Charlotte Wood, The Weekend

- Adele, Jude and Wendy are friends of Sylvie who has recently passed away. They’ve come to her beach house north of Sydney over the Xmas weekend to clean it up. Adele, the fading actress, is arty and creative and still physically attractive. Jude, an ex-restaurant worker, is fastidious, bossy, organised and intelligent ('No wonder Jude had never been a mother. It would offend her sense of order'). Wendy, an old hippy and respected academic, has let herself go and is now overweight and poorly dressed. She also drives an old, broken down car, and has a dog, Finn, who is deaf, nearly blind, old, arthritic and half dead.  

- There's a distinct smell of decay in this whole group, and vivid memories of former glories. 

- As someone who absolutely loved Wood's previous, award-winning novel The Natural Way of Things, principally because of its depth and resonance, I was at first quite disappointed with this one. These characters seemed entirely batshit crazy and uninteresting. A pretty ordinary tale of fading seniors and their typical group dynamics. And the dog profoundly irritated me. 

- But after the first day’s cleaning, they go to the beach, then take showers, then head to a flash restaurant. Adele meets an old actress ‘friend’. Suddenly the book becomes hugely more interesting. Wood's sharpness of insight comes to the fore. She's brutal in her critiques and observations about their lives, old bodies and old friends. It's supremely intelligent. 

- They hold a Christmas Eve party and the wine flows and tensions emerge. We've all been to these, and Wood captures the drama superbly. 

- One guest, youngish theatre director, Joe Gillespie says: ‘You old girls are fucking hilarious’. But they are not. They are real in ways he would never know.

- The ending is powerful. I was struck by the beautiful image of the exhausted and storm-drenched Wendy and her dog being welcomed by a small congregation for midnight mass - ‘...trusting in this ancient, nonsensical, holy thing, accepting bread from a stranger’. 

- And the story of Daniel, Jude’s 40-year lover, who has a separate life as a husband and father, and who she only sees on weekends, is very affecting.

- So, in the end, I enjoyed this novel immensely. Being of the same age, perhaps too much of it struck me personally.