The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner takes her extraordinary powers of observation to the Mars Room, a fictional San Francisco strip club, “the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and the most circuslike place there is.” Kushner is incapable of writing a bad novel, and her prose is perceptive and precise, but the setting of the book — all closed rooms and tight quarters — is a bit less successful than the sprawling cross-country exuberance of The Flamethrowers.