THE HAPPY COUPLE

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.