Content note: this novel deals with suicide and depression.
Do not let the title fool you. The cover is breezy, the setting is a grand hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, and the premise sounds like it belongs on a summer reading list beside a glass of something cold. Then you get thirty pages in and realise Alison Espach has done something far more interesting than the packaging suggests. The Wedding People is a book about being at rock bottom dressed up as a book about a wedding, and the gap between those two things is where all the real work happens.
Phoebe Stone
She arrives at the Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, carrying no luggage. Everyone in the lobby assumes she is one of the wedding guests. She is not. Phoebe is a recently divorced college professor who has lost her marriage, her sense of herself, her belief in the version of the future she had been building for years. She came to Newport alone because she had dreamed of coming with her husband and now her husband is gone and she decided to come anyway, one last time, one last indulgence.
What follows when Phoebe meets the bride Lila is one of the stranger, funnier, more unexpectedly moving literary friendships in recent fiction. Lila is everything Phoebe is not at this moment: certain, loud, demanding, impossibly organised about every detail of a wedding she has been planning with obsessive precision. She refuses to leave Phoebe alone. Phoebe refuses to be helped. The friction between these two positions is where the novel finds its comic register, and Espach is genuinely funny in those scenes, the kind of funny that arrives mid-sentence and catches you off guard.
What Espach is attempting here is difficult. She is writing about depression, grief, infertility, the end of a marriage, in a register that is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and she manages it more often than not. The humour does not minimise the darkness. It coexists with it, which is how people actually experience these things. You laugh at the wrong moments. You find something absurd in your own suffering. Espach understands this and uses it, and the result is a novel that feels emotionally true in a way that a more tonally consistent book about the same material might not.
Phoebe as a character is drawn with real generosity. She is not performing her pain for the reader. She is living in it, making bad decisions from inside it, occasionally startling herself with moments of feeling that she thought she had lost access to. She is also a literature professor, which Espach uses to give the novel a self-aware quality without tipping into smugness. Phoebe thinks about stories. She knows she is in one. She is not sure yet what kind.
The novel's middle section is where it tests your patience. The flashbacks to Phoebe's marriage with Matt are necessary and some of them are beautifully written, but there are too many of them and they arrive too frequently, pulling you back from the forward momentum of the hotel just as the present-tense story is getting most interesting. A few of those scenes could have been compressed without losing anything essential, and the novel would have moved more cleanly for it.
There is also a stretch around the midpoint where the wedding-party setting, which is one of the book's greatest assets, starts to feel like it is being used for texture rather than purpose. The peripheral wedding guests who populate the hotel are vivid in flashes but ultimately do not earn the space they occupy. Lila and Phoebe are interesting enough to carry the whole novel on their own. When the book wanders away from them it loses something.
Newport in summer, the Cornwall Inn, the particular social world of a million-dollar six-day wedding, these are rendered with a specificity that makes them feel real rather than decorative. Espach knows this world well enough to find its absurdities without sneering at it. Lila's obsession with her wedding is played for comedy but also for something more sympathetic, a person trying to build a perfect thing because the world has not been kind enough to give her a perfect thing naturally. The setting mirrors Phoebe in that way. Both women are trying to make something beautiful out of circumstances that have handed them significant pain.
The Wedding People is funnier than most literary fiction allows itself to be, more painful than most commercial fiction dares to go, and the friendship at its centre is drawn with enough complexity that it feels earned rather than convenient. Espach does not tie things up in ways that feel dishonest to the material. She trusts her characters enough to let them arrive somewhere real rather than somewhere tidy.
The structural problems are real and they matter. But they do not undo the warmth and the honesty of what Espach has built. This is a book that understands how people actually survive bad years, not through revelation or resolution but through the small, accidental, sometimes ridiculous interventions of other people arriving at exactly the wrong moment and refusing to leave.
Rating: ★★★★ 4 / 5 stars
For readers drawn to: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, I May Destroy You as a tonal reference, A Little Life for the emotional register at a much lighter scale, anyone who has ever found themselves laughing at something they had no business laughing at.