The government serves as a key antagonist in An American Marriage. All it takes is one instant for your entire existence to have meant absolutely nothing. The American government is not keeping score, because they’ve already filed against the Black man and woman. When you’re Black in America, it really doesn’t matter how many things you got “right” – going to college, getting a high-paying job, getting a business, getting married and starting a family – whatever the hell right even is – because no one is keeping score. “Things would be different this time,” Celestial said on her wedding day to Roy. In this book, the ideal was “tall, dark, and handsome,” and Roy was all of these things.

The feeling of lust and the ideal Black man. When you include someone else into your life, you have to understand whether or not those desires are compatible, as well.įor them, it started out as a feeling a desire to be held, a desire to feel safe and wanted. I think Jones was trying to showcase that without the characters acknowledging how incompatible this made them.

They are unable to sustain the needs of one another. Marriage Before IncarcerationĪt first, their marriage appears rocky he’s a womanizer and she’s a self-fulfilling artist. Shouldn’t it be better than before? Isn’t this what we were fighting for? These are the questions that preclude a most horrific premise: a Black man going to prison for a crime he did not commit after only a year and half of marriage with his beloved Celestial. He wants to release the idea that struggle has to be part of the next generation. There’s almost an obsession with Roy wanting to do things “right” with his children. What he calls “setting her down.” He wants to fund her dreams, but more importantly, for her to have his children to carry on his legacy.

A wife whom he would like to give everything to. He leaves the South, he works in Corporate America, and he finds the wife of his dreams. The cruel thing of this work is that it actually happens. He is confident in his abilities to transform his life from small-town Louisiana boy to full-blown Corporate American man – while Black. Are Black people just living their lives in vain? What I mean is – is there a possibility that we can do everything “right” and still end up with the shorter end of the stick as a collective? Is this life in America a life where fate has been decided and the joke is on us? An American Marriage is a contemplation of these questions.Īn American Marriage starts in the boisterous perspective of a young businessman, Roy.

An american marriage book review