The Wedding People by Alison Espach: A Beautiful Disaster Without the Beauty (Review)

THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Author: Alison Espach

Series: N/A
Source: Purchased at Libro.fm
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Publication Date: July 30, 2024

Overall Rating:
Diversity Rating:
Representation: n/a

Summary:

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help us start anew.

It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn't here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she's dreamt of coming for years - she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan - which makes it that much more surprising when the women can't stop confiding in each other.

In turns uproariously, absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined - and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

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Content Warning: violence and murder (including graphic descriptions of dead bodies and murder scenes), needles, torture, physical abuse, war, aftermath of war, references to PTSD and trauma, death of a parent, religious oppression, class-based discrimination, grief, survivor's guilt, blood, injury, gaslighting, emotional manipulation, neglectful parent, militarized state violence, alcohol consumption

This was SO painful to get through. There’s no sugar-coating it — The Wedding People by Alison Espach is one of the most joyless reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. And not because it’s dealing with deep, heavy, life-shattering themes (it tries to, and fails), but because it is full of characters I loathed, meandering plotlines that go nowhere, and a tone that feels like being stuck in an endless, awkward brunch where everyone thinks they’re the smartest person in the room — and they’re all wrong.

The premise had promise: a woman checks into a Connecticut hotel to kill herself and ends up tangled in the chaos of multiple weddings and their dramatic guests. That could’ve been a messy, heartfelt, witty literary soap opera. Instead, it’s a slow-motion car crash of overwritten introspection, self-important tangents, and absolutely zero people worth caring about.

I don’t need to like characters, but I do need them to be interesting. And unfortunately, The Wedding People is populated by emotionally stunted narcissists who mistake trauma-dumping and cryptic detachment for personality. Every time I thought I found someone with an ounce of depth, they’d turn around and be the absolute worst again. Every. Single. One.

The main character — who, honestly, I barely remember the name of because she was just that forgettable and also I read this book months ago (but I'm still so angry about it!!!) (oh, it's Phoebe, I just read the summary while adding it to this post) — spends the entire book in a fog of internal misery, passive to the point of nonexistence. The people she meets? A carousel of pretentious, self-absorbed caricatures with the emotional maturity of soap scum.

No one talks like a real person. No one grows. No one learns. It’s like they all entered this hotel with just enough backstory to justify being deeply unpleasant and never once made a decision worth rooting for.

The pacing of this book is glacial. And not in the poetic, contemplative way. In the "why am I still reading this and when will it end" kind of way. At some point, I continued just to hate read, which I so rarely do!

There’s no real momentum, no hook, no payoff. The book circles around themes of grief, identity, and reinvention, but it never commits to actually exploring them. Just vibes. Sad, soggy vibes. I kept waiting for something to happen — a revelation, a twist, even a decent conversation — and it never came. Instead, I was trapped in the literary equivalent of watching beige paint dry in a fog.

This book thinks it’s clever. And that might be the most frustrating part. The prose is trying to be poignant but lands firmly in overwritten and emotionally distant. There's a detachment in the writing that makes it impossible to connect — like watching someone cry behind a pane of glass and wondering if it's just a performance.

I genuinely don’t know who this book is for. People who want to feel bad and bored at the same time? Readers who like their fiction painfully introspective but without any actual introspection? I feel like people are going to read this and tell me I just didn't get it but nah, I got it: people suck.

I wish I had something nice to say, but the best thing I can offer is that I’m done with it. And that feels like a relief. A book about weddings should not feel like a funeral for my attention span.