Swine's Wedding

In book reviews, novelist Daniel Evan Weiss is often "lined up against Swift and Kafka," which makes him very happy indeed. Weiss insists, however, that all influences have been subliminal: "I never studied literature," he admits. Still, the author of The Roaches Have No King has a fresh style and a penchant for satire, as appealing and clever as it is bizarre. His second novel, The Swine's Wedding, is a black comedy about the trials and tribulations of modern interfaith marriage.

When Allison Pennybaker and Solomon Beneviste announce their engagement, the trouble begins: The Pennybakers plan a church wedding that they cannot afford while Solomon's mother, as a gift to the couple, traces the bizarre Beneviste family history back as far as the Spanish Inquisition. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Swine's Wedding is that it's told from three perspectives. Weiss juxtaposes Allison's frantic journal entries with Mrs. Beneviste's interior monologue as she hunts for evidence to define the family lineage and muses over whether her son is truly happy with his engagement. The third perspective comes in the form of official, sanitized reports from the coroner's office, foreshadowing the climax of the novel. Publishers Weekly called the two primary narrators "complex, unselfconscious and believable." In his second black comedy, Daniel Evan Weiss fleshes out the societal stereotypes of Wasps and Jews in American suburbia, chronicling an ill-fated engagement as it slides into the void between opposing religious faiths.