As an avid crime novel reader with an overly active imagination, I like to read a rom-com every now and then to keep the nightmares at bay. It is with this intent that I decided to read (or more accurately listen to) 'The Wedding People'. The usage of the word 'wedding' in the title, as well as the beautiful cover art, suggested a lighthearted but chaotic narrative, happy endings, and admiring the beauty of life in general.
In many ways, this book was exactly what I expected, but not having read the blurb beforehand, I was surprised at the dark beginning. English professor Phoebe wears her most beautiful dress and her golden wedding heels and boards a plane to the fancy Cornwall Inn in Newport, Rhode Island. There, she intends to enjoy some good alcohol, a luxurious last meal, and a handful of cat painkillers. She might as well; she has not been able to write anything for a while now, and her husband decided he was in love with her best friend. Having to watch them together at the college where they all teach is excruciating. She wonders, what does she have to lose?
When she reaches the inn, it turns out to be full of people attending the week-long wedding celebrations of Lila and Gary. In an elevator encounter with Lila, Phoebe tells her about her intentions. Later that night, Lila barges into Phoebe's hotel room and demands that she not commit suicide, because Lila's wedding must be perfect. Despite Lila's outward beauty, wealth, and entitled behaviour, it turns out all is not perfect in her world either. That night, the two women share their most guarded secrets with each other, and it is the beginning of an unlikely bond.
Phoebe does not die that night; instead, over the course of a week, she spends time with the 'wedding people', as she refers to them. Initially, perhaps she had despised some of them, but now, they are so much more than a homogeneous herd of shallow, wealthy people. It turns out she needed them, and they needed her. The story follows her as she puts the future aside for a week, only living in the now.
The book was everything I could have hoped for, joyful but not overly saccharine, optimistic while staying within a realistic frame, and very profound. The most important thing I learned from this book is that if we aren't valued by the people in our life, that doesn't imply that we are worthless. We are simply surrounded by the wrong ones, and that we are yet to meet more wonderful people who will uplift us and bring joy to our lives. For a week, Phoebe put everything aside and truly lived, truly enjoyed all the big and little things, and nothing went wrong. In fact, it changed her life for the better, in a way she could never have imagined. There is perhaps a lesson to be taken from that as well.
The only critique I have is that sometimes I found some of Phoebe's fantasies over-the-top and slightly redundant, but at the same time, given the overall quality of writing, I trust Espach to have valid reasons for them that may be beyond my comprehension. Perhaps the fantasies represent Phoebe's outlook in her past life, and highlight how drastically it changes by the end of the book.
The narration was extraordinary. Generally, having read for several years, readers eventually develop their abilities of inference to read the feelings beneath the words. In an audiobook, those feelings are handed to us through the narration, and one must trust the narrator to do them justice. Helen Laser went above and beyond; the contempt in her voice while reading Phoebe's inner monologue was subtle and yet impossible to miss, giving the feeling of being let into an inside joke. Her take on Lila's voice was hilarious; it was precisely annoying enough to suit her character, but not enough so that it deterred me from listening. While I usually have fuzzy images of the characters in my head while reading any book, this time, they were crystal clear, and the narration has a lot to do with it.
Although 'The Wedding People' is not the kind of book I usually read, it was an absolute treasure, even more so in this audiobook edition.
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