The devastating effects of bigamy: Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones, reviewed

Conservative estimates place the number of those in America with more than one spouse as up to 100,000, but the figure is much higher. Bigamy, which is outlawed in 50 states, takes place in secret, with only a handful of people knowing about it. ‘It’s a shame that there isn’t a true name for a woman like my mother Gwendolyn,’ says Dana Lynn Yarboro, the ‘other’ daughter of her father’s ‘other’ wife, in Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow, a novel that examines the multitudinous effects of bigamy — how it can extend families, break them, confuse identity and damage lives.

‘There are other terms I know,’ Dana continues.‘When she is tipsy, angry or sad, Mother uses them to describe herself: concubine, whore, mistress, consort.’ Dana herself, the narrator of the first half of this book, is known as the ‘secret’ daughter or ‘outside child’. Chaurisse, who doesn’t know that Dana exists, is their father James’s ‘real’ daughter — the one he ‘loves in public’.

Last year Jones won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for American Marriage. Her latest novel also studies a way of loving, and of being a family, that doesn’t fit the confines that American society allows or expects: ‘The six of us were hog-tied, fastened in place by different knots’ — an allusion to being trapped, to violence and to the suffering that Dana especially experiences as a result of her father’s bigamy. She isn’t allowed to attend the same courses, schools or colleges as her oblivious sister, who gets first pick; she obsesses over the choices Chaurisse makes, which inevitably limit her own; she can’t contact her grandmother or even include her father in the portrait of her family she draws at kindergarten — a small but deeply sad moment.