Review: An American Marriage

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

An American Marriage evoked so many feelings in me. Chief among them were anger and frustration at our uneven justice system, and a sad resignation that love and marriage can be such fragile things. While the disintegration of a marriage is its central theme, this story is impossible to separate from the racial context in which it is told. And yet this book is not directly about the justice system, per se. It is about how easily what you build can fall apart and how everything you've worked for can turn on a dime, especially if you are a black man. Jones writes masterfully, giving us rich characters and a New South overlaid with the painful authenticity that shows it too often still mired in Deep South injustice.

Roy Othaniel Hamilton and Celestial Davenport meet in college (he went to Morehouse, she to Spelman) thanks to Celestial's lifelong friend Andre, who has become Roy's best friend at college. Their relationship takes off after they've graduated. Roy, a rising corporate executive, and Celestial, an artist creating high-end dolls, seem to have created the perfect upper-middle-class New South life. And yet, it can all be over in a flash, it seems, thanks to a criminal justice system that thinks black men are more than likely guilty. (Specifically, the offensive idea that somehow black men are also likely to be sexually predatory.) How a black corporate executive goes home with his wife to see his parents in a small Louisiana town and ends up being dragged out of his motel room in the middle of the night, arrested, and convicted of rape is just the beginning of this story. Roy's life, the years lost to his wrongful conviction, and the slow disintegration of his marriage are a testament to the fact that if you are a black male in America, you could do every single thing right and still have everything go wrong in the blink of an eye. The corrosive effects of this injustice on marriage and family are the core of the book. This searing exchange, deep in the book, is one of the things I'll long remember about it:

"Roy, tell the truth. Would you have waited on me for five years?"

"Celestial, this shit wouldn't have happened to you in the first place."

SPOILER WARNING...[
Because of the injustice of Roy's situation, the reader is naturally inclined to take his side early on in the novel. The character flaws of Celestial and Andre made me dislike them, intensely at times. Celestial's love for Roy wasn't as strong as her pride's rejection of her self-image as a woman married to a man in prison (even if he was wrongfully there). Her father's disappointment in her character was well placed, but it's also true that Celestial has had her love, and faith in love, shattered, back in her first year at Howard, before she transferred to Spelman. The sad point Jones makes isn't so much about Celestial's disloyalty, her infidelity or lack of faith in Roy and her marriage as it is that love is so fragile- when it's gone, it's gone. I disliked Andre, the man who was never strong enough to speak up about his feelings for Celestial until she was someone else's wife and until her husband wasn't able to counter his claim on Celestial's affections.
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Because of the injustice of Roy's situation, the reader is naturally inclined to take his side early on in the novel. The character flaws of Celestial and Andre made me dislike them, intensely at times. Celestial's love for Roy wasn't as strong as her pride's rejection of her self-image as a woman married to a man in prison (even if he was wrongfully there). Her father's disappointment in her character was well placed, but it's also true that Celestial has had her love, and faith in love, shattered, back in her first year at Howard, before she transferred to Spelman. The sad point Jones makes isn't so much about Celestial's disloyalty, her infidelity or lack of faith in Roy and her marriage as it is that love is so fragile- when it's gone, it's gone. I disliked Andre, the man who was never strong enough to speak up about his feelings for Celestial until she was someone else's wife and until her husband wasn't able to counter his claim on Celestial's affections. 

While the extensive epistolary format of this book is not my favorite thing, the story of Roy and Celestial's marriage was a moving read. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Eisa Davis and Sean Crisden.

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