Staff Picks: Wedding Woes and Mutual Hatred

This summer I visited my ancestral home, which is loosely defined as Cleveland, Ohio and tightly defined as any room holding my Great Aunt Laura. She maintains not only my family history (the memory of my great grandmother staying up late playing solitaire, for example) but also a more general understanding of four generations of life in Cleveland.  In the hours I wasn’t rapt around her table, I was reading Dorothy West’s . Turned on to West by ’s  column, I tore through her novel of a late-summer wedding. Set within a carefully cultivated black upper-class community in Martha’s Vineyard, is the story of the much anticipated nuptials between a daughter of a respected family and the white jazz pianist with whom she has fallen in love. West’s sympathies are teasingly veiled. Through her characters, who span generations and therefore approach the couple’s union differently, she suggests a certain difficulty but not impossibility of judgement. certainly has enough heartbreak and suspensepublished in 1995 when West was eighty-seven is a beautiful novel and a record worth keeping close.