W.H. Auden supposedly said about responses to books, “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.“

Well, I hate to disagree with Mr. Auden, and I do think that those are all valid responses, but there are many others. What about the book that’s well-written in parts, but the parts don’t fuse into a whole? What about the response that this book is entertaining, not trash, but also not great or memorable literature? What about “this book is good, but it has some serious flaws, so I’m ambivalent?” I could think of many, many more nuanced responses to a piece of literature, and my evaluation of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage falls somewhere between the cracks of Mr. Auden’s five verdicts.

Yes, the book is well written. Jones has a feel for the emotional tone and complexity of family and marriage relationships, and she writes about those differing emotional reactions and decisions with insight and understanding. However, the depiction of black men in particular plays into stereotypes that have been damaging in the past and that are sill perpetuated today: namely the idea that black men are oversexed, sexually promiscuous, and dangerous. The husband in our American marriage is promiscuous before marriage and unfaithful after the wedding. But he nevertheless expects the wife to be faithful and committed to him while he is wrongfully imprisoned for five years on a rape charge. This husband would never, never commit rape, but he doesn’t mind sleeping around. And he expects his marriage to withstand that kind of betrayal.

Do men really think like this? Maybe some do. But why would the author portray her “American marriage” as inconstant and unsteady from the beginning if the purpose of the novel is to examine that marriage’s strength when placed under the pressure of injustice and false imprisonment? If I wanted to write about a bad marriage where the guy is unfaithful from the get-go, then all the prison stuff would be superfluous. Or vice-versa.

I wanted to like and to learn from this novel, but in the end I found it disappointing. It just didn’t live up to the hype. However, I did like the ending. One of the main characters was somewhat redeemed in my eyes at the very end of the book.

Final verdict: Try it if you like to be up on the latest (or near-latest) culturally relevant American novels, but don’t expect too much. And skip over the sex scenes if you don’t like that kind of descriptive passage. Or just skip it.