AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward - with hope and pain - into the future. A book where everything is a gray area. It's impossible to pick sides for more than 5 pages as characters redeem and un-redeem themselves.

My cousin, perhaps a bigger bookworm than I, her mere book pusher—once picked up an advanced reader’s copy of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE from my shelf before I even had a chance to dig in. When she flipped to a random page, she was instantly taken with one sentence. One. “Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.” During conversations, she’d awaken from a googly-eyed trance to tell me she was still thinking about that one line. When I finally sat down and read the novel, I saw more of what she saw.

The novel centers on newlyweds Celestial and Roy, who are both young in age and mind. When Roy is falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to twelve years in prison, Celestial and Roy’s marriage is put to the ultimate test. But not all parties involved are willing to fight for the marriage and when Roy is exonerated after serving five years of his sentence, he returns to a marriage that’s crumbled beyond recognition.

AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE is a portrait of marriage that’s at once brutally honest, yet not devoid of the romance we love to see in any book on the subject. Moving between three perspectives, Jones expertly portrays each character through an honest, sympathetic, and flawed lens. And while I saw the faults of each character (yes, fine, some more than others), I couldn’t say outright that I hated one or rooted for another. Ultimately, what I loved most about the novel is Jones’s use of language to gracefully move the reader through a complex and nuanced situation.

Many told me I’d breeze through this book and it’s certainly possible. AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE is fraught with tension, and while it isn’t a thriller, it’s definitely a page-turner. Taken with the quotable passages, I decided I would intentionally drink slowly. Along the way, I came across many passages in the book that really stayed with me. With no context needed, here are some of my favorites.

“But home isn't where you land; home is where you launch. You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”

“But how you feel love and understand love are two different things”

“Is it love, or is it convenience?. She explained that connivance, habit, comfort, obligation- these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes.”

“Sometimes the only thing that can cure a man is the inside of a woman, the right woman who does things the right way”

“Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.”

“A woman doesn't always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Every one of us has lain down for a reason that was not love”

“You can never really un love somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there”

You don’t know what you need until somebody gives it to you exactly the way you need it given”

“That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve”

“Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator.”

“Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.”

“There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.”

“It’s hard to mark time when your heart is a pinball in your chest.”

“In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren’t. On those pages is a mysterious character that conveys what it is to have no volition even when you do. On that same page it is explained how once or twice in your life you will find yourself bared, underneath the weight of a man, but a most ordinary word will save you.”

“The vast generosity of women is a mysterious tunnel, and nobody knows where it leads.”

All told, An American Marriage is a memorable dissection of one of society's most venerable institutions. Hard work or not, Jones brilliantly shows us just how easy it is for things to go awry in the blink of an eye, even in a happy marriage let alone in a less-than-perfect one.