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Artis-Ann
Features Writer
10:41 AM 8th August 2020
arts

The Heat Of The Night: An American Marriage By Tayari Jones

 
Recommended to me by a friend and ex-colleague, this novel is definitely worth a read. The first couple of pages of the book are simply reviews from all sorts of luminaries from Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama and all the major newspapers, both here and in the US, and it deserves every one of the accolades. Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 and a New York Times Bestseller, this has a well-deserved pedigree.

Celestial and Roy are newlyweds, educated, middle class and in love. They are on the brink of an exciting future until one night, Roy, a young southern black man, hardworking and ambitious, is wrongly accused of rape. He couldn’t have done it, he was with Celestial at the time, but no jury is going to listen to a black man’s defence - despite a singular lack of evidence - and retribution is swift and harsh.

Sentenced to twelve years, when Roy is eventually released earlier than expected, he returns home to find things have changed. Celestial also had ambition for success and personal fulfilment. Roy discovers he has to re-assess his position even though his future was torn from him through no fault of his own. Relationships have been tested and found wanting, and the novel focuses on the failed hopes of romantic love, against a backdrop of stark inequity. Roy’s imprisonment was not only a literal one for him but also a metaphorical one for Celeste. As time slowly picks apart the seams of their marriage, the reader has to consider whether there ever comes a point in a marriage where loyalty can no longer be an expectation.

There are subtleties: the accuser is described as neither black nor white, and the reader is left in doubt about her race. Should it matter? What assumptions does the reader make? The purgatory that is prison life, especially for an innocent man, is revealed only in part and in discreet references rather than an explicit denunciation of prisoner torment and the blind eye of the warders. Roy’s cellmate is an experienced older man who protects Roy for the most unexpected of reasons.The cracks which exist in the young marriage are revealed and the reader is left to wonder whether this was a relationship which would have weathered the usual storms and survived the test of time, or if it was always destined to fail.

Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones
Told at first from two viewpoints with a third added part-way through, the plot is revealed slowly with thoughtful insight into the minds of the three main characters: a man, his wife and their trusted friend. The influence of their respective families is not lost – family is an important factor.

Thought-provoking, the novel probes the way in which cultural expectations influence and clash with personal aspirations for the black middle classes but An American Marriage is also as much an exploration of modern gender roles as it is an inquiry into social justice. I expected a ‘Mockingbird’-style story of the wrongful arrest of a Negro but this was not a court room drama, it was so much more than that.

Despite its racial context, which I know many will argue was the reason for Roy’s unjust treatment, and therefore a central theme, the book’s title is misleading - it might, in fact, have been any marriage. Am I naïve to think that these events, this test, could have befallen any couple? It is the story of an innocent man, any innocent man, trying to get back home to a waiting wife who is unsure of the extent to which she is permitted to rebuild her own life. The rights and wrongs of the behaviour of all three main characters are called into question. Morality, duty, loyalty, are all placed beneath the microscope. Emotions are complicated and this love story is powerful, poignant and subtle.

A tale of love and loyalty, An American Marriage is a wonderful example of storytelling, well-crafted and powerful, and readers will warm to the characters’ southern lilt (it is an entirely non-white cast), with its gentle formality and a courtliness which has all but vanished from any other English-speaking part of the world.

I read it in just two sittings, an engrossed spectator.



An American Marriage is published by Algonquin Books