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‘American Genius: A Comedy’ by Lynne Tillman

Soft Skull Press, $15, 320 pages

By Kate Rockwood
Published: January 4th, 2006 | 1:00pm

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Skin may be the body’s largest organ, but it takes on epic proportions in Lynne Tillman’s latest novel, American Genius: A Comedy, a dazzling and often dizzying meditation on memory and meaningful connection. Lingering in a facility never clearly defined (it emerges as something between a New Age spa and a mental health hospital), the main character, whose name we eventually learn is Helen, obsesses over every aspect of her problematic epidermis: psoriasis, moisturizers, alopecia, waxing, scars, vermiculations, facials, the way this or that cloth feels against her sensitive skin. Throughout the novel, skin contains a multiplicity of meanings and remains one of the strongest metaphors, reminding us that the experiences contained beneath the skin are, like the surface of skin itself, at once endlessly vulnerable and impossible to articulate.

And indeed the sensitivity that Helen complains of with her skin is interrupted with painfully searing memories of her father and brother, who have both died, and her troublesome mother who now suffers dementia and is in need of care. Crisscrossing between inner and outer realms, the pain of physical touch against too-sensitive skin is jutxtaposed against the painful residue of emotional contact. How fitting that the family business is one of textiles, with Helen poring over her own fetishized memories of her father’s factory and the endless bolts of fabric that would be stretched taut and meticulously examined for any imperfections.

Almost entirely bereft of dialogue, American Genius is told through the looping, loping internal thoughts of Helen, a rushing, manic monologue detailing her predetermined days in the facility, compressed tight against her memories. Many of the sentences are staggering in length and beg a second reading, each clause an organic or causal outgrowth of the one before (“People need to be protected from others, who may hurt them, as I need to be protected, but I don’t listen to everyone, though I’m a good listener, and I’m curious, though curiosity killed the cat, my mother would say, but she had the cat killed.”).

Tillman magnificently reveals the inner depths of her character by holding a mirror to her character’s own compulsion toward overlapping repetition and her tendency to relegate her immediate surroundings to the periphery. It’s a difficult task that at times makes for a demanding read, as the voice darts, digresses and evades. But when Helen climbs into her cosmetician’s chair in the last passage of the novel — with “the Polish woman” having been replaced during Helen’s stay in the facility with a new woman who offers a strange though gentle touch — the reader has taken each wringing emotional detour and digression alongside Helen, from inside Helen, and feels the full release of being in someone else’s care.