American Genius: A Comedy(2006)

Lynne Tillman

This is what we'd get if Jane Austen were writing in 21st century America—a book that expands the possibilities of the national novel and of the female protagonist. Tillman brings into being a microcosm of American democracy, a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod, in which competing values—rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor—compete with one another through a hilarious narrative, cycling through skin disease, chair design, Manifest Destiny—folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating, in Wagnerian fashion, in a supernatural event, offering escape, transcendence, or perhaps nothing