People of a certain age who grew up in Chicago will remember what seemed like a ubiquitous television commercial for a musical no one would remember, where a woman comes out of the theater, is apparently confronted by a person with a camera asking how she liked the show and she replies, “I laughed, I cried, it was better than ‘Cats.’”
This is how I felt about Alison Espach’s new novel, “The Wedding People,” completely sincerely, no irony intended.
Espach is now three for three on delivering funny, emotionally moving explorations of the difficulties people have in being themselves. Her sharp, coming-of-age novel debut, “The Adults,” presaged the even more accomplished follow-up, “Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance.” Now we have “The Wedding People.”
In all three novels, Espach’s focal characters are experiencing a kind of disorienting and distorting sadness that seems to be the dominant feature of their lives. In “Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance,” main character Sally is dealing with a sudden tragic loss when she is a teenager that looms over her life well into adulthood. By framing the novel as a direct address from Sally to the person she has lost, we understand that Sally is both desperately sad but also utterly alive, with a cutting wit and big but sometimes inaccessible heart. It was one of my favorite books of 2022.
“The Wedding People” focuses on Phoebe Stone, a divorced adjunct English professor from St. Louis who recently found her beloved, aged cat Harry curled up deceased in her basement. Phoebe is checking into the most expensive suite of the Cornwall Inn, a coastal Rhode Island hotel. It is in the immediate aftermath of the most acute phase of the COVID pandemic, during which Phoebe’s husband Matt announced that he was in love with their mutual colleague Mia, abandoning Phoebe and Harry. Phoebe and Matt had been unable to conceive despite multiple rounds of IVF; Mia has a beautiful young child. Phoebe has not made any progress for years on her book on “Jane Eyre” that might qualify her for a better job.
She has had enough. She plans to swallow the bottle of Harry the cat’s fish-flavored pain pills and never wake again.
As strange as this may sound following that summary, “The Wedding People” is not in any way tragic. Really, it is the opposite, a story of what it means to lift oneself out of one life and into another through acts of individual will and fellowship with others.
Phoebe finds that she is the only guest at the hotel not there for what is to be a six-day wedding event, something that bothers the bride, Lila. Lila is even more bothered when she and Phoebe share the elevator to the hotel’s top floor and Phoebe confesses that she’s there to end her own life. Lila will not have her wedding ruined by a dead woman wheeled out of the hotel.
Phoebe, having moved beyond caring what anyone thinks of her, has become the perfect sounding board for Lila’s anxieties about the wedding week and her impending marriage to the dozen-years older groom, Gary, a doctor, a widower and the father of a pre-teen daughter.
The plot unfolds in simultaneously surprising and logical ways as Pheobe becomes gradually more entangled in the various wedding events, a kind of convenient receptacle for everyone’s anxieties, Lila, Gary, the best man Jim, Juice (Gary’s daughter), and others.
In the meantime, Phoebe is also starting to understand what she must do to move forward in her own life, even as her ex-husband seems to want to reinvolve himself in her life.
A highly recommended, deeply satisfying read.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “Year of Wonders” by Geraldine Brooks
2. “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck
3. “Sacred Hunger” by Barry Unsworth
4. “Père Goriot” by Honoré de Balzac
5. “Necessary Trouble” by Drew Gilpin Faust
— Iva F., Evanston
In just over 200 pages Paul Harding’s “This Other Eden” manages to tell a story that seems to span a millennium. A truly impressive feat with the intensity and scope I think Iva is looking for.
1. “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” by Adam Higginbotham
2. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus” by Douglas Adams
3. “Lady Joker” by Kaoru Takamura
4. “The Guests” by Agnes Ravatn
5. “Telluria” by Vladimir Sorokin
— Luke M., Browns Creek, Australia
Max Barry’s “Providence” is a science fiction thriller that challenges us to consider the nature of our individual realities, and I think its heady mix of ideas and suspense will work for Luke.
1. “The Rent Collector” by Camron Wright
2. “The Chinese Parrot” by Earl Derr Biggers
3. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
4. “James” by Percival Everett
5. “Blind Judgment” by Grif Stockley
— Biff G., Valparaiso, Indiana
You’ve got to be willing to follow the stories of some truly deranged characters to get into Donald Ray Pollock’s “The Devil All the Time,” but truth be told, I think it’s a good fit for Biff.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.