An American Marriage revisits a relationship dynamic as old (and as conventional) as narrative itself: the love triangle. Here, however, the exploration of the love triangle is anything but conventional.

Within the convention of the love triangle narrative, readers expect clean lines and clear logic, long suffering heroes and cartoonish villains. Jones refuses such simplification. The three characters involved in this love triangle are each earnest and sincere in their expressions of their heart. The heart here has a mind of its own and acts according to its own inscrutable logic.

There are no easy answers. Love is not an absolute. Love is not static. Loyalty is fluid and fidelity uncertain. The heart is both infallible and erring. The traditional expectations of a love story are as familiar as they are simplistic: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl marry, and boy and girl live happily ever after. Here love changes; grows; expands and contracts; and redefines itself against and amid unexpected conditions, tragic circumstances, and unavoidable events. Roy loves and loathes his wife; Celestial embraces and rejects her husband; Dre adores and smothers Celestial. That evolution does not make love any less sincere, any less immediate, or any less compelling.