In “An American Marriage,’ by Tayari Jones, The Oprah Book Club’s latest pick, the devastating effects on a tender, struggling young marriage reverberate throughout their extended families when Roy Hamilton is charged and convicted of a crime he did not commit. His successful, rising star artist wife Celestial, daughter of an upwardly mobile Atlanta couple becomes collaterally damaged by a corrupted criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex’s humiliating, dehumanizing strictures. “An American Marriage” is suspenseful in a non-frenetic style, an easy-going, readable style that pulls the reader into the circle of the families of Celestial and Roy. The shifts of perspective keep readers wanting to follow one side then the other and to test reality, to hear all the truths. Empathy abounds but does not obscure harsh truths about the damage that parenting can cause. Tayari Jones’ novel calculates the toll taken on a family and the larger community when one person is incarcerated in our punishment system, the cruelty exacerbated by this man’s innocence. And as gentle and easy going as the narrative is, the writing is likewise gentle, loving, closely observed of the intimate lives of a contemporary African American couple. Jones continues the finely wrought, sensitive work begun in her previous novels, also based in the contemporary south, “Leaving Atlanta,” “The Untelling,” and “Silver Sparrow.”