Meet Celine and Luke. For all intents and purposes, the happy couple. Luke (a serial cheater) and Celine (more interested in piano than domestic life) plan to marry in a year. Archie (the best man) should be moving on from his love for Luke and up the corporate ladder, but he finds himself utterly stuck. Phoebe (the bridesmaid and Celine's sister) just wants to get to the bottom of Luke's frequent unexplained disappearances. And Vivian (a wedding guest) is the only one with any emotional distance and observes her friends like ants in a colony.
As the wedding approaches and their five lives intersect, these characters will each look for a path to the happily ever after—but does it lie at the end of an aisle?
A study not of love or romance but of the motivating force of self-delusion ... Hews to the usual contours of what we now call a millennial novel ... The head-on consideration of marriage forces a certain heavy-handedness on the novel ... Dolan joins this lineage of contemporary writers who have tried to both revive the marriage plot for this century and show their characters writhing in new ways against its constraints.
Dolan is clever, effortlessly so, and her observations about people usually add something to the typical clichés ... But I’m not sure Dolan makes us care enough about these fridge-cold people to warrant such granular breakdowns of their deficiencies ... The weird thing is that in theory it sounds like the perfect novel ... When I sat down to write the review, I could remember oddly little ... There are lots of clever-sounding quips that don’t mean very much when you break them down.
One of the most impressive aspects of Dolan’s debut was the strength and confidence of the writing and The Happy Couple exhibits many of those elements, including the clever quips and funny one-liners ... There is much humour in Dolan’s arch observations of Anglo-Irish relations ... But I miss the linguistic showmanship Dolan brought to her debut, the acrobatic revelry in language that was so exciting but seems to have been reined in a little here. The intricate dialogue also seems to trip up the rhythm of the story at times rather than making it flow. But these feel like peevish complaints, a bit like asking a child who has scored 97 per cent on a test what happened to the other 3 per cent. The overall experience of reading this novel is one of great pleasure and enjoyment.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
