The Happy Couple

August 15, 2023
As their wedding approaches, a young couple--and their friends and family--wonder if they are making the right decision. Celine and Luke are a newly engaged couple who are happy enough, though not exactly happy, in Dolan's deeply Irish sophomore novel. Quietly introspective and dryly funny, the novel is broken up into six parts, with each of the first five narrated by a different character: Celine ("The Bride"), Phoebe ("The Bridesmaid"), Archie ("The Best Man"), Luke ("The Groom"), and Vivian ("The Guest"). In the last part, "Wedding Day," Dolan begins to fasten off all the narrative threads she has been weaving throughout the novel. These unique viewpoints offer a bricolage of not only Celine and Luke's relationship but also their relationships with their friends and family. Celine is a talented pianist whose first love is music; she tends to ignore Luke's faults, which include his penchant for lying, disappearing, and being ambivalent. Phoebe would rather spend her time tracking down Luke than on bridesmaid duties, whereas Archie is loath to be best man because he's in love with the groom. To round it all out, Vivian, a friend and ex-fling of Luke's, offers a fairly objective perspective on the state of the couple's relationship on the morning of their wedding. Dolan's characters feel irritatingly real in both their indecisiveness and their propensity for making poor decisions. The novel's formal playfulness--which includes having Luke narrate through drafts of his unfinished wedding speech and showing Vivian's past through her "encounters with paintings"--offers a fuller picture not only of the characters, but all of the social and cultural dynamics at play. Dolan writes beautifully about yearning and unhappiness: "Loneliness wasn't having no one. Loneliness was the gap between what you hoped for and what you got." Ultimately, Celine and Luke's happiness depends on whether what they got is better than what they hoped for--and if loving one another is more important than being in love. A quiet novel that questions and upends the traditional marriage plot.

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August 28, 2023
Irish author Dolan (Exciting Times) offers a sardonic chronicle of the year leading up to the wedding of a seemingly ill-suited Dublin couple in their late 20s. Celine is a pianist more dedicated to her career than her relationship with Luke, a slacker at a tech firm who juggles a series of romantic entanglements behind her back. The novel moves from an engagement party in London, which Luke inexplicably flees before the night is over, through the fraught days leading up to the wedding, alternating between Celine’s and Luke’s points of view along with those of Celine’s disturbed younger sister and bridesmaid, Phoebe; Luke’s best man and former lover, Archie, who might have had something to do with Luke’s disappearance from the party; and the withering Vivian, who views her friends as ants in an anthill: “She could move among them. But she didn’t have to, and often enough she didn’t want to.” Vivian and her arch sense of humor often stand in for Dolan, who extracts amusement from her characters and plays narrative games, such as spinning through version after version of Luke’s planned wedding speech. The will-they-or-won’t-they question is enough to sustain the novel’s momentum as the self-destructive characters careen toward disaster. This is hard to look away from. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc.

October 1, 2023
Dublin couple Celine and Luke are getting married, and here to tell you why it's a pretty bad idea are their maid of honor, best man, and exes and friends, along with the ""happy couple"" themselves. Celine and Luke have both dated men and women, so why the hewing to heteronormativity (""a near ubiquitous form of mania"")? Then there are the affairs; Luke's random (and not random) hook-ups, and Celine's obsession with the piano: her artistic career, and mind-consuming passion. Characters take turns narrating, with readers first meeting, for instance, best man Archie as a ""cokehead lawyer"" Celine can't stand before Archie takes the mic to reveal much about Luke, and his own, utterly likable self. By the time we hear from still-undecided Luke, the wedding is hours away. Celine and Luke do become the most fully realized characters here, but the full-cast style supersedes any individuals: the whole is much of the point. In Dolan's (Exciting Times, 2020) clever second novel, the will-they-or-won't-they, modern marriage plot and hard deadline make for a very enjoyable rush of a read.

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