The paradox of the past is that it is both over and always with us. In American Genius, A Comedy, Lynne Tillman’s concern is memory, though she seems mostly uninterested in easy, well-worn clichés around its unreliability. Instead of these, Tillman gives us a kind of experiment: a wild, digressive novel in which the narrator’s memory is given equal weight to, or even greater weight than, her present-day reality.

First published in 2006, and now issued for the first time in the UK, American Genius follows Helen, a historian (of course she is – someone tasked with interrogating our collective memory) approaching old age, who has taken herself to a ‘community’. The uncertainty over what this community is – artists’ retreat, health spa, psychiatric facility? – forms part of the intrigue that pulls the novel along. As Helen’s recollections become increasingly difficult to separate from the life unfolding around her, we begin to wonder whether the action of the novel is taking place in the facility or in Helen’s head. 

In an immersive monologue that streams unstoppably, like the passage of time itself, Helen cycles through subjects including the family cat that was euthanised by her mother, her Polish facialist (not to be confused with her dermatologist), the quality of the tomato soup in the canteen, her lost brother,