Swine's Wedding

Like the best black comedy, Weiss's third novel, (after Hell on Wheels and The Roaches Have No King) leaves the reader sated yet queasy. In a bizarre and biting story, the doomed engagement of Solomon Beneviste unfolds through the journals of the two women who love him most: his fiancee and his mother. When her Jewish son proposes to WASPy Allison Pennybaker, Miriam Beneviste finds herself excluded from the wedding plans. To keep busy, she decides to make a family tree as a wedding present and goes looking for the ""gritty brown of her ancestors' lives."" As she obsessively researches and records 500 years of religious persecution, beginning with the Spanish Inquisition, she becomes determined that her ambivalent son reclaim his Jewish heritage. Meanwhile, her future daughter-in-law has her own fixations, including wedding registry decisions and her family's latent anti-Semitism. As the book races towards the wedding and a fatal fire that is mysteriously hinted at on the first page, it becomes more dark than funny. Although the supporting characters, including the bridegroom, are one-dimensional, Weiss's two narrators are complex, unselfconscious and believable. Together, they provide a compelling, if grotesque, reason to remain true to one's identity. (Nov.)