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Read September 12-21, 2015
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. To be honest, I can't even remember where my copy of the book came from, I just found it on my To Read shelf (despite having purged a lot of books out recently). The basic description - that a really big Southern family has a wedding in the 1920s - would lead you to expect this book to be really light, but that's just not the case. Welty is a master at work here. The many characters are nicely evoked, with the central characters (Laura, Ellen, George, and Dabney the bride) being really detailed and compelling. Despite the claims of many characters that the Fairchild family is run by the women, it's George who's kind of the emotional center, beloved by everyone despite a few odd quirks and actions (what was up with that girl in the woods?!). Welty really outlines all the complex connections of a family's relationships and shows how those connections electrify at certain moments.
I don't really like prose descriptions of nature, but Welty brings it home here as well and makes the Fairchilds' home really vivid. Everything from the weather to the trees to the mosquitoes is almost tangible.
While I was reading this book, it was keeping company in my bag with Claudia Rankine's Citizen, which I'm also reading. This made for a strange juxtaposition, because the wedding in Delta Wedding takes place in the early 1920s, and this is a big plantation family; the black characters are treated... not poorly, and definitely with affection, but you can tell this family's attitudes haven't evolved too far from the Civil War that's still within recent memory to them. Most of the black characters are servants who aren't much more than scenery that gets told what to do. The ones who come through most strongly on the page are two elderly women, both of whom seem a bit unhinged. I don't genuinely know how much of this is Welty's own attitudes coming through in the work (original copyright date was 1945) or whether she's written it specifically from a specific perspective; I feel like it's intentional (unlike in reading certain works by L.M. Montgomery, for example, where a casual remark will sound very jarring to a modern ear), and it certainly feels accurate to the time period. Reading this concurrently with Citizen felt very strange, like looking at where we've come to and exactly how we got there.
Overall, though, I strongly recommend this book. It was a great read, just lush and lovely, and one I know I'll return to in the future.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. To be honest, I can't even remember where my copy of the book came from, I just found it on my To Read shelf (despite having purged a lot of books out recently). The basic description - that a really big Southern family has a wedding in the 1920s - would lead you to expect this book to be really light, but that's just not the case. Welty is a master at work here. The many characters are nicely evoked, with the central characters (Laura, Ellen, George, and Dabney the bride) being really detailed and compelling. Despite the claims of many characters that the Fairchild family is run by the women, it's George who's kind of the emotional center, beloved by everyone despite a few odd quirks and actions (what was up with that girl in the woods?!). Welty really outlines all the complex connections of a family's relationships and shows how those connections electrify at certain moments.
I don't really like prose descriptions of nature, but Welty brings it home here as well and makes the Fairchilds' home really vivid. Everything from the weather to the trees to the mosquitoes is almost tangible.
While I was reading this book, it was keeping company in my bag with Claudia Rankine's Citizen, which I'm also reading. This made for a strange juxtaposition, because the wedding in Delta Wedding takes place in the early 1920s, and this is a big plantation family; the black characters are treated... not poorly, and definitely with affection, but you can tell this family's attitudes haven't evolved too far from the Civil War that's still within recent memory to them. Most of the black characters are servants who aren't much more than scenery that gets told what to do. The ones who come through most strongly on the page are two elderly women, both of whom seem a bit unhinged. I don't genuinely know how much of this is Welty's own attitudes coming through in the work (original copyright date was 1945) or whether she's written it specifically from a specific perspective; I feel like it's intentional (unlike in reading certain works by L.M. Montgomery, for example, where a casual remark will sound very jarring to a modern ear), and it certainly feels accurate to the time period. Reading this concurrently with Citizen felt very strange, like looking at where we've come to and exactly how we got there.
Overall, though, I strongly recommend this book. It was a great read, just lush and lovely, and one I know I'll return to in the future.
