The Weekend

June 1, 2020
In Wood’s sharp sixth novel (after The Natural Way of Things), three septuagenarian Aussie women gather to help settle the affairs of their dead friend, Sylvie. Jude, a cold-blooded restaurateur and for decades the mistress of a married man, takes charge of the friends’ task of clearing out Sylvie’s beach house, which is perched on a perilous cliff. Wendy, a bedraggled feminist academic still mourning the death of her husband, arrives with her decrepit dog, Finn, whose ailments mirror the women’s own. Late, as usual, comes Adele, a once-celebrated actor who hasn’t had a gig in some time. Together, the old friends begin sorting through Sylvie’s things. Inevitably, in the process of clearing and discarding, the women unearth old irritations and a devastating secret, causing them to question how they’d ever become friends in the first place. Wood explores myriad possibilities of success, failure, philosophy, psychic ailments, and forms of melancholy that a 70-something woman might experience. While the qualities seem to be assigned almost at random to her characters, somewhat diminishing their effect (Wood likens Wendy to Sontag even though she dresses like “a witless old hippie”), the women are mostly recognizable nonetheless, and painfully relatable. Baby boomers and Wood’s fans will best appreciate this astringent story.

June 1, 2020
Three elderly female friends reunite to clear out the home of a fourth, who recently died, in a short meditation on relationship bonds and the wisdom--and other traits--accumulated over a lifetime. Largely observing the classical unities of time, place, and action, Wood's new novel plays out like a small theatrical drama, a chamber piece in which the three characters, both individually and as a group, confront the limits of their friendship. The time is Christmas, the place is Sylvie's appealing but decaying seaside home in Bittoes, not far from Sydney, and the action spans the weekend during which Jude, Wendy, and Adele, friends for 40 years, meet to empty the place of Sylvie's belongings. Fastidious, waspish Jude approaches the task efficiently; blowsy actress Adele ("so short and so bosomy") responds chaotically; and widowed academic Wendy, accompanied by her decrepit dog, Finn, does what she can. Rigid and preoccupied, Jude is awaiting the arrival of her rich long-term lover, Daniel; artistically impoverished Adele is probably homeless now that her latest relationship seems to be ending; while Wendy is fending off the obvious need to have Finn put to sleep. Wood consistently compartmentalizes, and limits, the women--the thin one, the fat one, the pert one; the clever one, the artsy one, the bossy one--while unraveling their separate and overlapping pasts. The present is largely static until a big bang of a finale is set in motion. The novel displays wit, insight, and some astute social commentary, especially on the topic of age, but offers little in the way of engagement or surprises. Meanwhile poor, mangy Finn haunts the proceedings, an ever present specter of decline and mortality. A neatly observed, tightly circumscribed journey into predictable territory.

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July 25, 2019
After Sylvie’s sudden death, her three closest friends—former restaurateur Jude, public intellectual Wendy and actress Adele—must renegotiate the boundaries of their lifelong foursome. As they retreat to Sylvie’s isolated beach house over the Christmas weekend, each woman grapples with her own private grievances, and the group’s emotional disequilibrium ultimately exposes a long-held secret. While the narrative may seem familiar—old friends coming together and having to face the buried resentments and recriminations of the past—Wood handles it with such empathy and dramatic dexterity that it becomes fresh and confronting. She not only captures the awkward navigations that occur when a death permanently disrupts the balance of a long-term friendship, but also how those navigations are shaped by time of life. Jude, Wendy and Adele are in their 70s, an age where losing a loved one is an ever-present threat, but Sylvie’s strange absence conjures its own uncomfortable emotional spectres. It’s refreshing to read a novel that centres the experiences of older women with unflinching pathos and clarity: Wood’s characters are fully formed, flawed but sympathetic in very different ways. The Weekend is a sharply observed portrait of growing old that’s sure to resonate with a broad age range of literary fiction readers.

Carody Culver is a freelance writer, assistant editor at Griffith Review and a contributing editor at Peppermint magazine