SOURCE: A review of The Wedding, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, Autumn, 1995, p. 799.

In the following review, Andrews offers an overview of The Wedding.

Numbering Harlem Renaissance luminaries like Hurston, Hughes, and Cullen as well as the late editor Jacqueline Onassis (to whom this book is dedicated) among her friends explains not only Dorothy West's historical span but also the excitement attending the publication of her long-awaited second novel. With forty-seven years separating her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), from The Wedding, “long-awaited” is more than a cliché.

West sets the action in “the Oval,” an exclusive Oak Bluffs section of Nantucket which symbolizes the insularity of wealth. Opulent celebrations seem to be at hand, but nothing in The Wedding is that simple. Like the novel's title, people and events only seem straightforward. Emotional desperation and tragedy surface as characters examine their tangled lives and complex responses...