An American Marriage

Book Blurb

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together. 

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

-Algonquin Books

Rating    5/5

The Short of It

I circled around this book for two years. I found the cover art stunning. And I do mean that literally. I could never scroll through Kindle or Overdrive without taking a pause when passing over this cover. Then I noticed it popping up in friends To Be Read lists on Goodreads. Then notable figures started adding it to their year-end book lists.  And throughout all of that I marveled at that cover and never once read the blurb. I know!

In April, I placed a hold on it in Overdrive, through my library. And just as May was coming to a close, my number came up.  By this point I had read the blurb.  I thought oh this is going to be a tough one. It’s going to be heavy and dense. It was heavy – no more or less than it needed to be. It was not dense. Tayari Jones writes exceptional prose. It’s almost so poetic that to label it prose seems a misnomer.  The way she references culture, especially pop culture is novel – a true rarity.  That in itself is worthy of noting her exception. Rarer still is how her unique voice is accessible to readers more inclined to contemporary literature while maintaining the gravitas assigned to Literature.

An essay by Tayari Jones titled “This Is a Love Story” was at the end of my copy of An American Marriage. One quote from it goes:

When I was a very young writer, my mentor cautioned me that I should always write about “people and their problems, not problems and their people.”

This is an accurate summation of how An American Marriage is written.  The book deals with a lot: race, incarceration, infidelity, injustice, how all of those string together and weave a web, at the center of which is marriage.  People and relationships that’s what good stories are about. You want me to care about a problem, give me someone to care about.  Yet the most interesting thing about this book is these characters are human. There are no archetypes here. No one is flawless beyond reproach and no one is flawed beyond redemption. I found myself caring and not caring for any combination of Roy, Celestial, and Andre. All the while Ms. Jones got me to read about problems, like a parent gets a child to eat vegetables.

The Long of It – spoilers ahead

There isn’t just one marriage in the story. We get a look at the parents of the three leads. Celestial’s parents are still together, but her father was married when he met her mother. Andre’s parents split when his father found a side-piece he wanted to make his main-piece. Roy’s parents are together throughout, but there’s a twist there too. Turns out Roy’s father is his dad in all the ways that really matter, but his “biological” is someone else.

As I said before this is a story of people and their problems. The people of this story carry legacies within them and consciously or unconsciously are eager to pass on a more enriched legacy to the next generation. “Black love is Black wealth.” There are also examples of generational wealth in the more traditional sense of actual assets. Celestial is given her childhood home as a wedding gift. As Roy notes,

It was like white people do, a leg up, American style. But I kind of wanted to hang my hat on a peg with my own name on it.

I get it, I do, but this guy. You chose this woman from a well-to-do, respectable family. You want to make a family like the one she grew up in. You begrudge her family’s ability to help her and by proxy yourself. You want to be self-made and are either too arrogant or ignorant to concede that no one makes it on their own.

Roy is in the business of checking off all the life boxes. He comes from humble beginnings in a small Louisiana town. He gets himself to Morehouse. He graduates, gets a good job, next up mate and make babies. In short, he wants to be a successful Black man in Atlanta, with a wife and kids. Check. Check. Check?

He’s too scared to risk losing it, so he doles out information when it is convenient to him or it cannot be helped. He expects his confessions to be taken as if they are crumbs, when in reality they are boulders. Take for instance, the twist of his biological father not being the man that raised him with his name. This is knowledge he feels is owed to Celestial, but he waits well over a year into their marriage to share it. And then plays up his irritation as confusion when her basic reaction is: WTF is your timing!?

Celestial confides in her best friend Andre who says,

“Ease up on Roy,” he said. “If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”

Andre, in love with Celestial, is trying to put his own feelings aside. He thinks he’s helping her navigate. But there are signs throughout that she and Roy are not for the ages. Roy keeps doing things he needs to come clean about. Like the time he bought two pieces of lingerie but only gave her one. When she calls him out on it, she has an actual receipt.

Their marriage was never whatever they aspired it to be. The signs were there before Roy’s arrest. Of course, there is the thought that they would have worked it out had things been different. I personally feel what happened caused a delay in the inevitable. Roy’s own mother asks if Celestial is the wife for the person he really is. She knows him. The idea of Celestial fits into the life Roy wants for himself, but he overlooks on thing, he is not the right husband for Celestial.

Celestial has her come to Jesus moment at her mother-in-law’s burial. As she watches Roy’s father dig his wife’s grave, she knows the love she and Roy share is not as deep or strong. There’s no mistaking the tableau in front of her in this moment. She wants out, she tells him as much eventually, but legally she remains married.

I was confused as to why Celestial marries Roy in the first place. I understand that they were drawn to each other outside of their Atlanta bubble, looking for home in a familiar face. Celestial is repeatedly referred to as an independent spirit who cannot be tied down. Celestial wants a partnership, “communion” as she calls it. After years of having a husband in prison, she doesn’t need or want the paper and ceremony.

Andre on the other hand says, “…right now, in America, marriage is the closest thing to what I want.”I feel this speaks to a lot of things. We’re all searching for something. We can’t reinvent the wheel, but we can innovate it. So, what he wants, is a kind of marriage. It’s a matter of working out what that marriage looks like. Celestial and Roy’s relationship respects why someone doesn’t want the papers and the ceremonies. If you don’t need it and I want it, what’s the big deal if you do it for me? But that’s just it. Not needing it and not wanting it are two sides of the same coin. They’re the same and not the same. While I respect your wants and needs, so should you mine. And if it is too big of an ask; that you cannot meet me and I cannot meet you, then let it be a sign that we cannot be in communion with one another.

So much of life is lived living up to the expectations of others. There’s a lot of people on the outside putting their own beliefs onto Roy, Celestial, and Andre. Celestial, promising a mentor to do her part in birthing and raising the next generation of Black people in America. Roy’s father can see how Andre loves Celestial as fiercely as he loved his own wife. He expects Andre to do the right thing and step aside. Celestial’s father stepped out on his own first wife but expects his daughter to honor her own marriage.

Vows of commitment are sacred. I don’t believe anyone goes into marriage thinking it will end. You can go in realistically knowing not every relationship lasts, but I think you hope yours will. And yet there are some things that are bigger than what you signed up for. And if one of those things happens in the early days, when you haven’t even found your footing yet… 

Here again we have expectations from those on the periphery. A Black man wrongfully convicted, torn from a life he worked hard to get.  He’s not a perfect husband, but he’s not a rapist either. A very real and triggering full circle moment for Roy occurs when he gets out of prison and goes to see Celestial. These are the hard truths An American Marriage guides us through.