“The Whole World … Was a Gigantic Prison”

This chapter argues that throughout The Mars Room (2018), Rachel Kushner interrogates the (predominantly white, male) environmental literary tradition and suggests that the notion of “nature-as-freedom” demands radical revision in the age of petro-capitalism. In the novel, set in a California women’s prison, Kushner argues that environmental destruction and carcerality are both constitutive parts of the same capitalist matrix, and to escape one arena of domination is merely to enter another. Contemporary “crime petro-fictions” like Kushner’s, I contend, demonstrate the ideological limitations of the inherited American environmental literary tradition while illuminating the striking convergences between carceral and ecological disaster in a world circumscribed by carceral petro-capitalism.