American Genius, A Comedy

By Lynne Tillman and Lucy Ives

Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read about a former historian ruminating on her own life and the lives of others--named a best book of the century by Vulture.

In the hypnotic, masterful American Genius, A Comedy, a former historian spending time in a residential home, mental institute, artist’s colony, or sanitarium, is spinning tales of her life and ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, textiles, pet deaths, family trauma, a lost brother, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, loneliness, memory, and sensitive skin--and what “sensitivity” means in our culture and society.

Showing what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod. All this is folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating in a seance that may offer escape and transcendence--or perhaps nothing at all. This new edition of a contemporary classic features an introduction by novelist Lucy Ives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781593763176

Reviews for American Genius, A Comedy

[reganrule · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

American Genius: a Comedy falls into the category of post-modern self-referential novels a la Wittgenstein's Mistress, Wittgenstein's Nephew, and perhaps Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline. All of these present a first person narrative: an isolated individual enjoys the dubious privilege of existing in an institution that allows them time to think--that is, time to follow a thought at leisure--with very minimal outside interference. (Mann's Magic Mountain also partially satisfies this criteria--as generally do most novels set in sanatoriums). On the whole, this genre can be differentiated by the specificity of the protagonist’s “triggers,” or “tics,” and the extent to which they are artfully woven into their personal, stream of consciousness narrative. Our protagonist, Helen, has her own peculiar idiosyncratic preoccupations: they center around skin conditions, ergonomic mid-century modern chairs, animals her parents killed, American History, Puritanism, fabric, memory (and its loss), time, sexuality, etc., to name but a few. She has a neurotic’s sense of humor; she is tactilely & socially sensitive; for each described instance, she exhaustively enumerates the psychology which might explain a particular human behavior. If the specific topics mentioned are not of interest to you, then I would advise skipping this book. If you have any interest in contemplating (or ruminating on) the complexity of superficiality, or the profundity of the phrase “skin-deep,” then this is the book for you.

[paulagraph · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This "novel" took me an inordinate amount of time to read. And it's only 292 pages in length! I kept picking it up and putting it down. I read one big chunk on a flight from Tucson to Oakland, however, which served to solidify this dense and almost maddeningly recursive anti-narrative for me. A nouveau stream-of-consciousness novel a la 21st century Virginia Woolf perhaps. The narrator, Helen, a middle-aged woman with extremely sensitive skin and subject to a "nonorganic pressure on the heart" is a disassembler of objects, memories, ideas, theories and personalities who has taken up temporary residence at a kind of mental-health rest home or personal growth institute. She introduces herself as "a recorder and collector, a listmaker, I studied history, philosophy, literature and have taught American history, but dissuaded from the academic life after receiving a Ph.D., or unsuited for its piquant rigors, even though well equipped to be an historian, since I could read something and remember it, I subsequently trained as an object maker and designer, while haphazardly pursuing odd jobs. I also wait." An intellectual obsessive, she collects facts about just about everything imaginable, examines them as if under a microscope and then makes paratactic leaps from subject to subject, obsession to obsession, childhood memory to excruciatingly detailed observation of the goings on of the other residents. And the other residents are a decidedly colorful bunch: the Count, Contessa AKA Violet, the Magician, the demanding man, the balding man, the Turkish poet, the disconsolate woman, the mathematician Spike, etc. Helen notes that "many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated but they struggle on." Other recurring characters in Helen's mental cabinet of curiosities are her dead father, her out-of-touch brother, her senile mother, various cats and a dog, her Polish esthetician, various chairs both poorly and well-designed and the imprisoned Leslie Van Houten. Above all else, however, American Genius is about time, about the body, the mind and mortality. Tillman's prose throughout is nothing but surprising; her sentences invite delectation. This is a book for readers who delight in the journey without concern for the destination.

[wdlaurie_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I bravely ventured 30 pages into this book before I gave up. If you enjoy sophomoric stream of consciousness writing, then this is your book.