Shakespeare And Company

A woman speaks to us from her room in a residential home, of some description. She reflects on her life, her family, her pets, on time—the past, present and the future—on Manson Family Alumnus Leslie Van Houyten, on History, on Death, on the Occult, on what it means to be “sensitive”…and so much more besides. All the while she is distracted, bothered, grounded, and charmed by her fellow residents, a rag-tag slice of American life if ever a novel saw oner. As you can imagine from a Lynne Tillman book—indeed, as you would hope—things get discursive, things get disrupted, things get WEIRD, very quickly. First published in 2006, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY achieves the eerie feat of growing more pertinent as time goes on. Deeply aware of the tradition of the novel—perhaps the American novel in particular—Tillman is also confident enough in the newness of her project, and mischievous enough in her approach, to subvert that tradition almost to breaking point. To echo the words of George Saunders, AMERICAN GENIUS, A C