The Weekend: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
“The Big Chill with a dash of Big Little Lies . . . Knife-sharp and deeply alive.” —The Guardian (London)
“An insightful, poignant, and fiercely honest novel about female friendship and female aging.” —Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend
“Friendship, ambition, love, sexual politics and death: it’s all here in one sharp, funny, heartbreaking, and gorgeously written package. I loved it.” —Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
Three women in their seventies reunite for one last, life-changing weekend in the beach house of their late friend.
Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank, and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three.
They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur; Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual; and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they’ve remained close all these years, the grieving women gather at Sylvie’s old beach house—not for festivities this time, but to clean it out before it is sold. Can they survive together without her?
Without Sylvie to maintain the group’s delicate equilibrium, frustrations build and painful memories press in. Fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests, and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface—and threatens to sweep away their friendship for good.
The Weekend explores growing old and growing up, and what happens when we’re forced to uncover the lies we tell ourselves. Sharply observed and excruciatingly funny, this is a jewel of a book: a celebration of tenderness and friendship from an award-winning writer.
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Reviews for The Weekend
109 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Three elderly friends have gathered over a weekend before Christmas at the beach house owned by their recently deceased friend Sylvie. Sylvie''s partner has asked them to clear the cottage in preparation for its sale.
The friends are so different it's difficult to see how their apparently life-long friendship has flourished. There's Adele, an aging and somewhat vain actress who now in her old age is having a difficult time finding parts. She is suffering financially, and relies on the kindness of her friends to get by. Jude is a practical, take-charge, officious, and somewhat overbearing restaurant owner. She is waiting to spend a week with her long-time married lover, and only in his presence does she feel alive. Wendy is a widowed former hippy and current college professor and well-known public intellectual. Nevertheless she cowers in the face of Jude's disapproval of her sloppiness. Against Jude's wishes she has brought her elderly dog Finn with her, a dog whose senility and physical ailments Wendy is refusing to acknowledge.
I thought I would enjoy this book much more than I did. I thought that there was an overemphasis on the litany of crud these ladies had to go through in the laundry room, pantry, etc. I became a bit bored. No treasures here. And I read that the author did some research in order to write about older women and get into the heads of her characters. I was expecting lots of musing of the philosophical issues we tend to come to consider as we get older--What's it all about? Is this all there is? etc. Instead there was lots about creaky knees and whether I can get up off the floor without groaning. A bit of that sort of thing is true to life, but this was a bit too prevalent.
So, it was an okay book, but not one I'd necessarily recommend.
2 1/2 stars - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well, it looks like people either love this book or hate it! It's a short book about 3 friends in their 70s who have lost an important member of their group. They're meeting at her beach house to clean it out out before it is sold and spend one last Christmas in the house. Without the presence of Sylvie everything shifts and the remaining three must decide how their very long friendship will continue to go on...or not.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Not every book is good for everyone. This is one of them. I liked the first few pages and after that, I was disengaged. Three friends get together at the house of another friend that died. There's also a dog that is mentioned - a lot - in the book. I was glad to get to the last page.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I was really excited to read this one - I love the cover art and the story of three septuagenarian friends reuniting for a weekend at a beach house appealed to me, especially after enjoying the tale of persnickety, 85-year-old Veronica McReedy in the titular "How the Penguins Saved Veronica".
However, I wasn't able to get more than four-and-half pages in on this one, and even then because I was starting it over my lunch break and didn't have another book or magazine nearby to read. (Yes, I have to read while I eat! I was that kid who always ate my breakfast while reading the back of the cereal box). There was something about the writing style that I really struggled. Plus, a general vibe that the story wasn't going to go in a direction that I would enjoy.
Wood is an award-winning novelist, and this is an international best-seller, so I was disappointed I didn't like it. However, I'm sure (know based on the stats) that others will love it.
Regardless, a big thank you to Charlotte Wood, Riverhead Books, and Goodread Giveaways for providing me with a complementary copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is my favourite CW book (so far)and the very best book I've read on long-standing female friendships. One I've pressed on my 'annual weekend away' girlfriends.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not very likeable characters.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Short of It:
Started off as a sweet story about three friends coming together after a friend’s death, but then was punched through with sadness and a little darkness which I was not expecting.
The Rest of It:
After the passing of their friend Sylvie, Adele, Jude, Wendy and her dog Finn, arrive at Sylvie’s old beach house to prepare it for sale. Adele, a former actress who still has her looks about her, prances around, flaunting her flexibility which she still possesses even in her 70s. Jude, the most sensible but also the most abrasive of the trio, puts up with her to a point but lets everyone know when they are annoying or slacking at the task at hand. After all, they have a job to do.
Wendy arrives a little sad over the death of her friend but also sad about the husband she lost and the next chapter of their lives. They aren’t getting any younger. By her side, is her sweet dog Finn who is also getting on in his years. So much so that he has anxiety attacks, paces relentlessly and has accidents, regularly. Wendy knows that she should put him down, but can’t bring herself to do so. Poor Finn.
The author does a magnificent job of capturing that fleeting feeling of time passing too quickly. In their prime, these four women were formidable and strong, successful and bonded through friendship. But in their 70s, they are tired and short with each other as they each figure out how they fit together without their friend Sylvie. As insecurities flare and one big secret is revealed that threatens to destroy their friendship, they pause for a moment to figure out where they want to go because even at this age, they have choices.
I really enjoyed this book and the writing in particular but there was one big problem I had with it and it’s the treatment of the elderly dog, Finn. I know that a beloved dog approaching the end of its life was probably intentional given that these ladies were also getting on in years and approaching the last stage of life, but the way this poor animal is treated by the other ladies in the house really bothered me. He’s full of anxiety, pushed around, forced to sleep outside even though he’s terrified of his own shadow. I really do not know why the author chose to include such horrible treatment of this poor dog. It was terribly disappointing and I felt, a poor choice and unfortunately affected how I felt about the book overall.
If you can get past these moments with the dog, then you might appreciate the writing, as I did. But I felt so sorry for this poor pup. I really did.
For more reviews, visit my blog: Book Chatter. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enjoyable book about old people set in Australia. Pity the ending was not complete. Why authors don’t finish books is annoying
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This is a quote from the Australian 'Guardian': Wood, a mere youngster in her 50s, researched the biology of old age during a fellowship at the University of Sydney and nimbly inhabits these bodies and minds.
Reality: Those of us who have reached our seventies have had lot of time to come to terms with mortality. We do not waste our time whingeing about it. We get on with the life we have left.
If I researched the biology of youth would that make me qualified to write about it?
Aging is not about biology.
Old people are not that different from everyone else; we merely creak a bit more. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“Adele and Wendy and Jude did not fit properly anymore, without Sylvie.”
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is a searing and insightful portrait of friendship, ageing and grief.
“Because what was friendship, after forty years? What would it be after fifty, or sixty? It was a mystery. It was immutable, a force as deep and inevitable as the vibration of the ocean coming to her through the sand. Wasn’t it?”
Less than a year after the death of Sylvie, her lifelong closest friends -Jude, Wendy and Adele, are spending Christmas weekend emptying her holiday home in Bittoes on the NSW Central Coast. It’s a chore each of them have been dreading, and in the sweltering summer heat, the task threatens to tear them apart.
“‘This was something nobody talked about: how death could make you petty. And how you had to find a new arrangement among your friends, shuffling around the gap of the lost one, all of you suddenly mystified by how to be with one another.’”
Shifting perspectives reveal the complex inner lives of these women as they grieve, and bicker and reminisce. Wood explores the fragility and resilience of their friendship as old hurts resurface, resentments simmer, and secrets are laid bare.
“It was true that time had gradually taken on a different cast. It didn’t seem to go forwards or backwards now, but up and down. The past was striated through you, through your body, leaching into the present and the future. The striations were evident, these streaky layers of memory, of experience— but you were one being, you contained all of it. If you looked behind or ahead of you, all was emptiness.”
Aged in their seventies, the women keenly feel the passage of time, reflecting on their pasts, and contemplating their futures as they attend to their tasks. Having enjoyed successful careers, and relationships, they struggle with their losses, and what they have yet to lose. Ageing is an uncomfortable process for them all, though in different ways for different reasons. Wendy’s old and feeble dog, Finn, is a clear metaphor for its indignities.
“And each of the three let go, plunged down and felt herself carried, lifted up in the great sweep of the water’s force, and then—astonishingly gently—set down on her feet again. They breathed, and wiped their eyes, reached for each other again, waited for the next wave.”
Yet there is plenty of life left in these women, none are quite ready to submit to mortality.
Told with wit, tenderness and brutal honesty, The Weekend explores the mundane to expose the extraordinary. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5First of all, this is NOT crime fiction (for those who follow my blog).
Four friends, now in their seventies, have met for years at Christmas at a beach house on the New South Wales coast. Now there are just three of them, and they are meeting to clean out the beach house in preparation for sale.
It becomes obvious that the glue that has held them together over the years is the owner of the beach house, the friend who has recently died. And perhaps the things that separate them are bigger than the things that bind.
We find out rather a lot about their current situations, and also a lot about what has happened in their lives over the years.
A thought provoking read. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Not a very enjoyable book. "With friends like these, who needs enemies ?" A very negative picture of life for women in their seventies. The writer is only 55 and has no idea. If that's what she thinks we are like .........
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An engrossing character study of three very different elderly friends.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As an older person with a recent brush with death, this book about 3 older women confronting their demise, was pretty appealing to me. The characters are all interesting and their relationships with each other and with significant others are realistic, nuanced, and well described. In many ways it's a 5-star novel for me except that I was left with the distinct impression that this novel was over-thought. Too much symbolism, with characters too different from each other, designed to make a point rather than to tell a convincing story. Wood tells us that their differences were brought to the surface partly because of the absence of the dead Sylvie, who had helped to keep the group together, but she doesn't really make out a good case that they ever did have a cohesive group. The women were almost caricatures at times. Sometimes, not all the time. Mostly the story was a great read.
Book preview
The Weekend - Charlotte Wood
CHAPTER ONE
It was not the first time it had happened, this waking early in the pale light with a quiet but urgent desire to go to church.
Cognitive decline, doubtless. Frontal-lobe damage, religion, fear of death—they were all the same thing. Jude had no illusions.
This longing—was it a longing? It was mysterious, an insistence inside her, a sort of ache that came and went, familiar and yet still powerful and surprising when it arrived. Like the arthritis that flared at the base of her thumb. The point was, this feeling had nothing to do with Christmas or with anything in her waking life. It came somehow from the world of sleep, from her dreaming self.
At first when it came, it would trouble her, but now Jude gave herself over to it. She lay in her white bed on the morning before Christmas Eve and imagined the cool, dark space of a cathedral, where she might be alone, welcomed by some unseen, velvety force. She imagined herself kneeling, resting her head on the ancient wood of the pew in front of her, and closing her eyes. It was peaceful, in that quiet space of her imagination.
Frontal-lobe shrinkage, doubtless. At this age it was inevitable.
She pictured the soft gray sphere of her brain and remembered lambs’ brains on a plate. She used to enjoy eating brains; it was one of the dishes she ordered often with Daniel. But the last time she did—three tender, tiny things lined up along a rectangular plate—she was revolted. Each one was so small you could fit it in a dessert spoon, and in this fashionable Turkish restaurant they were unadorned, undisguised by crumbs or garnish, just three bald, poached splotches on a bed of green. She ate them, of course she did, it was part of her code: You did not refuse what was offered. Chosen, indeed, here. But at first bite, the thing yielded in her mouth, too rich, like just-soft butter, tepid and pale gray, the color and taste of moths or death. In that moment she was shocked into a vision of the three lambs, each one its own conscious self, with its own senses, its intimate pleasures and pains. After a mouthful she could not go on, and Daniel ate the rest. She had wanted to say, I don’t want to die.
Of course she did not say that. Instead she asked Daniel about the novel he was reading. William Maxwell, or William Trevor, she often confused the two. He was a good reader, Daniel. A true reader. Daniel laughed at men who did not read fiction, which was nearly all the men he knew. They were afraid of something in themselves, he said. Afraid of being shown up, of not understanding—or more likely the opposite: They would be led to understanding themselves, and it scared the shit out of them. Daniel snorted. They said they didn’t have time for it, which was the biggest joke of all.
Jude pulled the sheet up to her chin. The day felt sticky already; the sheet was cool over her clammy body.
What would happen if she did not wake, one of these mornings? If she died one night in her bed? Nobody would know. Days would pass. Eventually Daniel would call and get no answer. Then what? They had never discussed this: what to do if she died in her bed.
Last Christmas, Sylvie was here, and this one she wasn’t—and now they were going to clear out the house at Bittoes. Take anything you want, Gail had said to them from Dublin in an e-mail. Have a holiday. How you could think cleaning your dead friend’s house a holiday . . . but it was Christmas, and Gail felt guilty for flitting off back to Ireland and leaving it to them. So. Take anything you want.
There was nothing Jude wanted. She couldn’t speak for the others.
Sylvie had been in the ground for eleven months.
The memorial had been in the restaurant (unrecognizable now from the old days—everything but the name had gone), and there were beautiful food and good champagne, good speeches. Wendy spoke brilliantly, honestly, poetically. Gail lurched with a silent, terrible sobbing, with Sylvie’s poor sad brother, Colin, beside her, unable to touch Gail for comfort. He was eighty-one; he’d been a greenskeeper at the golf club in their hometown, stayed long after the rest of the family left. Never managed to get over his sister’s being gay.
In the end Sylvie went where nobody expected: an old-fashioned burial in Mona Vale, next to her parents. To this part Jude and Wendy and Adele went with Colin, and Gail, and Andy and Elektra from the old days. There they’d all stood in the hot cemetery with a sympathetic priest (a priest! for Sylvie!), and Jude had picked up a handful of dirt and thrown it down. Strange that in all these years it was the first time she’d ever done that, or even seen it done outside a film. She felt silly squatting in the dirt, scrabbling in the dry gravel with her polished nails, but when she stretched and flung and let the earth rain down on Sylvie’s coffin, a breath of awful sorrow swept through her, up and out of her body into the deafening, glittering white noise of the cicadas.
Sylvie was dead and felt no pain. They had said good-bye. Nothing was left to regret, but she was still in there, in that box, under the weight of all that earth, her cold little body rotted away.
Gail said she looked peaceful at the end. But that wasn’t peace; it was absence of muscle tone, of life. Being dead made you look younger, it was a fact. Jude had seen six or seven dead faces now, and they all, in the moment after life left, smoothed out and looked like their much younger selves. Even like babies once or twice.
How long did it take a corpse to rot? Sylvie would screech at a question like that. You’re so ghoulish, Jude.
The ceiling fan in her bedroom rotated slowly, ticking, above her. Her life was as clean and bare as a bone, bare as that white blade, its path through the unresisting air absolutely known, unwavering. This should be a comfort. It was a comfort. The rooms of her apartment were uncluttered by the past. Nobody would have to plow through dusty boxes and cupboards full of rubbish for Jude.
She lay in her bed and thought of cathedrals. And she thought of animals: rats beneath the floorboards, cockroaches bristling behind the crossed ankles and bleeding feet of plaster Jesuses. She thought of dark, malevolent little birds; of the muffled small sounds of creatures dying in the spaces between bricks and plaster, between ceilings and roof beams. She thought of their shit drying out and turning hard, and what happened to their skin and fur and organs, rotting unconsecrated in roof cavities.
She would not go to church, obviously, for she was neither a fool nor a coward.
She would go instead to the butcher and the grocer and then the hardware store for the few remaining cleaning things, and she would drive without hurrying along the freeway to the coast, and this afternoon the others would arrive.
It was not a holiday, the three women had warned one another, but the warning was really for Adele, who would disappear at the first sign of work. Adele would be useless, but they couldn’t leave her out.
It was only three days. Two, really, given that most of today would be filled with the shopping and driving and arriving. And on Boxing Day the other two would leave and Daniel would come. She watched the fan blade’s smooth glide. She would be like this: unhurried, gliding calmly through the hours until Adele and Wendy left. She would not let the usual things get to her; they were all too old for that.
It occurred to her that one of them could be next to go. Funny how she’d not thought of that until this moment. She threw off the sheet in a clean white billow.
After her shower, though, while she was making the bed, already some little flecks of annoyance with Wendy began creeping in. It was like dipping a hand into a pocket and searching the seams with your fingers; there would always be some tiny irritant crumbs if she wanted to find them. Why, for example, had Wendy refused a lift, insisting on making the trip in that terrible shitbox of hers? Jude snapped the sheet, fending off the affront that would come if she let it, about Wendy’s secretive refusal to explain. Jude’s hospitality, not just in the long-gone restaurant days but in general terms, was well known. People said it about her, had always done so. She guarded her generosity even more as they all grew older and she saw other women become irrationally fearful about money and turn miserly. Pinching coins out of their purses in cafés, bargaining in charity shops. Holding out their hands for twenty cents’ change. It was appalling. It was beneath them.
Yet now, as she folded hospital corners—her bulging disk threatened to twang, but she maneuvered carefully and eased around it—she considered the possibility that hidden within the compliments about her largesse might be needles of sarcasm. Once her sister-in-law had murmured, It’s not that generous if you have to keep mentioning it,
and Jude had burned with silent rage. Burned and burned.
If she told Daniel about any of this, if she complained about Wendy and the car, he’d shake his head and tell her she had too much time on her hands.
She yanked another corner of the sheet.
If Sylvie were here, Jude could phone her and find out what the matter was with Wendy, and they could be exasperated together and then agree that it didn’t matter, and Jude would be able to compose herself for when Wendy parked her filthy, battered car in the driveway at Bittoes, and she would be calm and welcoming and free of grievance. Now she would have to do it by herself.
This was something nobody talked about: How death could make you petty. And how you had to find a new arrangement among your friends, shuffling around the gap of the lost one, all of you suddenly mystified by how to be with one another.
With other circles of friends, a death meant you were permitted to quietly go your separate ways. After the first shocks, the early ones in your forties and fifties—the accidents and suicides and freak diseases, the ones that orphaned children, shook the ground beneath cities—when you reached your seventies and the disintegration began in earnest, there was the understanding, never spoken, that the latest—the news of another stroke, a surprise death, a tumor or an Alzheimer’s diagnosis—would not be the last. A certain amount of withdrawal was acceptable. Within reason you did what you must, to protect yourself. From what? Jude stood, looking down at the flat, white space of the bed. From all that . . . emotion. She turned and left the room.
It was true that time had gradually taken on a different cast. It didn’t seem to go forward or backward now, but up and down. The past was striated through you, through your body, leaching into the present and the future. The striations were evident, these streaky layers of memory, of experience—but you were one being, you contained all of it. If you looked behind or ahead of you, all was emptiness.
When she’d told Daniel—crying bitterly, smoking—what Sylvie had said in the hospital about Wendy and Adele, he gazed at her with soft reproach and said, "But, Judo, of course you will, because you do love them. Because they’re your dearest friends."
Daniel was quite sentimental, really. It could be oddly appealing in a man. Why was that, when in a woman it was so detestable?
She sat at the dining table to drink her coffee. It was 7:34. If she got to the grocer by 8:15, she might find a parking space quickly, and then she could be in and out of the butcher and then the hardware place, home, and packed, and on the road by 9:30. Ten latest. She reached for the notepad with the list, swished it toward herself.
People went on about how death brought people together, but it wasn’t true. The graveyard, the stony dirt—that’s what it was like now. The topsoil had blown away and left only bedrock. It was embarrassing, somehow, to pretend they could return to the softness that had once cushioned their dealings with one another. Despite the fact that the three women knew one another better than they did their own siblings, Sylvie’s death had opened up strange caverns of distance between them.
She wrote: scourers.
And it had opened up great oceans of anger in Jude, which shocked her. Now when other people died, she found the mention of it offensive. It was Sylvie who had died, who was to be mourned. Other people’s neighbors and sisters were of no relevance; why did people keep telling her about them? Even Daniel! Holding her hand in his one evening, telling her his cousin Roger had gone, a heart attack on a boat. Jude had waited for him to come to the point before realizing it was sympathy he wanted. From her. It was all she could do not to spit on the floor. She had to put a hand to her mouth, the force of her need to spit was so great. She wanted to shout, So what, Roger died—of course he did! What did Daniel expect? Everybody died. But not Sylvie.
She looked at the list again. Adele had been at her about the pavlova. She knew it wasn’t a holiday, but it’s Christmas, Jude, it’s a tradition. Adele had always been soppy about things like this. Though actors were sentimental, in Jude’s experience; she supposed they had to be. They had to be able to believe in all sorts of things.
But the humidity would make a meringue collapse; it was going to be so wretchedly hot. They were all too fat anyway, especially Wendy. Christmas be damned, they could have fruit and yogurt. She put a line through eggs.
She had not spit on the floor, and she had not pulled her hand away from Daniel’s, and she said she was sorry even though all she felt for his dead cousin was shame, that he might try to associate himself with what had happened to Sylvie.
She stopped, looked at her list. Don’t be so hard on people, Jude. She added eggs again.
Jude hated having other candles lit next to the one she secretly thought of as Sylvie’s, in the cathedral she had stolen into once or twice. Sometimes she blew the other candles out.
None of this could be said. She lied in all the expected ways.
• • • •
Wendy ran her hand down the length of Finn’s sweaty, narrow back. It’s all right, boyo, it’s all right.
In her dented red Honda by the side of the freeway under the hot blue sky, she crooned softly to the dog who had clambered into the front and was trying to claw his way onto her lap. She hardly had room even to lean sideways but managed to release the lever: her seat slid all the way back with a chunking sound, and Finn landed heavily across her body. It was so hot here in the airless car.
She sat with her head pressed back against the seat, listening to the rhythmic on-off click of the hazard lights and the dog’s anxious whining, and looked out the window. She could see only the looming rush of car-ghosts into and then past her side-view mirror, and the grays and greens of scrub and road. For a moment she spiraled out and away from herself and Finn and the car into a high, aerial view of the bush and the road. She saw her car, a tiny red blob huddled beneath the great stone cliff on the freeway between the city and the coast. And then she plummeted down again and felt the panic of the landing, here in her present circumstances.
Finn whined and licked his lips and did not settle but instead tried to turn his large, shaggy body around in the small space, treading again over Wendy’s thighs, shifting his weight, his claws catching in the thin fabric of her trousers. He couldn’t pace his circles in the car; he would get more and more agitated. She’d hoped he would sleep all the way, but now the car had broken down and he was frightened, and Bittoes was still an hour away, and it was so muggy she could hardly breathe.
There was nothing to do but wait. She had found the roadside assistance number and called, and although her membership had lapsed, she could just pay the extra—thank God, thank God for mobile phones, thank God for credit cards. Sometimes the modern world was filled with miraculous goodness. Her phone battery had been full. Or half full. She extracted this merciful fact from the guilty chaos inside herself. She wasn’t so hopeless as to have a flat phone battery as well.
But the adrenaline of moments ago was still spreading through her body, the echo of it hot and cold and chemical like gin or anesthetic along her veins and through the core of her bones. She’d forgotten how it felt until the moment it happened. The soaking dread of a vehicle stuttering beneath you, suddenly dropping all power as you ascended a hill at a hundred and fifteen kilometers an hour with a line of cars barreling along behind you. She’d forgotten the drench of disbelief as the car faltered, forgotten the sound of your own voice calling out, No no please please come on, little car, just hang on, as you