TILLMAN, Lynne
American Genius, A Comedy

A former historian is spending time in a residential home – but is it an artist’s retreat, a spa, or a psychiatric hospital?

In hypnotic and digressive prose, Tillman’s narrator spins tales of her life while ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, the death of a pet, family trauma, loneliness – and above all, skin and the meaning of “sensitivity” in contemporary society. Meanwhile, these reveries and reminiscences are constantly interrupted by the presence of her fellow residents, each with their own obsessions and neuroses.

In this masterful novel, first published in 2006, Tillman fashions nothing less than a microcosm of troubled American democracy. American Genius, A Comedy reinvents the modernist novel for our distracted and hypermediated era – it is the tale of a consciousness that is expansive and exacting and utterly compelling. [publishers’ note]

“A masterpiece.”
—Harry Mathews

Cover: detail from Woman with the Hat (2011) by Hilary Harkness.

Published by Peninsula Press, 2024
Literature