In ''A Wedding in December" Shreve uses the ''Big Chill" device (her novels often suggest films) of old high school pals who have largely lost touch, briefly coming together as grown-ups. They see which friends made it to adulthood and which are spinning their tires in perpetual adolescence. The uniting ceremony is as likely a funeral as a wedding. This wedding is of former teenage sweethearts who had married other people. They reignited at a reunion 26 years later.
One winter weekend in a beautiful old inn in the Berkshire Mountains, these mid-40-year-olds assess each other's choices and reevaluate their own as one does when death is quietly walking the halls.
Shreve often hits a zeitgeist note, and stories of reunited childhood sweethearts were everywhere a few years ago. Shreve doesn't ignore the underside. The bride is riddled with cancer. She resents her chemo puffiness as she squeezes into her pink boucle wedding suit, which of course she quietly comes to hate too. That's middle age in December 2001.
Because her books are character driven and tend to be a little slow, though not unpleasantly so, Shreve often paces the primary plot by mirroring it with a historical one and, to her credit, usually infuses it with a similar emotional truth. Here she echoes the devastation of 9/11 with the horrifying Halifax, Nova Scotia, fire of 1917. It also started with an explosion, a munitions boat in the harbor. When the boat fire started, people ran to the windows to see it. The explosion blew in windows all over the city, and many were blinded.
Agnes, a teacher, is writing a novel set during the disaster. In it a young doctor is pressed into service, and though he falls in love, the fallout from the destructive wantonness sends him in another direction. Shreve's point that the aftermath of violence can lead us astray is the uninvited presence in the Berkshires that confronts the group with the unspoken question: Is this how you want to live what is left of your life?
