Yanny or Laurel? Blue dress or gold? Perspective is everything.

Just ask Romy Hall, the central character in Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, “The Mars Room.” Romy wasn’t living the American dream, but she wouldn’t have called it a nightmare either. Dancing at the Mars Room paid the bills and allowed her to care for her son, Jackson.

Then a regular client became obsessed with her, and Romy’s mundane life spun out of control. Now she’s serving two life sentences for murder, resigned to her fate but secure in Jackson’s safety. When that safety is threatened, Romy must draw upon what few resources she has to fight for her son.

Can a killer get a chance to save a life?

A better question might be, can a writer make readers care about the beautiful mind of a murderer? Ms. Kushner, the author of “Telex From Cuba” and “The Flamethrowers,” rises to the occasion once again with this sympathetic portrait of a good woman with bad luck.

Romy’s inner monologue drives the main plot forward and backward in time as she reflects on her wild childhood and adult career in sex work.

These memories, rooted in the back streets of down-and-out San Francisco and Los Angeles, glitter like a trail of broken glass, all the way to the drab confines of the California prison where most of her thinking takes place.

Compared to Romy’s colorful imagination the prison scenes are, as readers might expect, stark and forbidding. However, while Ms. Kushner includes all the details germane to a prison setting — strict guards, inmate squabbles, etc. — she deviates from the typical tropes by exploring the experience of several gender nonconforming inmates.

This choice is timely and serves to illustrate how, even in prison, Romy’s white, cisgender identity protects her from more serious harm. Some readers, however, will wonder why these characters weren’t given the opportunity to tell their own stories.

Instead, readers gain outside perspective on Romy and her situation through the eyes of Gordon Hauser, a restless academic who teaches GED prep classes at the prison. Hauser finds himself drawn to Romy’s intellect and struggles with his fascination, refusing to even Google the details of her crime lest the truth shatter his image of her.

Ironically, Hauser is far less free than Romy, mentally trapped by either/​or thinking, even as he roams the Sierra foothills looking for inspiration and purpose. Whether he can help Romy, there’s a question whether Hauser can help himself.

Ms. Kushner skillfully blends these various plot threads into a seamless nonlinear narrative. The pacing is deliberately slow but not plodding; readers will savor every detail of Ms. Kushner’s descriptive passages, which bring ferocious beauty to even the ugliest surroundings (Steinbeck would approve).

Although the main plot is set in 2003, Ms. Kushner sweeps readers backward and forward through time in such a way that the novel feels both ancient and timeless. Setting — always important in Ms. Kushner’s work — is here once again depicted with care, so that the reader feels completely immersed in the Southern California landscape.

The details of Romy’s crime are revealed late in the narrative, and by the time readers have the full picture they may very well question whether she should be locked up.

On the other hand, they may consider Romy an untrustworthy narrator who deserves her fate. The truth is somewhere in between, a condition all literary fiction fans instinctively understand. Rarely, however, does an author make the point the way Ms. Kushner does, with both elegance and grit.

Either way, “The Mars Room” is this summer’s mandatory highbrow beach read.

Leigh Anne Focareta is a freelance writer and friendly neighborhood librarian.

First Published: June 8, 2018, 11:00 p.m.