An American Marriage

Roy Othaniel Hamilton and Celestial Gloriana are educated, middle-class professional on the come-up. They've been married for a year, and like most marriages it isn't perfect - they've still got their secrets. There's work to do yet but a lifetime ahead of them to do it, filled with promise and love.

And then one night at a hotel it's a case of a black man being at the wrong place at the wrong time and Roy finds himself looking at 12 years in prison.

Celestial and Roy write each other in that time. The small cracks in their marriage growing into massive fissures pushed to breaking. The epistolary framework allows each of them to present their case uninterrupted and you find yourself sympathizing with both and neither. It's an impossible situation. Jones wrote that she felt this was a novel in conversation with the Odyssey - of a man trying to get back to his wife.

Jones has got such an ear for language, you can hear the southern black lilt in their words and sympathize with the case each of them makes. In Jones' hands I'd listen to them argue over single payer vs universal healthcare and just as likely still not know who I sided with. Complicated and messy rendered with clear eyed perspective. (But yeah, the poor tree was a bit extra.)