American Genius, A Comedy

by Lynne Tillman

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With American Genius, her first novel since 1998's No Lease on Life, she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s Pequod . In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literature, United States, Womens, Literary Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 2006

About the author

Here’s an Author’s Bio. It could be written differently. I’ve written many for myself and read lots of other people’s. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction – selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me.

My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.

Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.

I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He’s also a wonderful man.

As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I’m inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.

When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don’t know, have or haven’t experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that’s been written.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Being locked inside this narrator’s consciousness is like being trapped in a lift with a dermatologist specialising in Latin words for itchy, a tweed-suited Kafka scholar, a psychotic artist, and a trivia quiz show bore who knows the exact dates of the Crimean war, then being gaffer-taped to the ceiling until the lift operator prises open the doors and saves you from this torture, only to recite his four hour lecture on eczema. Being locked inside these never-ending paragraphs, these uncoiling merciless sentences of Shandyesque digression, of amusement and anecdote, tedium and incident, is like inviting all the people you might ever meet in the world ever, and have them talking at you simultaneously while the television plays in the distance over a car radio and a roomful of logorrheics sponsored to speak only in Henry James sentences. Being locked inside this writer’s novel is like being tied to a Pollock canvas and cannoned with four pools of paint while Barthes discusses the semiotics of semantics and the sublime vicissitudes of sandwiches, then shoves your melted brain into a tank of formaldehyde while the New Yorker staff pace the floor with their wine and their goatees and their smug little smirks and ask: “But is it art?”

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. This is told as a monologue from a woman staying at some sort of sanitorium. Her fellow residents are mostly described in terms of some character or physical attribute that isn't necessarily complimentary (inquisitive woman, tall balding man, disconsolate woman etc)

Our narrator is obsessed by her sensitive skin and with skin complaints geberae. Is she herself sensitive also? She's certainly very critical.

Mostly fun inhabiting her mind and thoughts with some laughs along the way

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

very satisfying for the rambling neurotic novel fan

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This seriously neurotic woman’s first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative without a plot could have been unbearable (I’m stuck in her mind, let me out!), but I found it very intelligent, fresh, and enjoyable. There is something satisfyingly realistic about the way Tillman presents the narrator's thinking process and her thoughts (realism is not generally what I'm looking for). And she handles repetition very well, too.

Most of all, I was impressed with Tillman’s intelligence and her control of long sentences that contain thoughts that relate only in the protagonist's mind. There is something special here that I can’t describe: an odd combination of taste, imagination, guts, and artistry.

For me, the novel flagged a bit toward the end (possibly because something actually happens), but at times I found the narrative brilliant and beautiful, and I learned to skim through the obsessive details about skin.

[Reese · Rating 4 out of 5]

imagine...holden caufield as a brilliant, multi-faceted, middle-aged white woman. kind of. you're in her head the entire time as she ponders and deconstructs everything she encounters, and may often find yourself floored by her profound, common sense observations. on the other hand, you may often find yourself begging her to shut up...but that's just part of the Tillman experience.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won't reiterate the specifics of other, better reviews but instead suggest folks google this book and check them out. I will say that this is one of the finest, most challenging, most complicated, and most intelligent books I've read in a long, long while.

[Sophia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Published in 2006 and for the first time in the UK in 2024 this novel is a stream of consciousness from a protagonist that drove me crazy. She's neurotic, sour, and dense. And maybe that’s the point but I didn’t find it interesting.

As far as stream of conciousness novels go, read Ducks, Newburyport.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first became interested in American Genius when I learned that it's considered by at least one list as one of the best novels of the century so far. I was intrigued by cover blurbs comparing it to Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rainbow. Heavy company, those titles. What I thought it most resembled was a brilliant novel by Joseph Heller called Something Happened, and the more recent David Markson novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress. Or maybe a work by Samuel Beckett but with much less despair. It's what I call an interior novel, a mostly inner monologue by someone who's experiencing an isolation of some kind, either voluntary or preferential, or an institutionalization. Late in the novel we learn Helen's name, but I remained unsure about the type of community she's in. It's not a prison or asylum because she has quite a bit of freedom to come and go. We don't learn very much about Helen, either, in this plotless novel, though some things are slowly revealed. She was once a history professor, for instance. But she talks more about the known facts of history than about the ideas. Leslie Van Houten, the Charles Manson acolyte, is a theme that Helen thinks of as history. Napoleon is frequently mentioned, too, and Kafka. A lot can be brought up in 292 pages of meditative prose. Indeed, encyclopedic is one of the tags assigned to the novel. Maybe. Many things are mentioned but none are developed as essential struts holding up the edifice of the fiction. Such obsessions as Kafka, skin and its diseases, Van Houten, cats and dogs, chairs and fabric, her mother, the Polish lady who gives her facials at a spa keep recurring so that the repetitions seem to be a symptom of hysteria. More hysteria than thematic development. Yet we gradually have to decide she's not insane. Unsettled, I guess, is a more generous description. I say this while at the same time remembering the 2 epigraphs preceding the novel, one by John F Kennedy about the unfairness of life for people who are sick, and one by William James about the nature of reality. Near the end the characters around Helen begin to take on shape and personality, as if emerging from her mental fog into recognition. There's even a little dialogue and some narrative movement. For me, by allowing her to become more involved with others around her and come out into the open, to venture outside her brooding preoccupations, took some punch away from the novel and made it less interesting. Comedy? Well, I didn't laugh. I took it all seriously, though not as seriously as Heller or Markson.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

god this book is a drag. not even gonna bother getting past, like, p.50. apparently it gets "good" around p. 200, which for a 291-page novel, is ludicrous. "just let your resistance down and let it wash over you."

no thanks. sometimes well-composed shit sucks and is incredibly irritating to read. too bad, because there are some good ideas present in the book. i'm just not willing to sift through piles of dung for a few grains of gold.

on the plus side, reading this got me thinking more about why i may like/dislike particular objects of art. as a proponent of the "leave 'em wanting more" school of composition, Tillman's style here is so maximal (with it's run-on sentences full of tangential information) that i was completely dulled by the repetition. it takes something special to so fully disengage me and this accomplished that feat.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I even liked the parts I didn't like

[Daniel Blok · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, that is to say my edition of it, since there may be different editions around, with various covers, I wouldn’t now about this, has a striking cover, a detail of a painting by Hilary Harkness, an artist I don’t know, though perhaps I should know her, or about her, since she may be famous or well-known, and its title is written in bright orange letters, or perhaps the colour is neon or day-glo, I have no idea what to call it, and is divided in two parts, with the result that on the front it says American Genius and on the back A Comedy, together forming the complete title, which confused me since I see no reason to split a novel’s title, but this is probably something that’s decided by the publisher and the author must be ok with it.
The novel I picked on a whim in a bookstore, small and cosey and a store I, as a rule, do not frequent, though I love visiting bookstores, they make me feel relaxed and at home, especially second-hand bookshops, but this particular store only sells new books, like this one, though it was not very expensive, luckily, and perhaps the blurb helped convincing me to buy it, since it was by George Saunders, whose books I hold in high esteem, but which are in a league of their own, clearly, not like this novel, which I did not even finish, something I rarely do, not finishing I mean.
It was not until I had read more than half of American Genius, A Comedy that I decided not to continue reading, which had little to do with the book’s style, or the writing itself, which is well done and sometimes even quite beautiful, the narrative voice is really quite distinct and unique, but also quite demanding of the reader because this narrator, a nameless, middle-aged woman who did not arouse much sympathy with me, though I did feel sorry for her sometimes, but more often I wanted her to shut up because she annoyed me, strings sentence after sentence after sentence, by associating thoughts and memories and events, though the book is not very eventful, to be honest, nothing much happens in the way of plot, there's no development and there are endless digressions which sometimes may work very well in a novel but not in this one, at least for me, though I do absolutely love Ducks, Newburyport, which on the surface may seem like a similar book but really is not.
So I’m relieved I decided not to finish this book, though other people may enjoy it tremendously, and may not understand this long rant, which I tried to write, just for fun, in the manner of this novel, with its rambling pace, but which may not have worked out as I planned it, for I’m not a real writer, obviously, but sometimes you just have to try and do what your instinct tells you to.

[Bridget Bonaparte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ach a disappointment. Tbh it feels like a worse Ducks, Newburyport though I guess it’s more accessible. It had its moments but mostly I was bored and it felt like a waste of a (reading) week

[Fukiko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quotability without captivation

American Genius is interesting in that it is extremely quotable — my copy is littered with highlights, small nuggets of brilliance or wisdom — but not particularly captivating. If there is a plot, it doesn’t really kick into gear until the last third or even quarter of the book, by which point it feels like a conciliatory pat on the head for making it that far. It functions best as a sort of Sei Shonagon-esque chronicle of poignancies, rather than as a linear novel. For a similar reason, it’s by no means a page-turner; I could usually only focus on ten pages or so per sitting, as the thicket of run-on sentences and tangents required a level of concentration not generally needed for recreational reading. Again, I now have pages worth of quotes from it; it’s beautifully-conceived; it’s not, however, flawlessly executed. Though perhaps that was the point?

[Brian Grover · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book wasn't terrible - it was just incredibly boring. It's a story told in the first person by a woman in her late 50s or early 60s who's living at some sort of scholarly retreat, and it's basically 350 pages of her non-stop stream of consciousness. The sentences are pretty dense, and I guess her riffing on Eames chairs and the Manson family wasn't very interesting to me, because I genuinely struggled to read further than ten pages at a time (sometimes could only manage a page or two) before falling asleep with the book in my hands. In that sense it's kind of a magical sleep aid, in fact. If this hadn't been my only option for several hours when I flew out to Jackson Hole in October 2019, I don't think I'd have put a big enough dent in it to consider myself invested enough to keep going, but even with a 70 page or so down payment, I probably finished 15-20 books between the day I started this and the day I finished it (in January of the following year).

[Morgan Buswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

In terms of a review, there's no denying that this is a fantastic read. Tillman's prose takes us through a journey that sort of investigates what it means to live, to remember who we are. I think it takes on a bit more than it can chew, there are some interesting motifs that appear throughout, foremost the idea of objects and things that we collate around us and position as a means to identify and place ourselves in the world. Time is a strange concept in this book, and there's a dreamlike quality to the prose that sometimes makes Helen, the narrator, easy to identify with and to like, but it is difficult to fully understand some of the characters, which are ,I think, intentionally left mysterious but I can't help but wish that there was more to them. If anything it's a poignant tale of the transience and impermanence of the human condition, and the difficulties we often have relating to and understanding what strange, pernickity, creatures of habit we all are at heart.

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

lol perfect book. For a while I've been interested in Tillman's relationship to and analysis of Warhol, and though attaching any emphasis onto the latter may be a stretch, what seems shared between the two is an interest in creating peculiar (even epic) frames for people's rigid and narrow capacities for change.

[Richard Chiem · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorite novels

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about skin. Like, as a metaphor for everything. Thick skin, sensitive skin, scared skin, infected skin, it's all relevant and meaningful here, in this very very impressive meditation.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you liked “the magic mountain” then you will probably like this book

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book avidly, and its introversion, constructed of elastic sentences smoothly stretched to contain multitudes, was engrossing. I read it as being a smaller, more compact version of Mann's "Magic Mountain", where the first-person narrator's prolonged stay at a health retreat allows her to focus on the minutiae of her thoughts and the actions and quirks of sojourners. As with Mann's novel, there is no sense of imminence, and the sabbatical from the world feels permanent, though the narrator, like Castorp, does at the end depart and return to the tumult of the real world. In Tillman's case, the tumult is not a world war but the care of her cat and her waning, aged mother.

In American Genius, predominant themes are skin, fabrics, furniture, and history, and all of these weave in and out of the narrator's thoughts, even as she engages with others. I suspect it's a testament more to my fading mentation than Tillman's narrative abilities that I can't recall specifics, even after only a few weeks (and several books since)...

[Regan · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Josh]

But I'm stubborn, my mother is stubborn, many people are, no one likes to apologize, no one likes to listen, no one wants to be wrong, yet everyone is and has been, but few people will admit they are wrong and will rarely admit their errors or their farts, in public or in private. People need to be protected from others, who may hurt them, as I need to be protected, but I don't listen to everyone, though I'm a good listener, and I'm curious, though curiosity killed the cat, my mother would say, but she had the cat killed.

Abandoned at 45%. Many good observations and ways of describing things, occasionally quite funny, but dense and repetitive and interminable. I understand that this is the point, but life is too short.

[Jiv Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

the comments about it being a neurotic novel are pretty accurate. i think a lot of people would hate this novel, but after finishing it (and getting to the closing act, which is worth the slog through the weaker portion of the novel through (180pg-240pg)) it turns into a surprisingly cohesive tale about being American — existing as an American, whether dead or alive — and how that feeling can take someone over / let someone go off the edge.

however, the ending answers how to avoid that edge, or at least attempts to.

i thought it was good — i wish there was a 4.5 star review option, given the weakness of one portion of the book (as noted above) — but I did love whole narrative/the neuroticism/the characters (the Count and the Turk and Helen all being quite entertaining).

thnx

[Gurldoggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lengthy tour through the rambling consciousness of a woman of letters, hiding from her life at an obscure retreat center/health spa. The story is deliberately cryptic - all characters and places are nameless, and the plot, such as it is, takes place almost exclusively inside the head of our narrator. Long digressions on abstruse subjects take the place of development. It’s not exactly an entertaining read, but there’s something enjoyable about getting lost Beckett-like in patterns of language that reveal a narrator’s innermost thoughts, nakedly expose her most personal frailties.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This post modern novel in which plot isn’t the point can be hard to read, but I found myself lulled into the endless inner dialogue of our protagonist as she grapples with what is inner and outer, death and memory, America and connection. I don’t think I need to read a ton in this genre, but I enjoyed it.

[Scout · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't finish

[Will Grofic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book on and off for a decade. It was worth it. I’ll miss the ramblings but at least won’t feel itchy anymore after reading it.

[Emily Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars because I feel like I developed Stockholm syndrome by the end of it

[Sioned Heal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love a constant stream of consciousness book. Clever how it maintained mystery throughout. Think I need a bit more story line to keep me coming back tho. Took me ages... altho most books do.

[Alexia Ureña · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proved to me you can write like that
You can do anything and say everything