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THE WORLD AFTER ALICE by Lauren Aliza Green

THE WORLD AFTER ALICE

by Lauren Aliza Green

Pub Date: July 2nd, 2024
ISBN: 9780593654132
Publisher: Viking

Upper-crust New York families collide after the loss of a promising young violinist.

Brooklynites Morgan Hensley and Benjamin Weil are getting married. They’ve waited until the last moment possible to reveal their relationship to their families, giving everyone just enough notice to gather in Maine for the nuptials. The Weils and the Hensleys are not meeting for the first time for this happy occasion—they have history. What the two families share is Alice Weil, an elite classical musician who was Benji’s sister and Morgan’s best friend, who jumped off a bridge 12 years earlier, her body never located. Green shows the group in their fraught, damaged present—at the couple’s rehearsal dinner, the wedding ceremony—to highlight the awful fireworks among family members. There’s Benji’s divorced Upper West Side parents: laid-off businessman Nick, whose younger wife and new daughter have not been able to dispel his ghosts, and failed ballerina Linnie, whose new philosophy teacher partner knows more about her past than she realizes. Meanwhile, Morgan’s father, an acclaimed pediatric surgeon, carries a torch for Linnie. Lest readers presume that grief has transformed these people into shells of their former selves, though, Green intersperses the present action with glimpses into the past—Alice’s memorial service, the lead-up to her jump, the dissolution of Nick and Linnie’s marriage—to show the same uncomfortable interactions germinating that will play out on a large scale later. This could all make for salacious, fun reading, as these are deeply unpleasant people who spend years bickering with each other, but instead the novel is mostly dreary and Green’s prose is weighed down by a curious formality (“The words shattered the concupiscent undercurrent of his thoughts,” Green writes of Nick during a confrontation with Linnie).

Like left-out wedding champagne: expensive, bitter, and a bit flat.