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American Genius: A Comedy, by Lynne Tillman
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Review
Praise for American Genius, A Comedy “Tillman’s beautifully constructed sentences create their own propulsion, able to take a reader in any direction at any moment. From the opening pages, a singular consciousness emerges, both porous and radically isolated, and by stripping out most other elements, the book confirms the ultimate primacy of literary voice, of which this is a rare triumph.†―Lidija Haas, Vulture, 1 of the 100 Most Important Books of the 2000s . . . So Far "If you’re looking for a book to really just get lost in, this re-release of Lynne Tillman’s dense, winding, frantically brilliant novel is a good bet. Notice I didn’t say safe bet, because there’s little that’s safe within these pages. Instead, you’ll find the profane, twisted, knife edge-sharp thoughts of a former historian who is meditating on everything from the concept of sensitivity to the Manson murders. And you’ll receive these thoughts in the inimitable literary stylings of Tillman, who goes places few other writers can even conceive of existing." ―Kristin Iversen, NYLON "American Genius, A Comedy is a novel of digression. Refusing linear plot for the meandering structure of recollection, the book takes the form of an stream-of-thought monologue delivered by a former American historian residing in a mysterious, clinic-like setting that might be a sanatorium or an artist’s retreat but might also be something more sinister. In slippery paragraphs always on the edge of incoherence, we hear about the narrator’s interest in baths, textiles, underarm waxing, the quirks and habits of most of her co-patients, and the history of slavery. A portrait of excessive interiority." ―TANK Magazine "If Jane Austen were pulled along a post-modern highway into the 21st century, forced to shed her fixation on marriage being the ultimate happy ending, the resulting novel might read a little like this." ––Ruby Brunton, Cleveland Review of Books"Tillman gives us a mind hilariously on fire with compensatory distractions, bristling with facts that may not help at all . . . The woman’s mind spins, and with it a voice that’s ardent and ironic, knowing and oblivious, repetitive and contradictory . . . What kind of 'comedy' is this? . . . The comedy, surely of a sort of late modernism, familiar from Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard: novelists whose narrators simply can’t be quiet, but find themselves yammering away, the brain always buzzing, dry lips smacking and teeth clacking as their stories and theories and opinions come tumbling out . . . American Genius, A Comedy was timely in 2006, and still feels queasily of our moment." ––Brian Dillon, 4Columns Praise for American Genius, A Comedy (2006) “The narrative voice is manic, neurotic, self-generative, very smart, loopy, deeply vulnerable, closely (obsessively) observant, narcissistic, and eminently contemporary. It is also very funny. Flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.†―George Saunders “American Genius is a masterpiece.â€â€•Harry Mathews “To read Tillman’s tightly woven novel, which meshes inner and outer realms as well as past and present, is to enter into an intense relationship, a communion with another spirit, perhaps with some sort of genius. An involvement that, like all forms of heightened attention, be it friendship, love, hate, or pursuits intellectual or creative, is demanding and bewitching, harrowing and bemusing, revelatory and transforming.†―Donna Seaman, Bookforum “Tillman’s prose builds to poetic brilliance.†―Entertainment Weekly “What emerges here is a bold showcase of a novel, a cabinet of curiosity, a proposal for what fiction could be.†―The New York Times Book Review “Reading the novel is like entering a room crowded with peculiar portraits, all brilliantly drawn. The book is a consummate work, one that levels Western history with family dynamics, pet deaths, Manson family references, the Zulu alphabet, skin disorders, and the loss of memory that afflicts us both personally and as a nation. Tillman once again proves herself a rare master of both elegant and associative writing, urging us to enter the moment, which is all we have and simultaneously cannot keep.†―San Francisco Bay Guardian “If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the ’00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years.†―Blake Butler, HTMLGiant “I don’t know if there’s a precedent for this charming, maddening, brilliant, painstaking, and utterly mesmeric book.†―Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions “To unravel the mordant skeins and associative daisy chains of American Genius is, quite often, to feel oneself gently possessed by the mind and memories of another. Tillman’s work infers that such a transmission is an ideal for fiction―that narrative isn’t just a means of organizing experience, but the stuff of consciousness itself.†―Slate “Tillman explores in all its minutiae how true sensitivity is both paralysing and liberating. When the meandering journey of American Genius finally ends, you might find you’ve come farther than you thought possible.†―The Guardian
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About the Author
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.
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Product details
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Soft Skull Press; Reprint edition (February 12, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1593763115
ISBN-13: 978-1593763114
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
6 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#781,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Although this novel has a very specific plot that may limit its appeal to wide readership, there is no doubt about the quality of its artistry. Tillman has taken a concept and executed it well. What surprises me is that none of the reviewers on this site or on the book jacket recognize its most obvious inspiration: Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. In Tillman's version of the psychosomatic seeking respite (from the world at large and finding a microcosm of carnival-mirror traits in her artists colony) the world is decidedly 21st century. But the reflections of the protagonist are as human, and therefore timeless, as Mann's. She plays with the flow of time the way Mann did, and uses personal ruminations to reflect both the character of the protagonist and the society from which she is temporarily escaping. Tillman uses the dining hall, bedroom, walking excursions, and seance in ways like Mann did, and with a similar type of wry humor. Her ambitions were less for political symbolism than Mann's. She musters a good dose of talent in her writing. Much recommended for serious readers.
Chosen by our book discussion group. We found it more enjoyable in discussion, when we could unwrap it, as it were, than it had been in the reading. As a psych R.N. I found it very much like being at work, listening to this hypomanic flight of ideas. Tillman has it down pat, the constant monologue, which keeps circling back to the same topics and obsessions.
Tillman definitely has some game. Her style is challenging, engaging, and engrossing. However, I don't feel as moved as many of the other reviewers I have read. This might be a sad comment on my own psyche, but.....I just didn't care about the narrator. Tillman's style is superb, and the mystery of the setting was masterfully executed. Still, I just couldn't work up any interest in the life of the narrator. Tillman does a remarkable job of taking you deep inside the mind of her narrator. I just didn't find much of interest once I arrived.
Although I enjoyed this book for the interesting style in which it was written it was not an easy read. I found myself putting it down after 30 minutes or so because the stream of conciousness stlye offered me no relief from my own brain.
AMERICAN GENIUS draws you in with the dexterity of Scheherezadem so don't plan on doing a lot of other things because hours will go by, and you'll still be there hanging on every word of the mysterious, yet utterly candid narrator, a woman who seems to be on a permanent vacation from the realities of her ordinary life, so that in a way, this is the updated, and very NY version of M. HULOT'S HOLIDAY. But is it a holiday entirely? Or has, perhaps, our narrator stepped outside the bonds of society and is being incarcerated in this strange place, like THE YELLOW WALLPAPER or THE SNAKE PIT? Women have long written about being clapped into one sort of prison or another, but rarely so enigmatically. I dare you to work it out, indeed part of the miracle of the book is seeing, with such inflected pleasure, just how long Tillman can keep up the balancing act of keeping you guessing. For in other ways the world the narrator finds herself in is like one of those artists' colonies one always hears about, where they bring you lunch to the door of your cottage, then tiptoe away so as not to disturb the "genius" within.Or it could be any sort of other place of temporary lodging, like the inn in Chaucer. "Flee, flee, this sad hotel," Anne Sexton wrote, but in many ways this place suits our narrator, and the other guests or inmates or whatever they are afford her (and us) endless hours of amusement and speculation, just as they did M. Hulot, or Henry James. "I'm not trapped here," she keeps telling us, or maybe she's trying to reassure herself.Each "guest" has a turn in the sun, each a little lesson in characterization, just the way they share their communal meals, or turn away from each other, or form little alliances that may or may not include our longsuffering artist with the sensitive skin. And yet by the end of the book we may decide that all that characterization aside, only a very few figures remain with us, strong trees on which the spiderwebs have entangled themselves. There is our narrator herself, bemused, sophisticated, and yet nursing childhood hurts and ancestral memories that mark her out as different even to herself--her world defined by how thin her skin is, how tender and how untouched. There's her brilliant father, not so much rapacious as passionately interested in everything except for that which his daughter holds dear. "It was my father who first made me conscious of the cherry on the back of my upper thigh." Thanks, Dad! And there's the Polish cosmetologist, superbly assured, highly skilled, European servility turned on its head to wear the mask of the master. She's great. Most strange of all, most touching, the real-life figure of "Manson Girl" Leslie Van Houten, imprisoned for real after umpteen appeals for parole, her memories of killing Sharon Tate and the rest fading away like spots on gold lame, her personhood turning her into a ghost, an avatar of humiliation, guilt, shame, and yet otherness, the otherness our heroine seems to see as a sort of shadow to her own self, the moon to her sun. Who knows what we might have been capable of if we felt as strongly, or as vacantly, as Leslie Van Houten?The back of the book compares AMERICAN GENIUS to Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow. I don't think so, but I can see what George Saunders and Matthew Sharpe jumped overboard in exactly those ways. Like these classic novels, AMERICAN GENIUS plays with time--slowing it down, making it jump hoops, negating it on the one hand while reifying it on the other--the way a prisoner does, marking the days scrawled in charcoal on the wall of his cave or cell. The long sentences with which our narrator marks time will resound in your head every time you try to put down this wonderfully achieved novel, and you'll be imitating Tillman next time you try to open your mouth and explain, just what it is that happened that made you so strange and so bereft.
The magician who appears near the end of this novel reminds the other characters that magic is all about misdirection. That describes the novel's technique as well. Our neurotic narrator obsesses over her skin, and sometimes fabric---the surfaces. But then she'll experience sudden eruptions of painful memory or vivid insight, usually tossed off as asides on every topic from art history to childhood pets. Our narrator (Helen, we eventually learn) complains about her sensitive skin, but what we're really exploring here is a sensitive psyche, a brilliant mind almost afraid of thinking. As the book begins, it's unclear whether she's living in some kind of mental institution or an artists' colony. The fact that we can't immediately tell is an example of the sly dry humor present throughout this beautifully written novel.
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