Literature

«The Mars Club»: a foreign Médicis in prison

7 reading minutes

écrit par Loris S. Musumeci · April 23, 2019 · 0 commentaire

«Le Mars Club»: un Médicis étranger en prison

An overview of some of the major literary prizes - episode #3

Le Regard Libre N° 49 - Loris S. Musumeci

«It's in the silence of the cell that you're plagued by the one true question. The one question that's impossible to answer. The why and the how. Not the how in the practical sense, the other. How could you do such a thing? How could you.»

Le Mars ClubThis is the kind of novel that's made to please the media and the critics. Its main protagonist, Romy Hall, is a woman who works as a stripper at the Mars Club. She is stalked by a Vietnam veteran, Kurt Kennedy, who no longer knows the difference between the seedy club where he used to be a customer and the young woman's private life, the object of all his fantasies and the little love he has left in his heart. Tired and frightened, she ends up killing good old Kurt.

She's sentenced to life, in an America that cherishes its veterans, especially in the face of a bad-living girl. It's come to this: because of the harassment of a straight white pervert, a woman ends up in prison. And not the least. Stanville. A women's penitentiary where violence, humiliation, absurd rules and cruel restrictions are at the heart of the inmates' daily lives. Of course, lesbianism abounds, and of course all these women are a little innocent at heart.

Nor do we fail to point the finger at social determinism, which means that you are not born a victim or an executioner. The poor are condemned to misery before ending up in prison. The rich are condemned to oppression before ending up in their little cocoon. Women are condemned to be sex objects; men, to be sex players. Injustice is always on the side of the weak, while justice is the property of the powerful.

«The problem with San Francisco is that I could never have a future there, only a past.
For me the city boiled down to the Sunset District, a fog-drenched, treeless, monotonous neighborhood of countless uniform houses built on sand dunes stretching forty-eight blocks to the beach, houses inhabited by lower-middle-class Chinese-Americans and working-class Irish Catholics.»

And reflections on the American justice system are not to be outdone. The fight against the death penalty is gradually gaining ground in the West, but the fight against life imprisonment is in full swing. Is it worth inflicting two consecutive sentences on a woman, who moreover has a child in her care, when she only acted in the desperation of self-defense? Perhaps she's not just being sentenced for what she did, but for who she is. Because she is what patriarchal, bourgeois puritanism hates: a single mother, a whore, who is intelligent and cultured and who also manages to get by. No, this is unacceptable.

«In short. Geronima, Sanchez, Candy were suffering beings who, on this path of suffering, had made others suffer, and Gordon couldn't see how making them suffer all their lives would be beneficial to justice. It was to add unhappiness to existing unhappiness, not to mention that no one, as far as I knew, had ever come back from the dead.»

For all these reasons, the novel has everything to appeal to today's trendy tastes. For all these reasons, this novel appealed to me just as much. Because you can be progressive, you can be feminist, you can denounce the patriarchal system, as long as your criticism is astute and intelligent. Rachel Kushner has written a fine, intelligent book. She does even more. Because if on the surface Le Mars Club takes advantage of all these denunciations, it actually does much more: it goes beyond them while assuming them.

It all comes together. The rawness of the form embraces the rawness of the content. The sentences are short, intense, salient. Sober. The language is forceful. The address to the reader is direct and straightforward. No pedagogy, but an exposure of reality in all its bleeding and sweetness. For when the text speaks of Romy's son Jackson, the style itself softens to convey the unconditional tenderness of a mother towards her child.

The novel divides its chapters in such a way as to leave the reader in suspense. At the same time, the reader opens windows onto other stories, more or less directly linked to Romy's. We follow the frustrations of Gordon Hauser, the prison teacher, who went from being a good student of literature to ending up where no one would want his career to shine. A few pages are devoted to the transcription of his personal diary; a welcome change for a book of almost five hundred pages.

Then there's Doc, whose story immerses us in men's prisons and transphobia. Then there's Kurt Kennedy himself, far more nuanced than he appears. He didn't mean Romy any harm, he says, he'd simply become attached to her. Finally, a few chapters set out the prison rules, in a layout that is reminiscent of poetry. What a contrast! In this, the novel breathes.

And then there's the whole testimonial part. With Romy, we're taken to the Mars Club to experience, however limited, the life of a stripper. Too trash? Perhaps. But a good slap in the face doesn't hurt from time to time. All the more so if it awakens the conscience and points the finger at the entrenchments of a society intoxicated by hypocrisy.

«There's nothing worse than kids your own age who are out to get you. It's always better to deal with customers who know the rules and respect them. Guys who play the game, pretending to believe that there really are girls out there, in rhinestones and canary-yellow stilettos, who get turned on by burying a mature man's head between their breasts. The customers we want are the ones who imagine that girls wear rhinestones and stilettos because that's their style, not because they're pretending it exists. As soon as I found the right places to work, I started making a good living.»

Just as we spend a few hours reading in prison. But without the sobs and the bars. Rachel Kushner is to be commended for her talent for imagination, or rather documentation, because in a realistic vein, she delivers elements that really tell us a few concrete details about life at Stanville. And of the friendship that, despite everything, binds the inmates together.

«I started helping Button with his homework for Hauser's class. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It was a big sister thing. Sammy was my big sister, I was Button's, and Conan was a kind of dad. We had a family. It wasn't that great a source of comfort, but it was better than nothing, even if Button was a real pain in the ass.»

Le Mars Club, It's still the cry of a woman who looks back and sees failure. When she could have walked away. When she should have gotten out, at least for Jackson. But tragedy takes roads that are impossible to retrace. That's why we cry at the end of Mars Club. That's why you can't forget what you've read. That's why there are no more whys. No more explanations. And the «if onlys» hang in the air. That's why Romy Hall doesn't have to do anything. Nor does she have to give up. Because if her fate is sealed, so is what she did: she gave life. She gave everything.

«I don't intend to live long. Nor briefly either, for that matter. I don't have any plans. The problem is that you go on existing, whether you intend to or not, until you cease to exist, and then there's no point in making plans.
But not having any plans doesn't mean I don't have regrets.
If only I hadn't worked at the Mars Club.
If only I hadn't met Kennedy the Pervert.
If only Kennedy the Pervert hadn't decided to hunt me down.
But he decided to do it, and he did it, impeccably. If none of this had happened, I wouldn't be on this bus, on my way to a life in a concrete hole.»

Write to the author: loris.musumeci@leregardlibre.com