Weddings are never just about the bride and groom, no matter how much people insist they are. Elin Hilderbrand’s latest contribution to her collection of summertime beach reads is unique, standing out in its species as a wedding story that focuses more on separations than unions, and paying less attention to the bride and groom in favor of their family and friends.
Narrated by the sister and father of the bride and the groom’s mother-in-law, we gather on the weekend Jenna Carmichael and Stuart Graham are to be married at the family summer home on Nantucket Island. The bride’s mother, gone seven years after a battle with cancer, has left her youngest child with ‘the Notebook’ (capital ‘N’) – a simple spiral bound list of advice she knew she wouldn’t be there to give her daughter when she finally met her Sensitive-and-Intelligent Groom-To-Be.
With the Notebook dictating every aspect of a fairytale wedding for a fairytale couple, the lives of everyone around them are not measuring up: the bride’s older sister is a divorced mother of three having an affair with her father’s 59-year old business partner; her father is stuck in a loveless second marriage; and the groom’s mother, whose husband had a son with another woman, has invited the home-wrecker to the wedding to gloat about her family. It doesn’t end there.
An anxious reflection on the state of relationships in modern times, ‘Beautiful Day’ at times feels paradoxical – “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. This is not a book about a simple summer wedding, it is a soap opera written by Chekov, starring the cast of ‘Dynasty’.
One might be persuaded to believe that the point of the novel is to convince the reader that marriage is a hopeless institution, that love ends, that people are all self-absorbed, selfish, and will let you down. The characters, in their glaring realism, are not easy to love, possibly because they are all too easy to identify with. Their pettiness and selfish tendencies strike a chord it’s hard to acknowledge, even as we’re turned off by their behavior as we read it.
And yet, there are glimpses of what I’ll call hope; of love that endures. The bride’s parents were married thirty-five years before the mother died, and they are not the only characters who restore your faith that it is possibly for two people to come together and survive a lifetime of differences.
Most compellingly, and in fact most revealing (should we still question her intentions), the author dedicates her novel in celebration of her grandparents seventieth wedding anniversary, which would have been in June of 2013 had her grandfather not passed just before this book was published.
Elin Hilderbrand grew up on Nantucket Island, and has promised herself that she would always have a summer vacation. There is a real sense of both her familiarity with the locale and the culture, which is even more evident when out-of-towners are introduced. It is the final touch, her individual seal, making this not just any wedding, but a wedding that is quite nearly a cultural experience. A New England wedding – for richer, not poorer.
