The Mars Room

The Mars Room

Rating

8.5

The Pequod Review:

Rachel Kushner takes her extraordinary powers of observation to the Mars Room, a fictional San Francisco strip club, β€œthe 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 β€” all closed rooms and tight quarters β€” is a bit less successful than the sprawling cross-country exuberance of The Flamethrowers