Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "American Genius, A Comedy"

Lynne Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). She also publishes short stories, essays, and other non-fiction.

I asked Lynne to apply the "page 69 test" to American Genius, A Comedy. Here is what she reported:

In a way, every page of American Genius, A Comedy is representative of it until the last third of the novel, when it changes significantly. On Page 69, the narrator refers to her skin condition -- dermatographia, or skin writing -- and speaks about the importance of skin. Skin is one of the connectors in AGAC, a theme in the book: skin as barrier to the world, or indicator of your own world, like blushing, or skin is permeable, also letting the outside in, skin tells others, exposes, something you may want hidden, it can betray you. Skin contracts and expands, which is what I wanted the novel to do: to move from small events and issues, like a facial or an annoying dinner partner, to great ones, like American history, democracy, sensitivity, sex, race and racism. Kafka and his ex-fiancee, Felice, also play their part in the novel, because they're the obsession of one of the characters the narrator meets -- Contesa, a mysterious and fascinating woman. The narrator meets many such people, all cloistered together for a time in an institution of some sort.

Here is the complete text from page 69:

more humane, but when I watched the mouse squirm with pain, I realized it wasn’t, or, if Contesa has again spoken of Kafka and Felice and showed me their pictures not long before I go to bed, I dream about them, who are strangers to me, as is Contesa, relatively. She believes she knows Kafka, especially through his letters to Felice, though she can’t know Felice that way, her letters to Kafka aren’t extant, but still it is by her faith in their intellectual and spiritual connection that they invade my unconscious world. Felice’s pleasant, homely face was oily and dry in patches, even scaly, and around her nostrils an irritated aureole of pimples the size of pinpricks. She broke out in welts, red hives on her back and thighs, just as she was about to meet Kafka, who looked like the tall balding man, but was wearing a frayed black business suit. Felice, like the disconsolate woman, but much stouter, stood at the door to the cafe discreetly rubbing her thigh. Suddenly she was terribly skinny, suddenly, and her digestion was poor, so there was a terrible smell coming from her mouth, like the breath of the demanding man, she wasn’t a vegetarian like Kafka, and horrified she ran away and fell down. She tore the skin on her leg, and the ragged wound bled furiously, so in my dream I became dizzy and nauseated. Her skin inadequately protected her, it now flaked like snow on her cheeks, as dry as mine. But skin is the agent of the body that protects its other organs, by covering them, and by being an information station that allows the other organs, my doctor explained patiently, to adjust to changes in the outer environment. My condition, dermatographia or dermatographism, skin writing, is not life-threatening, but because of it my skin tingles, pulses, and itches, and if I were to stroke my arm with a fingernail, white lines would surface and be visible for at least fifteen minutes, as my skin releases histamines, which produce swelling, and this occurs in about ten percent of the population, but the swelling is not a hive, since in dermatographia only raised lines surface, which resemble writing on the skin. My dermatologist says friends could leave messages on my back, but they’d fade quickly. The skin is a barrier against dehydration; it can lower body temperature by the increased evaporation of sweat; it synthesizes keratin, a flexible, durable, and resistant protein.

Many thanks to Lynne for the input.

Read an excerpt from American Genius, A Comedy. There is another excerpt at the publisher's site.

Among the praise for Lynne Tillman and American Genius:

"Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine--not because I admire her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel."
—Jonathan Safran Foer

"Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman."
—Edmund White

"Lynne Tillman's previous novel, No Lease on Life (1998), earned great recognition from the NY Times and the National Book Critics Circle, and [American Genius] ... is worthy of equal or greater praise."
—Matt Borondy

"Magnificently, Lynne Tillman makes skin do what Herman Melville made boats do--contain multitudes. American Genius, though less macho, belongs in the same class as Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rainbow: encyclopedic novels about America and the world. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, this book will also contradict anything anyone can say about it."
—Matthew Sharpe, author of The Sleeping Father

“It's a kind of ‘Tristram Shandy’ for our time, if Tristram were American, and institutionalized. The narrative voice is manic, neurotic, self-generative, very smart, loopy, deeply vulnerable, closely (obsessively) observant, narcissistic, and eminently contemporary. It is also very funny. This voice dodges, it annotates, it refuses to tell, it digresses. And out of this voice, as in an elaborate time-lapse photograph, a world is made, a world like ours: flawed, beautiful, sacred, insane.”
—George Saunders

In her review of American Genius for Slate, Jessica Winter discussed the "sly brilliance" of Lynne Tillman.

Listen to Michael Silverblatt's 2006 interview with Lynne.