The Weekend by Charlotte Wood review – intimate and insightful
Australian writer Charlotte Wood’s last novel, 2015’s The Natural Way of Things, imagined a labour camp populated by women who had publicly accused their sexual abusers, a dystopia that soon chimed with its times and was likened to The Handmaid’s Tale.
The Weekend returns to more everyday experiences of women’s lives, in particular, friendship and growing old. Its frame is narrow – three women in their 70s, a Christmas weekend – but Wood zooms in for revealing, intimate close-ups.
The trio have gathered to clean out their dead friend Sylvie’s beach house. Naturally, this prompts the women to take inventories of their own lives too: achievements and failures, griefs and lost opportunities. And what’s uncovered makes them reassess the stories they hold about the lives they’ve led.
Adele is an actor, now broke and forgotten; she’s obsessed with maintaining her good figure, revelling in sensual pleasure. By contrast, Jude is rigid, uptight; she ran restaurants for years and likes to provide, but is also judgmental, impatient. She’s especially exasperated by Wendy, a lightly chaotic feminist scholar, bringing her ancient dog, Finn, a gift from Sylvie after Wendy’s husband died. Wood affectingly captures the emotional dependence we can feel for pets, although Finn’s decrepitude can be used a little heavy-handedly as an end-of-life symbol.
Related: Charlotte Wood: 'What are we really afraid of when we think of old age?'
Sylvie, however, remains unknown, missing for the reader as for her friends. Personally, I’d rather have been able to slot this final puzzle piece in. But Wood finds a beautiful balance between her three women, swivelling between their perspectives on the present and their shared past. The gaps between how a character sees themselves and how their friends see them are astutely drawn, both painfully comic and frequently heartbreaking.
Although an enjoyable read, The Weekend does focus on the bleaker aspects of ageing and the frustrations and irritations of friendships rather than the joys. Avoiding the wise-old-woman trope is itself wise, but I felt that three such formidable figures would find positive new perspectives in growing old. Instead, ageing is presented as a regrettable, humiliating thing.
Still, Wood is to be praised for taking female friendship seriously and for being caustically honest – there’s not a sentimental line in this beautifully insightful book.
• The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
