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A review by sam_bizar_wilcox
The Wedding by Dorothy West
5.0
A tragic fable, The Wedding captures a distinct social milieu of wealthy Black intellectuals in the 1950s. The setting, the parlors and portals of Martha's Vinyard cottages, serves as a sumptuous backdrop to a multigenerational saga that builds out from the story of the titular wedding. Indeed, the wedding is far from center stage, as Dorothy West becomes more interested in how a family comes to grapple with racism from outside and within its own house. There's Gram, who is the grand matriarch and a white woman who must reconcile with her own deeply held prejudices and her relationship with her grand and great-grandchildren. Then there's the generations in between, which feature illicit loves and infidelities before winding down to Shelby and Meade, the interracial betrothed couple at the beginning of the novel.
With a meandering plot that considers, with humanity and intense scrutiny, the lives that came before, The Wedding is a clear look at what it means to love and be loved in a period of history when such love was often impossible. It is, too, a wrestle between physical desire and a more philosophical depiction of love. The conflict at the center (or, as the novel expands, really at the book's periphery of beginnings and endings), exposed in the novel's opening chapter, comes when another character--Lute--aims to halt the wedding of Shelby and Meade and wed the bride himself. This mission's success depends on the depth of his passion, how it measures next to the couple before him.
West's novel is best as a look at a unique time and place, through the eyes and minds of special characters and their abilities to be intimate (or not) with one another. But the novel works in another, almost Platonistic way: it imagines the ways families are shaped. It shows how often fraught and subject to cracking these bonds between relations can be, but it supposes, in an idealistic way, that after all the cracking and friction some kind of unity can be earned. Family is unstable, but it can demand truce.
With a meandering plot that considers, with humanity and intense scrutiny, the lives that came before, The Wedding is a clear look at what it means to love and be loved in a period of history when such love was often impossible. It is, too, a wrestle between physical desire and a more philosophical depiction of love. The conflict at the center (or, as the novel expands, really at the book's periphery of beginnings and endings), exposed in the novel's opening chapter, comes when another character--Lute--aims to halt the wedding of Shelby and Meade and wed the bride himself. This mission's success depends on the depth of his passion, how it measures next to the couple before him.
West's novel is best as a look at a unique time and place, through the eyes and minds of special characters and their abilities to be intimate (or not) with one another. But the novel works in another, almost Platonistic way: it imagines the ways families are shaped. It shows how often fraught and subject to cracking these bonds between relations can be, but it supposes, in an idealistic way, that after all the cracking and friction some kind of unity can be earned. Family is unstable, but it can demand truce.