WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY

College friends meet up at a Wild West–themed wedding venue in the Texas Hill Country.

Bride-to-be Elaine Wheeler has put them all together at the “queer table"—Fin Hightower and Jacque Aguilar, her closest male and female friends from their University of Texas days; Todd and David King, a not-very-happy married couple; a former co-worker named Marina, described as a “Cara Delevingne lesbian.” These five would “form a unit with each other because there were no others to form one with,” a phrase that seems to presage the energy level of what’s to come. The older friends plan to initiate the newer ones into a tradition they call “the Hour of Disrespect,” for which everyone saves up their peeves and criticisms for a group venting session. Flashbacks to iterations of this tradition from previous weddings are sprinkled throughout, but they are somehow never snarky enough, funny enough, or outrageous enough to move this novel into The People We Hate at the Wedding territory (which you might guess by comparing the titles). In between these interludes and many digressive backstories (including, for example, excerpts from Fin’s late mother’s diary), a jampacked itinerary of events has been scheduled for the guests at the Hill Country Hideout. Minor mishaps plague the lassoing contest and the s’mores bonfire, but nothing goes as badly as the river float, where minor violence breaks out and local law enforcement gets involved. Fin’s reluctant feelings about his own recent engagement to a handsome Canadian man have led him to keep the news from his dearest friends, but as buried secrets go, this is pretty weak tea. In both of his preceding novels, The Old Place (2022) and Four Squares (2024), Finger proved he can spin out page-turning plots and make us care about his characters, but sadly he doesn’t pull off either one here.

If this is a character-driven novel, somebody really needs to put their foot on the gas.