A SUCCESSFUL chick lit novel does many things: it infuses the ordinary, and sometimes the downright mundane, with humour and intrigue; it spins a narrative which nudges what is only remotely possible towards what could be quite probable; it affords the reader an interlude of escapism. Its breezy, effortless style is responsible for its unmatched palatability. With its pastel-hued cover recalling macaroons and cupcakes, Katie Fford’s A Vintage Wedding promises to be a similarly sugary treat. Village life, a wedding-planning business and friendship — one expects to settle into a novel with absorbing details of a quintessentially feminine business and charming scenes of rustic weddings. Nothing in the back cover blurb anticipates the difficulty one has in swallowing this fairly plausible story of three women who find love while setting up a business.

The story opens with Beth, one of our three protagonists, rushing to a village hall meeting in her newly adopted home in a Cotswold village. Beth has freshly graduated from university, but, as a result of a fallout with her mother, has turned her back on her home and is anxiously looking for a job and friendship. At the village hall, she meets two other women who are roughly her age and they immediately strike up a friendship. The two are Lindy and Rachel whose commonalities end at the fact that they are both divorced. While Rachel is a presumably successful freelance accountant, who has bought her dream home in Chippingford seemingly for the express purpose of indulging her purported OCD, Lindy is a seamstress whose two boys are the outcome of a high school crush gone wrong. The three undertake the restoration of the village hall, possibly in time for Beth’s sister’s wedding. The very next time they meet, they have decided to start a business, called Vintage Weddings, giving elegant weddings to couples on a budget. The novel is then all about the first two weddings that Beth, Lindy and Rachel plan, along with their romantic life which, completely dormant at the opening of the novel, germinates in tandem with their business.

A chick lit novel in which you don’t really like the main characters is already doomed. Fforde’s attempts to flesh out Beth, Lindy and Rachel are mostly mechanical. She employs the clipped tone of one ticking items off a checklist in telling us about the hopes, dreams and anxieties of these characters. All three are apportioned a backstory, a physical description, and a description of their house that reflects their personality. In all of this Fforde seems so deeply unenthused by her own creations that some of that disenchantment inevitably rubs off on the reader. While not one of the three protagonists truly comes to life, it is Beth who suffers the most from Fforde’s treatment. Attempts to show her as a ‘regular’ 20-something who may be too easily influenced by those around her end up making her look like a marionette, both to the author and to the other characters in the book. Beth is supposedly an online marketing whizz, but that depiction is limited to mere mentions of technology (Skype, Facebook, eBay) that make the book and its author seem paradoxically archaic.

Had these characters been at all real, we may have wondered at the plausibility of them being drawn towards each other in friendship. Indeed, there is not much to say about this friendship. “My problem was, I slept with the wrong brother,” says Lindy in one of the many cringe-worthy moments that the book affords. But, other than oversharing intimate personal information the very first time they meet, Beth, Lindy and Rachel seem appropriately circumspect of each other. Lindy privately wonders if Rachel is a snob and all three feel a darting curiosity about the others’ love lives, but other than that they don’t think very much about each other at all. Their potential conflicts remain buried under a cloud of goodwill, kindness and politeness, and they remain cordial business partners eager not to overstep boundaries.

The sum of all the details and descriptions that Fforde gives us is nought. Beth’s mother is called a ‘control freak’ and a ‘Mumzilla’ but the relationship is painted in such generic terms (disapproval of Beth’s haircut and career choice) that we hardly realise that it is a key point. Later in the book, Beth is able to hold her own in front of her mother, not because she has matured in any fundamental way in the course of the novel but because a guy stands up to her when her mother is criticising her. Such disingenuously convenient circumstances are typical of this novel in which fortuitousness ends up being a big problem. Entirely too many happy coincidences strain our credulity. Lindy’s high school crush appears out of the blue and expresses not only a desire to be “more of an uncle” to her children but also the kind of uninhibited romantic interest which would have been better confined to high school. A rock star falls in love with Beth while she is waitressing at the local pub. Of course, all of these things can happen, it’s just that Fforde does not take the trouble to spin the story in a more believable way.

In the chapters devoted to her, Rachel’s OCD is described in repetitive detail. Her obsession with different shades of white, her love of order and the fact that she enjoys cleaning, sorting, packing and moving are signifiers of her neuroses as is the fact that she needs more ‘space’ than ‘normal’ people. Once the rakish Raff muscles his way into her life, however, the ‘OCD’ slips off like a silken robe, revealing the ‘real’ Rachel who realises “her desperate need for order and tidiness came from her desire to make her wrong marriage be right. Her ex wasn’t a bad man but he wasn’t right for her. She couldn’t make him a better emotional fit so she altered everything she could alter”. Sure, the power of love can be transformative, but the suggestion that mental illness can be cured if only you find the right man is ridiculous.

While on the one hand everything ties in too neatly, on the other, there are entirely too many loose ends. Rachel is told by everyone to stay clear of Raff since he is a womaniser but we see no evidence of this in his single-minded devotion to Rachel. We are never told how Raff got that reputation or why he is so attracted to Rachel. Raff’s mother, who has spent a lifetime collecting stuff, suddenly and inexplicably wants to get rid of most of it and donates it to Vintage Weddings, despite being told that she can sell at least some of it quite profitably. Beth spends a few chapters agonising when her rock star’s manner is gruff; but after her anxiety culminates in a saccharine romantic scene, we never really learn why her beau’s mood was off for a few dozen pages.

A Vintage Wedding is jarringly unbelievable in a way that invites reality to intrude into what is essentially escapism. Far from the airy, sugary treat it promises to be, it is a heavy, indigestible concoction.

A Vintage Wedding

(CHICK LIT)

By Katie Fford

Century, UK

ISBN 978-1780890838

464pp.