I spent some time trying to picture it — I even Googled to see if it had happened to anybody ever — but, of course, I was missing the point. In Kwan’s universe, things happen for the plain and happy reason that he wants them to. Pose an objection, he’s already galloping on, and if you want to go along for the ride — as millions of readers have — you have to suspend your private laws of probability, and once you do, it will all be over quickly and sunnily.
“Lies and Weddings,” in short, is another chapter in Kwan’s fantasy of conspicuous transnational consumption and love against the odds. The basic template is familiar to anyone who has read “Crazy Rich Asians” or seen its indecently entertaining film version. Hong Kong-born Arabella, the Countess of Greshamsbury, has made it her mission in life to arrange advantageous dynastic marriages for her three English Chinese children. She is particularly keen on landing a princess for her only son and heir, a hot and feckless wannabe artist named Rufus.
In Arabella’s path lie three formidable obstacles, none of which she yet knows about. Her global chain of luxury hotels is mortgaged to the brink. Decades of unchecked family spending have emptied the Gresham trusts. And Rufus has long since consecrated his heart to the girl next door: Eden Tong, daughter of the Gresham family doctor and a kind and conscientious physician herself. She is also (unless you count her father and the myriad servants) the only not-rich person in the entire book, which makes her by default its heroine.
The action proper begins in Hawaii, where Arabella’s oldest daughter is set to marry a half-Norwegian prince in a wedding for the ages. Things go wrong almost from the start. Eden throws up during a whale-watching expedition. Rufus discloses his true feelings over a hot mic. And a truly inconvenient volcanic eruption sends the A-list crowd scurrying. (Joan Collins chips a nail.) From that disaster, “Lies and Weddings” swivels toward fresh disasters, from London to Paris to Marrakesh to L.A. to Texas to Venice to — well, I lost track at some point, but Kwan fans will recognize the arc. Alliances are made and unmade. Fortunes are won and lost. Rich people, trying to get richer, outwit themselves. Poor girls, armed with only their own stubborn integrity, stake a claim on happiness.
And the laugh lines arrive punctually. “Maxxie’s father is down to his last Bacon and the mama only has a ranch full of useless llamas.” “Come on, you know alcoholics only exist in America.” “We had Fran Lebowitz to dinner, don’t you remember? If we can charm her, we can bloody well charm anyone.” “You always think you’re having a stroke, but unfortunately you never actually do!”
A photographer in his previous life, Kwan has a gimlet eye for how fat cats strut: the Earl of Greshamsbury, for instance, in his “perfectly pressed ruby-red corduroy trousers and a pale blue Ede & Ravenscroft Sea Island cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows.” Kwan knows where all his characters have been to school, what they drive, how their rooms are furnished, and whatever he can’t squeeze into the text he folds into a stream of cheeky meta-footnotes: “The Princess of Wales has made it known that she prefers to be called Catherine, so for God’s sake please stop calling her Kate Middleton.” (Which he just has.) “In Los Angeles, complete strangers will give you a full-body hug upon meeting you for the first time. … You will never, ever see them again.”
One might expect all this taxonomy to bring Kwan’s characters to more dimensional life, but if anything, it pins them more fiercely to the page, prisoners of their coordinates (as used to happen to Tom Wolfe’s characters). The rich may be different from you and me, but, in “Lies and Weddings,” they’re awfully alike, whether they’re walking about on heated Portoro marble floors or mounting weddings with 50 hot-air balloons or organizing very intimate affairs with 150 of their closest friends.
Are we to revel in or recoil from their unheeding hedonism? Behind every great fortune, it has been said, there is a crime, and Kwan makes a point of noting what wealth can wreak — poverty, racism, exploitation, environmental degradation — but he’s too canny a showman to let any of these critiques linger. In the world of rom-com fantasy, being wealthy has always been a hell of a lot more fun than being poor. If some guy’s going to be impaled on a chandelier, please God, let it be crystal.
Louis Bayard, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of several novels, including “Jackie & Me” and the upcoming “The Wildes.”
