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The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

by
November 2019, no. 416

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 259 pp, 9781760292010

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood

by
November 2019, no. 416

‘What kind of game is the sea?’ asks the speaker of Tracy K. Smith’s poem ‘Minister of Saudade’. ‘Lap and drag’, comes the response, ‘Crag and gleam / That continual work of wave / And tide’. It is not until the end of The Weekend that the sea’s majestic game is brought into focus, and then the natural world rises, a riposte, to eclipse human trivia.

Before this, Charlotte Wood’s novel is emphatically domestic, the sea a backdrop to the tight dynamics of decades-long friendship, its presence only occasionally noticed as it ‘[slaps] against the seawall in lazy, rhythmic sloshes’. This, too, is a kind of riposte, since ‘domestic’ fiction, especially by women writers, has long been disparaged.

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Weekend' by Charlotte Wood

The Weekend

by Charlotte Wood

Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 259 pp, 9781760292010

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