tl;dr

An American Marriage is a terrific, compelling, emotionally resonant novel.  If it’s not longlisted (as a minimum) for the National Book Award later this year there should be an enquiry.

opening remarks

When it was published in early February, An American Marriage garnered significant praise from reviewers.  After hearing Tayari Jones speak about her book on the NYT Book Review podcast I knew I was going to read this book.

knee-jerk observations

I endorse Big Roy’s advice:

Little Roy’s description of his wife, Celestial.  I particularly like the line, “I know that height is the luck of the draw, but it felt like she chose all that altitude.”

Roy is on trial for allegedly raping a woman in her room at the Piney Woods Inn.  Roy was present the night the woman was assaulted, but he was in bed with his wife, Celestial, when the awful incident occurred.  Celestial testifies to this, but her measured tone doesn’t play well with the jury.

Even though I’m not even a quarter of the way through the novel, I can confidently say that An American Marriage is one of the most engrossing books I’ve read this year.  Obviously, the novel’s conceit – an innocent black man is imprisoned for rape – is inherently compelling, but what enhances it are the bold, personality-driven voices of Roy and Celestial.  They live and breathe from the first page.  Their love for each other and conflicting views are borne out in the emotionally fraught letters they share while Roy is serving 12 years in jail for rape.  In particular, Celestial’s anger at being questioned for aborting their child, a decision Roy agreed to at the time, is palpable.

Celestial, who makes dolls for a living, wins a national prize for a toy she fashions influenced by her husband, a baby outfitted in prison blues.  This doesn’t go down well with Roy, mostly because Celestial freely admits she won’t publicly discuss her inspiration, she doesn’t want to be known as the artist with a husband in jail.  Angry letters are exchanged until Roy comes to his senses after seeking advice from Walter, his pragmatic cell-mate, AKA Ghetto Yoda.

Andre has known Celestial since they were kids and for years has held a secret flame for her.  Two years into Roy’s incarceration, Andre and Celestial finally get together.  The guy secretly in love with his female best friend is a tired, old cliche, the province of many a romantic comedy.  And yet Jones makes it work because her characters are so clearly drawn.

When Andre announces that he’s proposed to Celestial at the family Thanksgiving meal, it doesn’t go down so well with Celestial’s father, Frank, who remains on Team Roy.  Frank’s put down is something savage:

It’s Celestial’s Aunty Sylvia, though, who provides the killer blow:

I love this description of Celestial’s voice – a scotch and Marlboros alto:

The novel is titled An American Marriage, and while the primary focus is the relationship between Celestial, Roy and later Andre, there’s a powerful heart-rending moment when Roy Snr buries his wife, Olive.  If marriage is treated as a disposable commodity by some, Roy Snr reminds us that it also can forge deep intimacy and love between two people:

Roy’s attitude toward women is complicated.  His letters to Celestial when he was in prison chided her college education whenever she was forthright but praised her sense of independence.  Here he talks about being fucked back to health as if that’s all a women’s good for, a repository for his sperm and his insecurities.  And yet Roy is genuinely grateful for the gift of intimacy Davina provides on his release from prison.  It’s why I love this novel so much; the characters are not defined by a single attitude, they are all, to varied degrees, contradictory, rough around the edges.

Roy visits Celestial.  He wants to know whether they can be together again (he doesn’t know about Andre, but he suspects). Their discussion moves to the bedroom where Celestial – more duty-bound then out of love – consents to sex.  She wants protection though and that’s when things get tense.  The excerpt below gives you a taste but doesn’t do the entire scene justice.  Intense and powerful.

Sadly, it was always coming to this.  Roy belts the shit out of Andre.

The Gist Of It

In her acknowledgements to An American Marriage Tayari Jones explains that there were moments when she feared she wouldn’t be able to resolve the “thorny conflicts that both bind and separate these characters”.  It’s a testament to Jones’ ability to create living, breathing people, complicated and flawed, brilliant and brittle that I also had no idea, until I reached the Epilogue, how she would straighten out the love triangle between Celestial, Roy and Andre.  I won’t say more about it here – you need to discover how Jones ties the threads together yourself – but the ending, which does elicit tears, perfectly suits a novel, that’s about the messy, joyous, unpredictable nature of marriage.

As the title suggests, Jones explores marriage from a number of different angles.  While all the relationships depicted are heterosexual, there’s still room to display a variety of unions; those that last to “til death do us part”; those that never make it that far; those that are interrupted before they can fully develop and mature.  It’s that third one which is the central focus of the novel, though that’s not to disregard those other American marriages.  Our three protagonists, their personalities, their attitudes, are informed by how their parents met, how they loved, how they stayed together or drifted apart.  It provides the book with a perspective that goes beyond the challenges faced by Roy, Celestial and Andre.

What I haven’t discussed is the catalyst, the spark that drives the novel, the incarceration of a black man for a crime he didn’t commit.  Most other writers would have set their sights on Roy’s plight; the book would be about the particulars of the crime, the long process of appeals the horror of being innocent and yet still serving time.  Indeed, that’s all present, Jones doesn’t underplay Roy’s plight, his absence, and the nature of that absence is essential to the outcome of his relationship with Celestial (the most effective part of the novel is the letters they share while Roy is in prison).  Jones isn’t interested in just making this a story about wrongful imprisonment; she wants to explore whether a marriage, one still in its honeymoon period, can survive such an injustice.  And the answer, like the characters that populate the book, like the marriages depicted throughout the novel, isn’t simple, or straightforward, it’s rough and messy, jagged and painful.

An American Marriage is, simply put, a terrific, compelling, emotionally resonant novel.  If it’s not longlisted (as a minimum) for the National Book Award later this year there should be an enquiry.