*This review makes the book sound much more depressing than it is. I genuinely liked “Seating Arrangements.” I promise.*

A wedding is as good a setting as any for a literary novel. In some ways, it’s probably better than most – weddings, even the smoothest and best ones, all come with drama and all have potential for emotions and tenuous family relationships to push up against one another. Maggie Shipstead definitely picked a good starting point for her debut novel.

Then again, this particular wedding – between Daphne Van Meter and Greyson Duff – is probably the least important part of “Seating Arrangments.” It’s given four pages at the very end, almost like an epilogue. You certainly don’t get inside of Daphne or Greyson’s heads, or get a feeling for who they are in the slightest. Are they good for one another? It seems so, if only because the somewhat unpleasant and self-centered people that do get top billing in the novel think so in the few moments that they aren’t absorbed with their own lives. Are they interesting people? Clearly not interesting enough to take center stage for even one second over Winn, Daphne’s father, or Livia, her sister. Why does Shipstead make Daphne seven months pregnant, if no one really seems to be that concerned with it, except for some vague thoughts of its impropriety from Winn’s side? I don’t know, maybe so that Daphne has something interesting to bring to the table.

As I said, the book focuses mainly on Winn Van Meter and his youngest daughter Livia, though we do get in the heads of a few other members of the wedding party as the long weekend plays out. The Van Meters and all of Daphne’s bridesmaids have descended on the family’s summer house on Waskeke, an island in New England that was once a center of whaling but now plays home to rich Connecticut weekenders. Winn is, in a word, a bit of a curmudgeon, someone whose sense of propriety overwhelms the entire proceedings of the novel. Never once is he able to just enjoy himself – he is the typical father of the bride, except that he is less concerned with the money and more just with how unseemly the whole spectacle of the wedding is, and how much he hates all the people intruding on the house that has been his family’s haven for relaxation for decades. I do appreciate that money isn’t really an issue, though, especially since while the Van Meters are a family that has gone to Harvard for generations and lived well for a century, they are definitely on the comfortable side instead of the gaudy ostentatious rich of some of the characters we meet. Winn gets a little tiresome. It’s like he has a midlife crisis in the course of the two days leading up to the wedding, though in typical 21st century literary novel fashion everything gets tied up by the event itself, not exactly in a tidy fashion but in the “we’ll agree to ignore our faults and sins, because we’re wealthy WASPs” way that is also highly typical of the current trend in novels.

Twenty-one year old Harvard senior Livia is definitely the more interesting character, though Jesus did she grate on my nerves. She is smart (one gets the sense that Winn doesn’t particularly like his daughters, but if he had to pick one to carry on the Van Meter name it would be Livia) but she spends the entire book in a foggy depressed state… over a boy who broke up with her six months before. Good grief. When we are allowed the glimpses of the Livia who would have attracted the boy in question in the first place, I relaxed a bit. But her general woe-is-me attitude made me grit my teeth from time to time.

“Seating Arrangements” isn’t a fun book, but it is a light book. It’s a fast read. The author is excellent at weaving memories and flashbacks into the present day to show who the characters are and how they got to here. Shipstead does a great job of giving full characterizations to the people who populate the novel. That said, they are incredibly dour. But I’m not sure I really minded.