Laura’s view, as cousin but outsider, is a good start for the reader trying also to get to grips with this vast family of Fairchilds. As soon as Laura puts the wish into words, it is granted by her aunt without a second thought. The moment where she finally is co-opted into the wedding party is very Welty indeed: it turns out to be an obstacle that never really existed. She yearns to be one of the wedding party, wearing one of the dresses which (scandalously) are in different shades of red – but, as she explains to everybody, she cannot because her mother has died. There is a crowd of voices and perspectives, starting with young Laura McRaven, who is Dabney’s cousin and whose mother has recently died. The only other one of Welty’s works that I’ve read, The Optimist’s Daughter, is much leaner and forward-focused, and (it has to be said) probably better Delta Wedding is a novel to wade into, enjoying the patchwork which is woven around the reader, never quite settling or knowing which direction to go in. This is not a novel to read for plot or structure. But the lead-up to the wedding is anything but simple, filled with the minutiae of family arguments, anxieties, and affections. The wedding is quite simple – 19 year old Dabney Fairchild is marrying a man twice her age, without any real noticeable connection between them, though nobody seems overly concerned about whether or not the match will be a happy or unhappy one. There are no mentions of war: this may have been written during World War Two, but is set back in 1923 – a couple of decades but a million miles away. The premise for Welty’s 1945 novel is there in the title: a wedding is taking place in the deep South, and the whole family are gathering around for it. Luckily the inside of the book lives up to the exterior. Along with the other new reprints from Apollo (an imprint of Head of Zeus), the paper quality, choice of image, and interesting directional lines on the cover, come together to make a thing of beauty and a joy forever. The transitions are so smoothly made that you seem to be all over the place at once, knowing the living members of three generations and all the skeletons and ghosts.Delta Wedding might win the award for the most beautiful book I’ve read for this issue of Shiny New Books – as an object, I mean, though the term can also apply to the writing. The interplay of family life, with a dozen different people saying and doing a dozen different things all at the same time, is wonderfully handled by Miss Welty so that no detail is lost, every detail had its place in the pattern of the whole. It describes the novel as going "deep into the motives and moods and compulsions that move her characters".
The New York Times praised the characterization of the novel.
Initial reception of the novel was chequered, with many reviewers challenging the absence of plot.
The novel's focus on the mundane and social life of the central South elicited considerable critique from contemporary critics.
Set in 1923, the novel tells of the experiences of the Fairchild family in a domestic-drama filled week leading up to Dabney Fairchild's wedding to the family overseer, Troy Flavin, during an otherwise unexceptional year in the Mississippi Delta. Delta Wedding is a 1946 Southern fiction novel by Eudora Welty.
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