In 'Wedding,' some things borrowed, some things true

A Wedding in December
By Anita Shreve
Little, Brown, 325 pp., $25.95

There's something satisfyingly clean, well functioning, pale, and delicious about an Anita Shreve novel, like a digestive biscuit or a wooden spoon. She's not a deep, wonderful writer, but a good one who plays to her strengths and hits her mark. Yes, her work is a tad formulaic. Her new novel has the usual brilliant branding of a gorgeous cover photograph, and inside are the usual East Coast, well-meaning, hapless adults and few children. But sitting alongside countless memoirs about broken families, tricksy first novels, and contrived mysteries, Shreve's characters grappling with desire, juggling their shame against their regret, are entirely welcome.

In ''A Wedding in December" Shreve uses the ''Big Chill" device (her novels often suggest films) of old high school pals who have largely lost touch, briefly coming together as grown-ups. They see which friends made it to adulthood and which are spinning their tires in perpetual adolescence. The uniting ceremony is as likely a funeral as a wedding. This wedding is of former teenage sweethearts who had married other people. They reignited at a reunion 26 years later.

One winter weekend in a beautiful old inn in the Berkshire Mountains, these mid-40-year-olds assess each other's choices and reevaluate their own as one does when death is quietly walking the halls.

Shreve often hits a zeitgeist note, and stories of reunited childhood sweethearts were everywhere a few years ago. Shreve doesn't ignore the underside. The bride is riddled with cancer. She resents her chemo puffiness as she squeezes into her pink boucle wedding suit, which of course she quietly comes to hate too. That's middle age in December 2001.

Because her books are character driven and tend to be a little slow, though not unpleasantly so, Shreve often paces the primary plot by mirroring it with a historical one and, to her credit, usually infuses it with a similar emotional truth. Here she echoes the devastation of 9/11 with the horrifying Halifax, Nova Scotia, fire of 1917. It also started with an explosion, a munitions boat in the harbor. When the boat fire started, people ran to the windows to see it. The explosion blew in windows all over the city, and many were blinded.

Agnes, a teacher, is writing a novel set during the disaster. In it a young doctor is pressed into service, and though he falls in love, the fallout from the destructive wantonness sends him in another direction. Shreve's point that the aftermath of violence can lead us astray is the uninvited presence in the Berkshires that confronts the group with the unspoken question: Is this how you want to live what is left of your life?

And in case we miss the message, Shreve adds the ghostly presence of their friend Stephen, who died in high school. He was the one who was better-looking, more fun and clever than all of them, except he was so troubled he couldn't prevent his own demise. Stephen is the catalyst that causes half the characters to reveal their secrets.

The characters are fairly simplistic, though their troubles are credible. And Shreve deftly pinpoints a couple's pain, sometimes with only a phrase. A publisher in Toronto, Harrison is married with two jolly sons. Harrison's wife feels guilty about not loving him as much as she should. He fails to assure her, ''without admitting to the death of hope."

Harrison lusts after Nora, ''the treble note of [her] palm on his shoulder drowning out thought, intention, rest." She owns and runs the inn, a new business venture since the death of her husband, another churlish, incredibly talented poet.

Some of the characters are almost stereotypes; Jerry, the wildly successful, morally reprehensible, brash New Yorker who arrives with his beautiful wife in a stretch limo; Rob, the gay artist who is the only one in a truly happy relationship; Agnes, the spinster with her ''prematurely weathered" face, a strong ''but not an elegant" body, and frizzy hair. Her friends presume she is a lesbian, a lonely lesbian. Of course she is neither. But coupling is unlikely to be satisfactory in Shreve's novels, and Agnes has had a very long affair with a married man.

All these people, their secrets and history, cramp Shreve, so there is lots of exposition. Harrison writes to his wife. Agnes writes to her lover and works on her novel. In some ways this is a novel about how writing captures our past and helps us map our future. If God is blowing people up who just turn up for work, and is giving cancer to those who find true love, well, Shreve seems to say, write your own legacy. She often tilts God's cards in our direction, dissolving the wall between omniscient writer and reader. Agnes ''thought of Louise, blind behind her bandages. How would one manage in the world? . . . No, Agnes thought as she found her notebook in the bedcovers. Louise would remain as she was."

One can almost feel Shreve thinking, should I let Agnes find happiness or let her remain as she is too? But she doesn't answer. Unsatisfactory though it may be, Shreve doesn't tie up all the ends. She hints as to the way things might go, but as she illustrates so well, man makes plans and God laughs.

Mary Ambrose is a Canadian writer who lives in London.