It’s the complex individuality of all the novel’s characters that allows it to become much more than its simple storyline suggests. From a well-off Atlanta family – her father an inventor who has struck gold – her aspirations are different from those of Roy, whose impetus has been to escape Louisiana, to assert himself in the ranks of corporate America and to establish an unassailable life. Like Penelope, Celestial is a maker – in this case, of exquisitely crafted black dolls that occupy a space somewhere between art and high-end commercial artefact. Jones has said that An American Marriage is a novel in conversation with The Odyssey the story of a man trying to get back home to a waiting wife and a wife unsure of the extent to which she is permitted to rebuild her own life. But the question of whether their marriage would have continued, despite Roy’s tendency to flirting with other women, Celestial’s aspiration to forge a career as a textile artist and her ambivalence over having children, becomes suddenly moot, stopped like a broken clock. Despite a strong bond, incompatibilities are beginning to appear on the evening of Roy’s arrest, they are quarrelling about his propensity to keep secrets, including that of his paternity. In fact, we have reason to believe that Roy and Celestial’s marriage is precarious.
Jones’s cleverness is to leave this monolithic fact to function as a sinkhole at the centre of the novel a fundamental instability that threatens everything around it, irrespective of the state of play before it opens up. Jones has said that An American Marriage is a novel in conversation with The Odyssey Jones neither elaborates on the circumstances of the assault, nor the subsequent trial the reader is simply given to understand that a black man, in the wrong place at the wrong time, will find retribution meted out swiftly and unquestioningly. A woman whom Roy briefly met earlier in the evening while fetching ice has been raped and has identified – with certainty, but no apparent evidence – Roy as the perpetrator. Recently wed Roy and Celestial are staying in a motel on a visit to Roy’s parents in small-town Louisiana when they are suddenly ripped from their beds and thrown to the asphalt outside, lying in “parallel like burial plots”.
It centres on an appalling miscarriage of justice. And one appreciates why the jury picked it from a strong shortlist that included Booker winners Pat Barker and Anna Burns – it is an immensely readable novel, packed with ideas and emotion. T his is the first of Tayari Jones’s four novels to appear in the UK and her publisher’s confidence has been rewarded earlier this month, An American Marriage won the Women’s prize for fiction, all but guaranteeing Jones a new readership.
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