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By all appearances, newly married college grads Roy and Celestial are living the dream as an upwardly mobile and passionately in love black couple in Atlanta. But their marriage is at once torn asunder, on a night when the couple is staying in a hotel in Louisiana on a trip to visit Roy’s parents, and Roy is accused of raping a fellow hotel patron. The victim identifies Roy, whom she had encountered earlier in the evening in the hallway, and all of the sudden, Roy is given a life sentence in prison for a crime that he did not commit. Tayari’s Jones’ fourth novel, An American Marriage, offers a searingly intimate portrayal of a marriage subjected to the constant trauma of wrongful incarceration. The novel follows Roy, Celestial, and their mutual friend Andre, as the three characters struggle to come to terms with this new reality that affects their relationships.
The strength of Jones’s narrative is her ability to generate empathy for each and everyone of her characters. By switching between Roy, Celestial, and even Andre’s perspectives, she forces readers to confront how the wrongful incarceration at the center of the story plays out in different characters lives. In an interview with the Paris Review, Jones lamented the position of Celestial, explaining, “She is made responsible for Roy’s happiness or unhappiness. In this book, I feel almost like she receives more blame than the prison system.” Jones describes giving drafts of her book to early readers who could only conceive of the novel as Roy’s heroic journey to escape from under the yoke of his wrongful conviction, and that Celestial’s main duty is to support him in that journey. Jones advocates for Celestial’s position, as a woman who has lost her husband to the prison system after only a year of marriage, and the choices that she must make to pursue happiness.
In an interview with NPR, Jones stated, “This book in many ways, was inspired by the Odyssey, Roy is like Odysseus — he has this huge challenge and he has to travel this journey … and he just wants to find a clean home and a faithful wife waiting on him at the other end.” And Roy’s journey does feel like a sort of doomed odyssey, as it is clear that the life he longs to return to after his release from prison is already out of his reach. His previous career trajectory has been irreparably altered due to his incarceration, as has his marriage. It is important to note also that the past that Roy clings so firmly to may be a little different from what he actually experienced. There were cracks in the facade of his and Celestial’s marriage before he ever went to prison, Roy was unable to stay faithful and the couple was having major arguments about family. Jones doesn’t mean for readers to mourn the dissolution of a perfect marriage, but rather explores the pressures that incarceration can put on any sort of relationship, the ways that it robs individuals of certain paths to success or joy. Whether Roy and Celestial’s marriage would have survived without the seven years of prison time is not the point of the novel, but the strains that Roy’s prison time put on each character individually as well as their relationships with each other cannot be underestimated.
An American Marriage is a devastating portrayal of the very intimate day-to-day lives of people forced to live in an unjust system. There are many valuable texts that provide statistics and insights into the prison industrial complex and the history of black incarceration in America (Ava DuVernay’s award-winning doc 13th is a great place to start), but this novel offers something different: a deeply personal account of how those systems affect black communities every day. “When you’re in love, love is not about symbolism, it’s about individuals,” Jones said in an interview about the love-story aspect of her novel. While this novel is certainly a string condemnation of the racially inequitable justice system in America, it is also a character-driven narrative that centers on relationships. This is a deeply moving novel about black love and the complicated nature of relationships in a pervasively oppressive society.
Further Reading: Tayari Jones’ first three novels: Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow. Also, this excellent interview that Jones did for the Paris Review about her novel.