Published in 2024, this is by Alison Espach.

It flitted across my horizon last year when it starred on Becca Freeman's Top Books of 2024. It seems it rapidly propelled itself onto significant American book club lists, and into the ranks of the New York Times bestsellers.

But what really made me take notice was the endorsement by Kate Jones. I love her commentary on Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, and many other women writers, so I thought she could be relied on to know what she's talking about.



The novel is set just after the covid pandemic, and its timeline runs from Tuesday to Monday. Which is how long it takes to stage a luxury wedding at a 19th-century luxury hotel in Newport, Rhode Island...

The idea of being at a wedding for that length of time fills me with absolute horror, and I guess I never quite got over the feeling that this book was mostly set on a planet that is utterly unfamiliar to me.

However, the lead protagonist, Phoebe Stone, is very likeable. She and her husband, Matt, have just split up. Actually, putting it that way makes it sound too mutual. What happened is that Matt left Phoebe for Mia.

The marriage has been struggling a bit. Fertility treatment has not worked, and Phoebe's miscarriage felt like the demise of her last hope. But they've also just grown away from each other... They're both university teachers, but he is tenured and she is not, so there's a constant twinge of jealousy and resentment there. He wins an award, for example, but adjuncts aren't eligible for awards, and when the pair are invited for dinner, they sit with "people just like her husband", ie, "people with real jobs". She's aware that she doesn't have his charisma. Plus, she's not getting anywhere with her book, and has published only one article in the last 10 years (believe me, these things REALLY matter).

And all this weighs on a psychological foundation that was not robust in the first place. Phoebe's mother died while giving birth to her, and her father never really recovered. She often feels she has inherited a sadness from him, in the way you might inherit a blood disease. It's a lonely childhood. She'd always tried to be good. Tried to be quiet. And somewhere along the way she has just obliterated herself: "When did Phoebe being good become Phoebe being nothing?"


I've never been to New England, but no coast could be more beautiful than Corsica's. This is Calvi...

We don't learn all that about Phoebe in one big dump. But when we first meet her, we quickly find out that her purpose in the luxury room the hotel has named The Roaring Twenties is not to attend the wedding. As she blurts out to the bride, when she meets her in the lift: "I'm here to kill myself." Not a spoiler, by the way. We're only 4 per cent into the book when this is announced. It's also not a spoiler to say she doesn't. Kill herself, that is. After all, we do have another 96 per cent to get through...

Lila, the bride, is understandably put out. She's spent a lot of money on this weddding. A lot as in a million dollars... I KNOW... That is completely insane. But the money is from her late father. He became ill, and it was his dying wish to see her married. She'd met Gary, and they'd got engaged. And then Dad died. Oh, and then there was a pandemic for two years. But now the Show Is On...

So the fact that Phoebe is there at all is the kind of annoying anomaly that a million dollars should have prevented. That this uninvited guest is planning something so dramatic and tragic, something that's truly the ultimate in bad omens, just can't be contemplated.

Lila is used to getting her own way, but she's now up against someone who has nothing to lose...

For various reasons, the really bad thing doesn't happen. And as the narrative moves forward, these characters gradually start to change places. Inoffensive Phoebe becomes the capable matron of honour, and the voice of honesty as far as Lila is concerned. Meanwhile, the assertiveness that Lila shows around Phoebe starts to melt away when she's in the presence of the "wedding people": Her rather overbearing mother, her luke-warm bridesmaids, the loose-cannon best man, the snarky sister of the groom's late first wife, and the resentful daughter who's the permanent reminder of the great tragedy of this previous marriage... They're all hard to handle.

And things get even more complex when both Phoebe and Lila start to suspect that the bride and groom aren't right for each other.

I'll divulge no more about that, because part of the book's charm is that you do want to know the ending. All I'll say is that the conclusion is managed quite well, hitting a sweet spot between the inappropriately tragic and the unutterably cheesy, and leaving lots of doors open. Maybe there'll be a sequel??



***

Pluses

1. This book is very, very funny... I'll just quote a couple of sections, by way of illustration:

At university, Phoebe bumps into Mia, her husband's new partner. Mia is on her knees in front of the photocopier, fixing a paper jam. There is a bland exchange. "Then Mia added, 'I’m sorry, this will only take a minute,' and it made Phoebe so angry. Because a paper jam always took longer than a minute. Phoebe knew this. Mia knew this. Mia started opening up all the drawers the machine told her to open, but even then, Mia couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know where drawer five was, and this is when Phoebe normally would have helped her look for drawer five, but she refused."

And the conversation between Phoebe and Gary (whom she does not know, at that point, to be the bridegroom) about her (now aborted) suicide plan is hilarious:

"May I ask how you were going to do it?"
"Professor Stone, with the cat painkillers, in the Roaring Twenties," she says.
"Cat painkillers? That’s a little..."
"Cliche?"
"No," he laughs. "Ineffective. Who uses cat painkillers?"
"Apparently people who are not setting themselves up for success."
"So, you came all this way to kill yourself with some cat’s painkillers --"
"I mean, it wasn’t just some cat. It was my cat."
"-- and get surprised by a fucking wedding?"
"Yeah," she says. "That’s why I couldn’t do it. That and the lack of room service."
"Personally, I never kill myself unless there’s room service," he says...



There's also a memorable little exchange about aging bodies (although it's not quite so funny when you remember that the people saying this are at most in their forties):

He talks about his aches and pains, and then she talks about her aches and pains, and then they talk about how much more fun it is to talk about their aches and pains than their younger selves expected it would be.
"It honestly doesn’t even feel like complaining," Gary says. "It’s just like, valid subject material."
"I agree," she says. "How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?"
"It’s truly the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to us," he says. "It’s basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you’re never allowed to acknowledge that the ship is sinking."
"And then people roll their eyes every time you mention that the ship might be sinking," Phoebe says.

2. Despite the comedy, though, it's very real about depression. Espach is obviously someone who understands the way this darkness descends. And there are also some memorable pieces of advice: "Is there one thing you feel capable of doing right now instead of crying?" (the implication is that there always is); "You do things in the moment for the person you hope you might be two years from now. You don’t kill yourself when you are sad because one day you might not be sad..."

3. The author works in academia, so those details are all spot on as well: A colleague talking "at length about the surprising importance of cheese in medieval theology"...; how it's risky "for a female scholar to be caught asking too many questions"; how Phoebe feels she'll miss the moments of connecting with students, but won't miss the pretending: "I never realized how much pretending was involved."

4. Phoebe's field is English Literature, so there are interesting little reflections on Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton (who used to live nearby).


The Whartons' summer home in Newport

Minuses

There's only one, really, which is that it does all strain credulity at times... I know... It's supposed to be a beach read... The setting is a posh wedding, where everything is larger than life... But the dialogue testifies to so much really smart, accurate observation that you want the action to have a matching realistic feel.

I guess the biggest element in the whole not-true-to-life thing is the rapidity with which Phoebe bounces back from that very low ebb.

But then we all need hope... "Becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it."

So, this was not totally my genre, but it was a very good read, and Espach is undeniably a good writer. I will be on the lookout for more.