The Happy Couple

Irish author Dolan (Exciting Times) offers a sardonic chronicle of the year leading up to the wedding of a seemingly ill-suited Dublin couple in their late 20s. Celine is a pianist more dedicated to her career than her relationship with Luke, a slacker at a tech firm who juggles a series of romantic entanglements behind her back. The novel moves from an engagement party in London, which Luke inexplicably flees before the night is over, through the fraught days leading up to the wedding, alternating between Celine’s and Luke’s points of view along with those of Celine’s disturbed younger sister and bridesmaid, Phoebe; Luke’s best man and former lover, Archie, who might have had something to do with Luke’s disappearance from the party; and the withering Vivian, who views her friends as ants in an anthill: “She could move among them. But she didn’t have to, and often enough she didn’t want to.” Vivian and her arch sense of humor often stand in for Dolan, who extracts amusement from her characters and plays narrative games, such as spinning through version after version of Luke’s planned wedding speech. The will-they-or-won’t-they question is enough to sustain the novel’s momentum as the self-destructive characters careen toward disaster. This is hard to look away from. Agent: Harriet Moore, David Higham Assoc. (Nov.)