NIGHTSTANDS AND COFFEE TABLES

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

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

Tayari Jones’s novel explores being black in America. She strategically catalogues the perspectives of three African-American people with different backgrounds caught up in a friendship/love triangle. They are each battling inner demons, all uniquely flawed and raw, but endearingly willing to live unfiltered. They love hard, they rage hard, they forgive even harder. Roy and Andre are trying to discover how to be black men in America, what it means, how best to navigate a society where some people view them as less than, on a constant quest to prove themselves. Celestial is battling being a woman in America, on a search for independence, yet confined by her culture’s common assertion that masculinity requires a woman’s submission. Both men are attracted to her independent spirit, yet challenged by her insistence on living independently.

When Roy is wrongfully accused of rape a year into his marriage with Celestial, he is sent to prison for twelve years. Celestial is forced to face the vows she made, how much she actually meant them when they seemed like simple words. How much should a wife sacrifice? Must she serve her own sentence while he is incarcerated? She seeks solace in Andre who knows and cares for her husband, their mutual friend. How that relationship evolves and the reader’s judgment of it forces us to examine how we define love. When she visits Roy in prison, he says, “I know what true feeling looks like, but I know what obligation looks like, too. What’s in your face, that’s all duty.” Roy resents forced love, but refuses to accept that his wife’s love might be fading.

This novel showcases the gritty reality of a flawed criminal justice system, particularly for people of color. It also extends those injustices to the family members, those not on trial, but forced to serve emotional sentences of a loved one’s absence. Celestial’s privileged upbringing shows both the pride and guilt of having more. When her father insists on taking his daughter to the projects, to remind her how good she has it, her mother chastises him saying, “This is how progress works. You have it better than your daddy and I have it better than mine. Don’t treat her like she stole something.”

Jones’ style of writing does not rely on the reader liking her characters. In fact, she leads and ends with their flaws, asserting the weaknesses as the more interesting parts of humanity. Some might find the novel hard to relate to, but that may be a result of us too often relying on a character’s redemption. Jones does not wrap her characters or her story in pretty packaging to make us care. Instead, she forces us to face the truth of their experiences, for better or worse.