Book Review
An American Marriage by
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage is a novel about a young black couple who get married who are from different social classes. The wife, Celestial, comes from a wealthy upper class family while Roy comes from a working class family. They both are college educated but coming from different backgrounds seem to have different values, beliefs, and preferences.
Roy gets arrested and is falsely accused of rape
and sentenced to twelve years in prison after the first year of his marriage to
Celestial.
Celestial stops visiting Roy after about three
years saying that she can’t live like she is, as a single woman, while Roy, her
husband, is incarcerated. Celestial has taken up with Andre her childhood
friend who also was Roy’s best friend and is the person who introduced Roy and
Celestial to begin with. Roy is released after five years when his case is
overturned on appeal. Roy’s homecoming to find that Celestial and Andre are
planning to marry when Celestial sues Roy for divorce brings the plot, the love
triangle between Celestial, Roy, and Andre, to a climax.
The ambivalence each character experiences about
these love relationships creates the creative tension that gives this novel its
appeal.
The subplot deals with the injustice of the
criminal justice system as it pertains to prosecuting and incarcerating black
men and the damage this does to families and the communities beyond the
injustice done to the alleged offender.
Tayari Jones is a good writer but the story is a
bit like a soap opera. The moral of the story is a muddle. Whether Roy and
Celestial would have made a go of their marriage had Roy not been incarcerated
is hard to tell. It may have dissolved anyway, but after a year of marriage the
bond was not strong enough to weather the enforced physical separation.
Celestial and Roy had talked about having
children but had put it off. Had they had children one would wonder if this
would have made a difference.
Why the novel is entitled “An American Marriage”
is not clear. What makes the marriage between Celestial and Roy “American” is
never addressed. The dynamics of the plot involve an African-American couple,
but would be similar if the couple were white, or Hispanic, or Asian.
Reading “An American Marriage” reminds me
Stewart O’Nan’s novel, “The Good Wife” which has a similar plot except the wife
is pregnant when her husband is incarcerated and she stands by him and raises
their child for 28 years.
An American Marriage gets a 6.5 on the MBH 10
point scale.