Alison Espach’s latest novel, “The Wedding People,” unfolds during the week-long wedding celebration for Lila, a young heiress, and Gary, a widowed doctor who treated Lila’s father for cancer before his death.
Lila has planned an absolutely extravagant wedding to honor her father’s last wish for her to be married. She is determined that nothing can go wrong (but we all know something always goes wrong at a wedding). Weddings are naturally filled with drama. The rich-people-have-a-wedding plot is not a new device, but “The Wedding People” offers something different.
First of all, our narrator, Phoebe, isn’t actually part of the wedding at all.
Phoebe’s life is in shambles. She is an academic whose research, ironically, focuses on British marriage plot novels, but she can’t manage to finish the book she’s been working on for years, and has thus been passed over for a tenure-track position at the university where she teaches. At the same time, her husband has received his department’s highest honor, and he has left her for another woman.
On top of it all, Phoebe’s beloved cat has just died. Phoebe decides she is done with this life; she’s going to check into a fancy hotel that she’s always dreamed of visiting in glitzy, old-money Newport, Rhode Island, have a spa day, order room service, finish things off with the entire bottle of her dead cat’s painkillers and never wake up again.
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As Phoebe arrives at the hotel, she notices that everyone in the lobby seems to know each other — and there are way too many Uncle Jims milling around. She realizes that they’re all here for a wedding, and she has booked the lone vacant room in the hotel. Phoebe ends up stuck in the elevator with the bride, Lila, who is trying to determine why this stranger is at her wedding.
In this rare moment when Lila can let her guard down with someone who doesn’t know her, they share a surprisingly frank and vulnerable conversation. Phoebe matter-of-factly states that she’s planning to kill herself and Lila vehemently protests: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” Lila refuses to let Phoebe’s planned suicide disrupt her carefully planned, extravagant event, so she draws Phoebe into the wedding festivities, eventually even making her a temporary maid of honor.
The novel highlights how unplanned connections can profoundly change the course of our lives. Through her interactions with the wedding guests, specifically Lila and Gary and Gary’s daughter Juice, Phoebe finds unexpected support and connection, and she gains the courage to confront her own pain and begins to take a long hard look at her life and make some different choices.
While the premise might sound sad at first, this novel is so funny and so endearing. It is filled with all kinds of playful, comedic bits — awkward encounters, fumbled events and silly unnecessary luxuries — a nod to the classic novel-of-manners wedding plots from classic British writers like Jane Austen. These details add levity to the heaviness of Phoebe’s inner monologue.
“The Wedding People” balances a dark premise with absurdly funny and devastatingly tender moments, creating a unique and emotional reading experience — humorous, poignant and always life-affirming.
• Alicia McClintic is a book seller at Inklings Bookshop. She and other Inklings staffers review books in this space every week.