Entertainment Weekly - May 11, 2018

The inner monologues of the

protagonist Emer are very

believable. How did you chan-

nel this female point of view?

I don’t know. To me that’s what

art is about. I’m less about trying

to figure out who deserves to

write someone’s experience

and more about trying to get

into each other’s shoes. Trying

to grow empathy, really.

There are lots of statements on

current pop culture in the book.

Are these your actual opinions?

[Laughs] The ones that are going

to make me enemies are [Emer’s]

opinions; the ones that are going

to make me friends are mine. In

Miss Subwaysis about a

present-day couple who get

involved in a wager with

mythological figures. What

inspired you to write this story?

It all started around 1985.

I was a graduate student at

Yale and somebody dragged

me to see a Yeats play called

The Only Jealousy of Emer.

The basis of the story is the

idea that to save the person

you love, you’re going to have

to deny that love. It seemed

to be a very kind of dramatic

and romantic setup. It always

stuck with me. And I guess

it took about 30 years to get

it out on paper. [Laughs]

His Way or

theSubways

Despite its surreal premise, the third

novel byXFiles starDavid Duchovny

is a cleverly romantic love story.

BY CLARISSA CRUZ

58 EW.COM MAY 11, 2018

IF RACHEL KUSHNER NEVER WROTE

again we would still have 2013’s

The Flamethrowers, a novel so

restless and electric and startlingly true it

almost seemed to charge the atoms in the air

around it. (Either way she would have written

another National Book Award finalist, 2008’s

clever, more diffuseTelex From Cuba.)

But now a five-year wait has producedThe

Mars Room—a novel that may be even better,

though its subject matter is infinitely grim-

mer, miles away from the subversive glamour

of the 1970s New York art world or Italy’s

youth in revolt. Romy Hall is a native of San

Francisco—not the postcard dream of

steep hills and cable cars but a scrappier,

almost feral nether land of teenage delin-

quency, seedy flophouses, and $20-a-song

strip clubs. She’s a dancer at a club like that,

a single mother, and, by 2003, a convicted

murderer serving two life sentences.

Like Raymond Carver or Edward Hopper

or Nan Goldin (whose photograph “Amanda

in the Mirror” graces the cover), Kushner is

a sort of genius of loneliness; her stories slink

in the margins, but they have the feel of some-

thing iconic.Marsbrims with characters and

digressions—the diaries of Ted Kaczynski,

bygone country & western singers, inmates

named Conan and Teardrop and the Norse—

and returns to favored themes: the tricky

wobble of young womanhood, the open-road

freedom of motors and speed. Romy might

not be going anywhere fast, but she’s alive on

every page, raw and beautiful.A

The Mars Room

BY Rachel Kushner

PAGES 336 | GENRE Novel

REVIEW BY Leah Greenblatt @Leahbats

DUCHOVNY: TIM PALEN; DUCKOVNY & LEONI: MATIE ARGIROPOULOS; MARK DU

PLASS: ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY

IMAGES; JAY DUPLASS: DESIREE NAVARRO/GETTY IMAGES; HARDEN: MICHAEL TULLBERG/GE

TTY IMAGES