Is Marriage In America Really The Way Tayari Jones Describes it?
In a recent conversation with a couple of my friends, we got to talk about various topics that have been on our minds for a while. It's quite funny and strange at the same time. But the conversation got heated when we began to talk about love and marriage. My friends began to share their thoughts on how they wish to meet someone who will love them, then they get married, bear children, and live happily ever after in a nice mansion. For me, I could tap into the feeling of wanting to be loved and happy, but as usual, there's always that awkward friend who brings up something different that makes the conversation weird. This time, my awkward friend chose to inform us that majority of the cases being tried in court are divorce cases between spouses.
WTF!!!!!!!!
This statement made the room silent for a couple of seconds and I'm sure this was because we were all thinking about how our marriage dreams could crash land into a divorce.
NEWS FLASH, I wasn't even thinking of that. Instead, what popped into my head was the beautiful and complicated love story of Roy Othaniel Hamilton, Jr in Tayari Jones' novel An American Marriage and how the author used her book to portray the state of marriages in America and how this story could easily be the fate of any black man. So I just had to take it upon myself to write a book view on this novel cause this book deserves to be in the mind and library of every reader.
About The Book
Wikipedia describes An American Marriage as
A novel by the American author Tayari Jones. It is her fourth novel and was published by Algonquin Books on February 6, 2018. In February 2018, the novel was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. The novel also won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Source
The book is centered around the entanglement and relationship between three characters namely Roy Hamilton, Celestial Davenport, and Andre Tucker. Roy Hamilton happens to be a typical black man living in a country that constantly looks for a way to deploy racial injustice upon him just because of the color of his skin. His wife, Celestial Davenport, is also a black woman but a gifted doll maker, and finally Andre Tucker, Celestial's childhood friend, and the person who introduced Roy and Celestial to one another during their University days.
A unique feature that can be found in this novel, which grabbed my attention is how Tayari Jones took her time and effort to craft out the plot from a point of exordium, where she introduces us to the characters, the bowl of contention currently going on in their marriage and down to the point where a dramatic twist in events comes into play. Not only that, her writing has this unique flavor, if I am permitted to describe it that way. If you give the book your full attention, you will discover the way she makes use of the name of each character as the chapter title instead of going with the conventional chapter one, two, and the likes of that.
A turning point in the book began from the moment Roy and Celestial decide to go to Eloe to spend the Labour Day holiday with Roy's folk. After dinner, the couple gets into an argument that sprang up due to Roy's desire to become a father and Celestial's unreadiness to conceive. This has always been the spark of their argument for a while and that alone had a strong hold on Roy's temper. In advent to clear his head and cool off his temper, Roy goes out of the hotel for a walk where he gets to meet a white lady and engages her in a conversation before walking her down to her hotel room, then he retires to his room for the night. Unfortunately for Roy, he is disrupted from his sleep and gets arrested for a crime based on the claim from a white lady, that he was the perpetrator responsible for her rape.
For a crime he had no hand in, Roy gets sentenced to 12 years in prison where he gets to meet his biological father. This new reality took a huge turn on him but his strong love for his wife kept him going and the idea that his wife and her family will not rest until they have done everything in their imminent power to make sure he gets out.
Then this is when the plot twist comes in. While Roy is still behind bars, Celestial his wife begins to reflect on their marriage and starts to ask herself if she can wait for a man who waited until the night of his arrest before telling her that the man she thought was his biological father is just his stepfather. This and more got her thinking deeply. As if that wasn't enough to bear, she begins to develop feelings for her childhood friend Andre, who has always had feelings for her but lacked the balls to express them.
As expected, Celestial and Roy's marriage ended in a catastrophic breakup but it even got more awkward when Roy got to leave prison earlier than Celestial expect. But a lot happened before all these came into play, which is why I would recommend you should read the book and find out for yourself if Celestial was completely selfish or if she needed to take that drastic step to move on.
In other words, Tayari made use of her wit, creativity, fictional expertise, and feminist intellect in writing this novel which brought her literal prowess into the limelight and caught my full attention. Now I'm sure you can see why I thought of the book when my friend informed me that most of the court cases currently are divorce cases.
Don't FORGET I STILL REMAIN @blackavalon, A WRITER ON THE WEB3 BLOCKCHAIN
