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Sexy prison pen pals is a thing, believe me. I remember reading about it years ago. People would auction off letters they get from hopeful bachelors on the outside. Whoever bought the letter could respond to him, saying, presumably, something along the lines of "I'm so hot for you that I could light a cigarette, which reminds me." You'd see what else you could get out of him. Maybe a cake with a file in it. Maybe just a cake, cake is great.

Rachel Kushner maybe read the same article, since the same scene happens here in her Caged Heat sequel The Mars Room. It wouldn't surprise me: she's read nearly everything. She's one of our purest book nerds. Her is one of my all-time favorites. When characters in this book discuss other books, which they do constantly, she's careful not to spoil them. When asked for her favorite literary hero, she once


Get it? Because....you know what, never mind.

"She's read everything, but has she tried heroin?" say my notes on this book, followed immediately by "Who cares?" There's some sort of question of legitimacy here, of who's telling whose story. This is about women in prison, and Kushner isn't one. She for what that's worth. You get this situation where the people who are trained and prepared to tell stories skillfully are often not the people who have the stories. It creates an imbalance.

Kushner's imbibed a lot of the stories, and it's thrown her a bit loopy. She's tried to fit them all in, unsuccessfully. She met a crooked cop when she went undercover in a prison (that sentence is 100% true) and she couldn't stop herself from telling his story, even though she totally failed to weave it into her main story. I get it, Doc's a terrific character, but it's not great for making this feel like a coherent novel.



The main story is a stripper kills her stalker and now she's in jail. She's got a kid, which sucks for both of them. ("Having children complements the making of art," Kushner says, fucking up your last excuse about that novel.) She's desperate and unable to protect him. She forms a little family - Conan the transgender man, Fernandez the repeat offender. A GED instructor named Gordon, the kind of nimrod who would give an inmate Little House on the Prairie, is duly manipulated. He's not a stand-in for Kushner, who's far too self-aware to do something that obvious. But he is the sort who might believe a letter from a prison pen pal.

Little House isn't here by accident though. The novel keeps wanting to return to nature. Walden comes up a lot too, and...and the Unabomber. Gordon lives in the woods, where he spends his time wondering if that was a coyote or a woman being murdered. Romy (view spoiler)[will end up in the woods too, where she commits suicide by cop outside a redwood. (hide spoiler)] I'm not sure what to make of all these trees; it feels like Kushner's maybe lost the forest for them.


Jumping the...you know what, forget it

The Flamethrowers is one of my favorite books of the decade. Mars Room is, if anything, more of a page-turner, but it's not as good of a book. It feels unfocused and rushed. It's the kind of book where, when someone needs wires cut, someone else just gives them wirecutters. You'd think they'd at least bake them into a cake.

Soundtrack: Kushner has great taste in music, on top of everything else. Romy's favorite song to strip to is by Nick Gilder. Please see the comments below to weigh in with your own personal stripper song. Mine is by Eileen Barton.