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morgan_buswell's review
4.0
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.
stewarthome's review
5.0
"American Genius" is a beautiful book. incredibly well written, it draws you in and throws you out again, with deftly handled repetition forcing the text to hover somewhere between poetry and prose. The narrator is Helen, and Helen was the name of the "missing" character in Tillman's third novel "Cast In Doubt". In "Cast In Doubt", Helen is a young woman who appears to represent romanticism or post-modernism; while the 'main' 'character' Horace, who is searching for Helen (as a way of searching for himself and his 'other') is an archetype of classicism or modernism. When Horace acquires Helen's diary, and he fails to recognise his post-modern "romantic" other, his classical cum modernist facade simultaneously crumbles. Helen in "American Genius" appears to be both a middle-aged version of Helen from "Cast In Doubt" and a fictional version of the author Lynne Tillman. The narrator is living in an institution but exactly why is never made clear, and although she is surrounded by curious personalities, she tends to avoid company. Helen likes to speculate about others, to observe them, but is wary of getting too involved. She tells us about her life and her outlook on life, and in doing so obsessively returns to subjects such as her senile mother, the cat and dog her mother gave away, her father's textile business, the Polish woman who gives her facials, skin and skin complaints, American history, Leslie Van Houten and the Manson murders. These repetitions are humorous and as such serve to 'deconstruct' the so called "Great American Novel", which this book parodies and undermines. If Henry James was a theoretically informed post-modernist (and had thus carefully avoided a stance of po-mo "extremism" precisely because "extremism" is relational and not rational), then this book would serve to ventriloquise him. Helen, ventriloquising Tillman, puts it this way: "I'm not willing to doubt everything all the time, because then doubt isn't doubt, but a form of certainty..." (page 236).
Read the full review here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sex/tillman.htm
Read the full review here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sex/tillman.htm
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