No Substance: Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room

Over the weekend, I read Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room. Kushner is an American author whose previous novels include The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, neither of which I've read. But after The Flamethrowers a few years back, Kushner began to get a lot of attention, and The Mars Room sounded like my kind of thing, so I gave it a go.

The book opens wi…