American Genius : A Comedy Book

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…