By Kelly Pickerill. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 25)
Tayari Jones’ fourth novel, An American Marriage (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), quickly reaches its inciting incident. 
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy drive from their home in Atlanta to visit Roy’s parents in Eloe, Louisiana. Tension between Celestial and her mother-in-law makes the young couple decide to rent a hotel room rather than stay at the house. At the hotel, an argument between the couple sends Roy out of their room for less than an hour, an hour that will determine the course of both of their lives.
That night, a woman at the hotel is raped, and she accuses Roy, with whom she had a brief encounter earlier in the evening at the ice machine. Despite a lack of physical evidence, Roy is convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. After Roy serves five years of his sentence, a lawyer hired by Celestial’s family succeeds in getting Roy’s conviction overthrown.
The novel then explores the consequences those five years have on Celestial and Roy’s marriage. As the novel progresses, Jones manages to avoid many tempting paths. An American Marriage does not become an agenda-driven indictment of the failings of America’s criminal justice system, particularly involving black men.
Jones also frees her characters from the pitfalls stereotypically associated with black incarceration: drug abuse, undereducation, and poverty (Roy comes from a boostrap family, but he attended college and is on his way to becoming a moderately successful executive; Celestial, on the other hand, comes from new money, hasn’t wanted for anything, was given the resources and encouragement to embrace her creativity, and is beginning to break out as an artist who makes unique, high-end dolls).
When Celestial takes comfort in her neighbor and childhood friend Andre several years into Roy’s incarceration, and they eventually become engaged, the novel doesn’t become a character study or a bereft or cuckolded husband.
Instead, moving forward and backward through time, Celestial, Roy, and Andre in turn tell their stories. They each tell the story of what they want now that Roy has been freed, and what happened in the past that brought them to this point.
An American Marriage powerfully illluminates the nature of human will–how it adapts, but sometimes breaks, how it can transform, or be denied or asserted, and what makes it stronger. There are consequences to every one of our choices, large and small, that we make every day. And those choices affect who we are fundamentally. Though what happens to us can often be out of our own control, who we are is, ultimately, made up of our choices–of what we decide to do with the cards we’ve been dealt.
Tayari Jones will be at Lemuria on Monday, February 26, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from An American Marriage. An American Marriage is the February 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.
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