American Genius, A Comedy

A former historian is spending time in a residential home – but is it a mental institute, a spa, or an artist’s colony?

In hypnotic and digressive prose, Tillman’s narrator looks at her life through a fractured lens 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.

Attempting to tell the story of her life, her reveries and reminiscences are constantly interrupted by the presence of her fellow residents, each with their own obsessions and neuroses. In this masterful novel, now available in the UK for the first time, Lynne Tillman creates a microcosm of American life. American Genius, A Comedy reinvents the modernist novel for our distracted era – it is the tale of a consciousness that is at once expansive and exacting and utterly compelling.