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.
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