The Wedding - Hardcover

While younger writers obsess over the need to show rather than tell, the octogenarian West simply grabs you by the lapels and drags you headlong through a multigenerational saga of affluent, Martha's Vineyard blacks who are so fair in complexion that they're almost white. And she does it all in something like 225 pages, sounding very much like Faulkner even when she's over the top, which is only now and then. You won't mind, because there is greatness here as well as gripping storytelling.

On the island of Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s there exists a proud, insular, nearly unassailable community known as the Oval, made up of the best and brightest of New York's and Boston's black bourgeoisie. Dr. Clark Coles and his wife Corinne, pillars of this community, are mortified that their youngest daughter Shelby is set on marrying Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. Equally alarmed is Lute McNeil, a successful black furniture maker from Boston who is new to Oak Bluffs and desperate for social acceptance. Lute has fallen in love with Shelby Coles, or at least the way of life she represents, and he will stop at nothing to pull her away from Meade. As the day of the wedding approaches, the tension surrounding Shelby, Lute, and Meade builds, climaxing in a single tragic act that will forever change the lives of three American families. The Wedding is a wise and heartfelt novel about the shackles of race and class we all wear and the price we pay to break them. It is also an unforgettable history of the rise of the black middle class, written by a woman who lived it. This wise, heartfelt tale marks Dorothy West's first novel in over four decades.