Book review: The Wedding distills smart, cutting characters in melancholy of human failings

Witness the formalizing of a relationship whose troubled beginning does not guarantee happily ever after

Published Oct 12, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

Gurjinder Basran

The Wedding

Gurjinder Basran  |  Douglas & McIntyre

$24.95 | 224pp

An impending wedding — a stupendously costly, 1,000-guest, three-ring circus of a wedding, in fact — forms the surface of Gurinder Basran’s tragicomical third novel, The Wedding.

Akin to The Plus One, Vancouver writer S.C. Lalli’s recent destination wedding-set murder mystery, the story proceeds from the certainty that any wedding story necessarily involves an obstacle — before, after, or at the altar.  Whether a drunk uncle, squabbling families, cold feet, infidelity, or homicide, the narrative relates the details of the lavish glamour while also exposing the sobering truth behind the veil.

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A fantasy generated in part by a multi-billion dollar industry, weddings represent, for many, a pinnacle: of one of life’s truly perfect occasions. And while novels about weddings can scarcely undermine that myth, they’re amusing and edifying for the showcase of revelations that might elude the wedding photographer.

In the case of The Wedding, Delta resident Basran (Help! I’m Alive) builds a story with a confident momentum toward the big day. There’s so much at stake, not least the reputations of two status-conscious families, the Atwals and the Dosanjhes. And lest we forget, the two altar-bound lovers themselves: bride-to-be and blueberry farm heiress Devi and groom-to-be and candy shop heir Baby.  They’re apprehensive, each for their own — quite compelling — reasons.

Basran begins with Jasvir Sidhu, though. This elderly and frail distant relative — she “had not just shrunk, as people do with age, she had collapsed in on herself” — receives a personal invitation from rival Darshan Dosanjh that reminds her of lingering feuds, regrets, and humiliations. The casual visit has Darshan dropping news about her assorted successes while sniffing at Jasvir’s “dated showroom decor.” Jasvir, meanwhile, notes the foolish smile of Darshan’s son. With his dull complexion and bloated belly, Jasvir wonders whether he’s an alcohol addict like his father. Further: “She’d never known Indian women to be addicted to anything but suffering.”

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If nuptials are the skin of the novel, thoughts like Jasper’s are its guts, head, and heart. Smart, cutting, witty, lamenting, meditative, and sociological, these private thoughts reverberate throughout the novel’s 19 chapters. And with them Basran’s novel serves up a social commentary that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jane Austen novel. There’s family, there’s tradition, and there’s the inexorable force of them; and then there’s the price paid — compromises, sacrifices, postponed dreams, exclusion, conformity, resignation.

A ritual ceremony and epic celebration is tinged with melancholy in Basran’s hands.

Janvir is the first of about three handfuls of characters to whom Basran dedicates a chapter. Each one is absorbing, a bittersweet, story-like mini-biography.

For instance, there’s Twinkle, an international student who works in punishing conditions as a banquet server; Sonia, who wrestles with a porn habit and a mother ashamed of her for being unmarried at 28; Satnam, who drives a taxi to make extra money for his son’s wedding and feels overwhelmed by the gang-related shooting that paralyzed his eldest child; and Rish, a wedding photographer, who moves about with the voice of his mother in his head that seethes with disappointment that he dropped out of university.

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The portraits are an impressive gallery of Basran’s insights about the triumphs and failings of humans and their social institutions. In a wedding, one of Baron’s character’s discerns “hopes and dreams for a new beginning, for something better.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but one that The Wedding expresses degrees of skepticism about.

Though an iffy source, Oscar Wilde quipped that marriage represented the “triumph of imagination over intelligence.” As her most jaded, Basran might see the triumph of social norms over free will. Then again, maybe: sit back and enjoy the spectacle and food. With a wealth of perspectives to consider, The Wedding can be enjoyed at many levels, not least of which is to witness the formalizing of a relationship whose troubled beginning does not guarantee happily ever after.

Salt Spring Island resident Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of five novels, including My Two-Faced Luck and The Age of Cities.

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