![]() ![]() The variation in these perspectives serves an important purpose: It offers up myriad means of understanding the novel’s complicated central relationship, and lets every character speak for themselves, giving each an opportunity to capture the reader’s allegiance. She then returns to their firsthand accounts, adding in a third narrator -Andre, a childhood friend of Celestial’s and a college friend of Roy’s. Jones shifts from the first-person narration provided by these two protagonists to letters they send each other while Roy is in prison. It is this sort of intimacy that Tayari Jones so searchingly explores in her new novel, An American Marriage, which follows the wrongful imprisonment of a young black man named Roy, and its impact on him and on his new wife Celestial. ![]() And while perusing just one letter between two people provides hints into their relationship, digging into a whole trove of letters sent over the course of several years can reveal intricacies that face-to-face interaction with the authors never would. There is no performance, no act put on for third-party observers. ![]() ![]() The personalized salutation, the handwriting quirks, and the inside jokes sprinkled throughout offer a glimpse at an interior world only the recipient is meant to see. Reading someone else’s private letters feels almost as intrusive as spying on them through their living-room window. ![]()
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