An American Marriage

Here's what I knew coming into the book: it was an Oprah's Book Club pick, and it was about the consequences and effects on a marriage of a black man's interaction with a racist and unjust legal system. I wanted to remain open to what the book, and Tayari Jones had to say, but my expectations were tempered a little bit by the cynical baggage I brought to it. I did not think I needed a book to teach me that the legal system in this country is racist, I did not need a book to teach me that the personal consequences were devastating (do you hear the cliché of that word? Our cliches fail us: devastating, heart breaking, immense, incomprehensible. They all relate to a quantity so vast as to challenge human scale, but they're equally so vague as to be almost bloodless).

This wasn't that book, it's better than that.

This book asks difficult, almost despairing questions. What happens when injustice is as commonplace, as unbounded, as inhuman in scale as the weather? What's the point of shaking your fist at the weather? Roy is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and once he has successfully appealed, the system may expunge his record and release him but it can never give him the the time lost, the life that he could have lived, back. Who pays him back for that time? It's not the state, and if it's not the state, then the only other people can pay are the people around him, but they've changed too.

It's the irreconcilable paradox of our prisons, the math that never penciled out in the first place. It's become so encumbered by history and politics and violence and profit that we delude ourselves into thinking that our reforms and incremental changes and civic religion of equality can fix it, but when you take it all away, the same conflict remains: if prisons are places of rehabilitation, at some point the prisoner becomes a different person than committed the crime. If prisons are places of retribution, who believes anymore that wasting years of human life does anything to mend what cannot be broken?

I loved the characters in this book. Not loved them in the sense of being good or likable people, I don't feel the need to judge them but nobody in the book is perfect. But Tayari Jones makes you believe in their dreams, believe that they are real, and that means that the painful realization that all of these dreams together did not add up was real too. Nobody was going to get exactly what they want, and even those that got most of what they want will have to live with the knowledge that some of it came from some pretty selfish choices.

The justice system, the whole legal system, is based on the ideas that everything is owned by someone, and when something is stolen, somebody has to pay. Except for the system itself. It never has to pay.