Fiction: This is familiar territory for Anita Shreve. Once again the romantic novelist is taking relationships - or, more particularly, marriage - and trying to pinpoint the driving forces that keep people together.
Like The Last Time They Met or indeed several of her previous novels, A Wedding in December is about missed and retrieved opportunities, the passing of time and the power of memory.
The seven middle-aged people who assemble for the weekend in Nora's chocolate-box pretty bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires have a shared past. Twenty-six years ago they were students together in the same privileged New England college. Communication between the seven since graduation has been sporadic or in some cases non-existent, but for some their lives have been profoundly influenced and shaped by their high school years. There's Harrison, whose roommate Stephen died in a tragic accident in his final year - a death Harrison has always felt somehow responsible for; Agnes, who fell in love with her comfortably married teacher and who has maintained a tortured clandestine relationship with him ever since, sacrificing her own needs so he can keep his marriage intact; and Bridget and Bill, the couple whose wedding they are all brought together to celebrate. They were inseparable in college but both married other people, and didn't meet again until 23 years later when Bridget was divorced and Bill unhappily married. Since they got together Bridget has been diagnosed with breast cancer and her illness and the intimation of her mortality hangs over the weekend like a dark secret that everyone knows but no one wants to talk about.
The other characters are Jeremy, now a successful businessman; Nora, whose hospitality in her newly refurbished inn they are all enjoying; and Rob, now a world-renowned classical musician who arrives at the weekend with his partner Josh. Despite all the talk about weddings, it is these two who are presented as having the most successful, most loving and caring relationship.
The character of Nora is one that will be familiar to Shreve fans. Typically, the writer has given her an interesting backstory: in this case she was once married to a world-famous poet whose death freed her from what was, behind closed doors, a claustrophobic and emotionally abusive relationship. But, as so often happens in Shreve's novels, the character who moves through the narrative doesn't live up to the complicated past the writer has devised for them. Nora is another of Shreve's bland and chilly women, and Harrison, the novel's main character, is equally dull and uninteresting despite Shreve creating for him a tortured memory that has been eating away at him for more than quarter of a century.
Shreve is a prolific writer and in this 12th novel she's not breaking new ground, staying comfortably within the well-defined boundaries of white, middle-class, educated America - a milieu that she has proved adept in chronicling.
A Wedding in December, By Anita Shreve, Little Brown, 325pp. £14.99
Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist
