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AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY

Lynne Tillman

This is what we'd get if Jane Austen were writing in 21st century America--a book that expands the possibilities of the national novel and of the female protagonist.

Tillman brings into being a microcosm of American democracy, a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod, in which competing values--rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor--compete with one another through a hilarious narrative, cycling through skin disease, chair design, Manifest Destiny--folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating, in Wagnerian fashion, in a supernatural event, offering escape, transcendence, or perhaps nothing.

Lynne Tillman, Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on art and culture.

Available products
Book Published 2019-02-01 by Soft Skull Press
Book Published 2019-02-01 by Soft Skull Press

Comments

Tillman's prose builds to poetic brilliance.

To unravel the mordant skeins and associative daisy chains of American Genius is, quite often, to feel oneself gently possessed by the mind and memories of another. Tillman's work infers that such a transmission is an ideal for fiction - that narrative isn't just a means of organizing experience, but the stuff of consciousness itself.

If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the '00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years.

I don't know if there's a precedent for this charming, maddening, brilliant, painstaking, and utterly mesmeric book.

Confirms and enhances her reputation as one of America's most challenging and adventurous writers.

What emerges here is a bold showcase of a novel, a cabinet of curiosity, a proposal for what fiction could be.

To read Tillman's tightly woven novel, which meshes inner and outer realms as well as past and present, is to enter into an intense relationship, a communion with another spirit, perhaps with some sort of genius. An involvement that, like all forms of heightened attention, be it friendship, love, hate, or pursuits intellectual or creative, is demanding and bewitching, harrowing and bemusing, revelatory and transforming.

Tillman explores in all its minutiae how true sensitivity is both paralysing and liberating. When the meandering journey of American Genius finally ends, you might find you've come farther than you thought possible.

Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman.

Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine--not because I admire her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel.

Flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.

She is my secular art angel.

American Genius is a masterpiece.

Reading the novel is like entering a room crowded with peculiar portraits, all brilliantly drawn. The book is a consummate work, one that levels Western history with family dynamics, pet deaths, Manson family references, the Zulu alphabet, skin disorders, and the loss of memory that afflicts us both personally and as a nation. Tillman once again proves herself a rare master of both elegant and associative writing, urging us to enter the moment, which is all we have and simultaneously cannot keep.

Lynne Tillman's protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment.