a man convicted of murder and sentenced to death despite multiple witnesses confirming his presence at a church fundraiser during the established time of the murder. And though that profile is truly sympathetic, not all the people Stevenson represents are, but rather are the victims of poor representation in court. Stevenson’s goal is to level the justice playing field, which is rocky on the end where the poor end up, and smooth on the end where those with resources briefly land.  This plea for public awareness of injustice isn’t a hammer, it’s a soft, humbling, spiritual song, and one I will not soon forget.  

Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly

Some of you may know author Michael Connelly from the Mathew McConaughey movie “Lincoln Lawyer” in which McConaughey plays lawyer Matthew Haller, half-brother of Michael Connelly’s other favorite character, the main character of this book, Detective Harry Bosch. 

Bosch is one of those hard-nosed detectives always at odds with his police department, as is the case in Two Kinds of Truth, which nimbly juxtapositions two story lines: Bosch going undercover to expose an opioid drug ring, all the while fighting off an old foe in prison for murder, now filing a lawsuit again Bosch claiming he planted evidence resulting in a false conviction. 

Connelly doesn’t really write a bad book, and is a pretty reliable read in the crime novel genre, but this one was one of his best (of 36).     

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú

I’m a perspective fanatic, so I was immediately attracted to the idea of a book written by a US Border Patrol agent (especially in light of recent immigration issues). What does immigration enforcement look like from the perspective of a Border Patrol agent on the front lines? What do they see? How do they feel? 

Author Francisco Cantú is a third-generation Mexican America, raised in Arizona by his National Parks Ranger mother. The same intellectual gene that drives Cantú’s mother’s environmental ambitions, drives Francisco to study illegal (as opposed to legal) Mexican immigration close-up – to become a Border Patrol agent. His mother struggles to understand why her son would stray into enforcement of a law that under a different set of circumstances might have deprived his own family residence in the US. Soon enough, unable to rationalize a system so punishing of the crime of breaching a border seeking a better life, Cantú drops out of the Border Patrol and returns to school, feeling not angry, but rather confused. Eventually, simply by coincidence, he becomes involved in trying to help a friend who has lived illegally in the US for decades, but who is unable to return to the US after going to Mexico to tend to his dying mother.   

The Line Becomes a River provides perspective, and a relatively unemotional inspection of the issue of illegal Mexican immigration. Francisco Cantú writes well, seemingly without a specific agenda - to simply tell the story of his odyssey through the miasma of Mexican immigration.