An American Marriage

An American Marriage was the pick for the first meeting of the book club I'm trying to get started in my neighborhood. I had never heard of it, and I probably wouldn't have picked it up on my own, but the point of a book club is to expand your horizons. I ended up liking it, though I don't know that I'll actively seek out more like it in the future. Still, it sparked an interesting debate. And it was short enough to read in two days.

The book is about a marriage that falls apart. Roy and Celestial have been married for just over a year and have just started trying to get pregnant when he is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent to prison for twelve years. He's released after five years, ready to pick up where he left off with Celestial, only to discover that she has moved on.

I think the marriage would have failed even if Roy hadn't been sent to jail. He and Celestial have some serious communication problems in the beginning of the book, and he's a serial cheater. It's possible they would have found a way to work on these issues as they matured and started a family, but it's equally likely that they would have just grown farther apart. The point, though, is that they never got a chance. Their marriage ends up being another casualty of American racism and injustice.

One of the biggest themes in this book is how your home and your history defines you. Roots are important, and Roy and Celestial both end up repeating some of the same patterns as their parents. There are some big class issues between the two of them that seem insurmountable. Roy is always hoping to move up in the world, to achieve something great, while Celestial just sort of takes it for granted that she'll be able to do whatever she sets her mind to. The book spends a lot of time wondering whether we can break free of our histories or whether our lives will be forever defined by the circumstances of our births.

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