AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

By Tayari Jones

306 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $26.95.

Tayari Jones’s wise and compassionate new novel, “An American Marriage,” tells us a story we think we know. Roy, a young black man, is tried and wrongly convicted of rape while his wife, Celestial, waits for his return. But Jones’s story isn’t the one we are expecting, a courtroom drama or an examination of the prison-industrial complex; instead, it is a clear vision of the quiet devastation of a family. The novel focuses on the failed hopes of romantic love, disapproving in-laws, flawed families of origin, and the question of life with or without children that all married couples must negotiate. It is beautifully written, with many allusions to black music and culture — including the everyday poetry of the African-American community that begs to be heard.

Celestial and Roy — in love, educated, middle-class members of the post-integration African-American generation — are decidedly upwardly mobile and unconcerned about issues of racial uplift and representation, though they have been chaptered and versed by their parents in the language of oppression. With Roy’s career “on the come-up,” as he describes it, and Celestial building a portfolio as an artist, they see a trajectory to become black rich, maybe even white rich. But after only 18 months of marriage, Roy is sentenced to 12 years in prison. The horror of this story lies in its banality: An innocent man, happily married, who does all the right things to succeed, is nonetheless sidelined to a concrete cell. The unfairness of the years stolen from this couple because of someone else’s mistake, the great cosmic error that derails Roy’s life, is the novel’s slow burn.

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Much of this story is told through the letters that Roy and Celestial write each other during and after his incarceration. Jones recreates the couple’s grief, despair and anger until they finally work their way to acceptance. This is complicated emotional territory navigated with succinctness and precision, making what isn’t said as haunting as the letters themselves.