She's not even invited but 'The Wedding People' change her life, just the same

They say a good actor can read a phone book and still keep an audience spellbound. Alison Espach is that kind of writer.

She is a master of taking the seemingly mundane and creating moments that transfix. Take, for instance, the beginning of "The Wedding People," her latest book. Phoebe has arrived at the Cornwall Inn in Newport, R.I., and for the first 12 or so pages she is waiting in line to check in, "the kind of line she expected to see at the airport, and not at a Victorian mansion overlooking the ocean."

The waiting people strike her as "comically ordinary next to the velvet drapes and the gilt-framed portraits of bearded men lining the wall," as if they were "tethered to the earth by their titanium-strength suitcases."

Then Phoebe realizes the many people in line and milling about the lobby are part of a wedding: "It's unsettling, like in that movie 'The Birds' her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it looks like it could survive a trip to the moon."

Phoebe eavesdrops on conversations and mentally catalogs the guests, gathering information as if she were an anthropologist dropped into the middle of a rarely studied human ritual. And it is that in a way, because interaction of any kind is overwhelming to her in the immediate aftermath of COVID, among other recent traumas.

"Removed" is the best way to describe Phoebe, who is not a member of the wedding, the only person besides hotel staff who isn't, and has arrived, luggageless, for a decidedly different reason. She has checked in but she might never leave, to paraphrase the Eagles.

Then she and the bride end up in the elevator together, upending everything.

What's so mesmerizing about the level of detail in Espach's work (it's equally true of her other novels, "The Adults" and "Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance") is that it feels less like reading than being a fly on the wall. You're always observing but vaguely unaware that a plot is humming along below the surface, rather like when a furnace or refrigerator kicks on. You don't notice it until suddenly you do, unable to place the noise at first, and then relaxing when it recedes back to the familiar.

Espach's characters never hold back, but that warts-and-all approach is leavened with unexpected humor. In "Wedding People," it's the kind of tragicomedy only a wedding can conjure, especially an over-the-top extravaganza that is slated to last six days.

I would bet that's why Espach called her novel "The Wedding People" instead of "The Wedding Party" or "The Wedding Guests." Conviviality isn't part of the picture. It's bound to be a train wreck, and you're invited.

The Wedding People

By: Alison Espach.

Publisher: Henry Holt, 384 pages, $28.99.