American Genius: A Comedy - Softcover

Tillman, Lynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933368446 ISBN 13: 9781933368443

Publisher: Soft Skull Press, 2006

Synopsis

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With American Genius, her first novel since 1998's No Lease on Life, she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod. In this otherworld, competing values rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

An often dazzling, totally disorienting interior riff, Tillman's fifth novel (after 1995's Haunted Houses) presents an unnamed woman of a certain age, who lingers in a spa (or is it a madhouse?), digressing with authority on loneliness, denim, Eames chairs, the history of silk, the vicissitudes of friendship, Puritanism, the blissfulness of sleep and the pleasures of 100% cotton socks. Dialogue is virtually absent, as is plot; most everything—a painful childhood, beloved pets, a dead father and brother and a troubled mother—is revealed through the woman's first-person recollections and observations. Eventually, it appears the narrator is resident in a New Age, claustrophobia-inducing colony, where she sharply observes her strange fellows and attends absurd guest lectures ("Live Food, Raw Food"). The location and purpose remain ambiguous, as do large chunks of the narrator's personal history, which has left her with an obsession with skin: leg waxing, alopecia, psoriasis, facials (a particular favorite) and scars "whose presence never lets you forget the event, which may have been dramatic or even traumatic." Indeed, her own memories seem to have left her suffering, numb and loquacious. Vividly recorded by the multitalented Tillman (who also writes nonfiction, essays and short stories), this loopy trip through a meandering, fretful mind proves worthwhile. (Oct.)
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Review

...demanding and bewitching, harrowing and bemusing, revelatory and transforming... -- Donna Seaman, Bookforum

[A] circuitous, riveting journey. Tillman is as piquant and provocative as ever. -- Kirkus Reviews

[F]lawed, beautiful, sacred, insane. -- George Saunders

[P]oetic brilliance... -- John Freeman, Entertainment Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Soft Skull Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1933368446
• ISBN 13: 9781933368443
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320