I’m trying to resist the temptation to think that this book was written to order: ” This’ll attract sales -how about a book about aging women that book groups can discuss!?” It certainly felt as if it were aimed at an educated, older female audience of readers. Aging, women’s friendships, betrayal… all set in a beachside setting over the Christmas weekend on the central coast of NSW.
Jude, Wendy and Adele, all in their seventies, have been going to Silvie’s beachside house for Christmas for years, and they head there again. But this time it is different: Silvie has died, and they have come to clean out the house for sale. The 1970s house has seen better days despite its ocean views, with its creaking inclinator (i.e. lift) obviating the need to scramble up the steep cliffside driveway, and it is full of the greasy, musty, scurf and accumulated detritus of a long residence. Jude, successful restaurant manager, has arrived to work; widowed public intellectual Wendy has brought her sick, old, mangy dog Finn, and washed-up actress Adele has come as an escape from her female partner who has been quite insistent that their relationship is at an end. They are all well aware that this phase of their life and friendship has come to an end.
They have been friends for over forty years, and I guess that in that time you could accumulate a long list of slights and peeves. They are judgmental of each other and hold secrets and deceptions from each other. Jude is the long-term mistress of the married Daniel, with whom she spends a week a year at the beach-house after the other women have gone home. Rather implausibly, these long-term friends have never met Daniel, although they are aware of his existence. Wendy is in the final stages of her academic career, but she feels that she still has one final book in her. She had two children, now adults, with her husband Lance, and after his death her friend Sylvie brought her the puppy Finn, who by now is a blind, deaf, incontinent and confused dog, who should have been put down long before. Adele has not worked for some time, but still dresses in skin-tight tops to reveal her cleavage and takes pride in her athleticism. However, years of sporadic theatre work have left her financially distressed and she has not worked in a long time, even though some other actresses her age have continued to do so.
The story is set over just a couple of days, and it felt rather like a play. I read this immediately after reading Demon Copperhead, which was such an exhilarating experience that this felt particularly jejune in comparison. It was a particularly ‘interior’ book, with lots of backstory and cogitation, revolving around relationships and choices and responses to aging and loss. She did capture the setting well: I could ‘see’ the house, and even the characters, in my mind’s eye, and there was a veracity in the complexity and ambivalence in their relationship together. I was surprised that Wood herself is ‘only’ 58 because she wrote well about aging women’s bodies and the indignities that they subject us to. But I can’t help feeling that she was writing to a particular audience- me- and perhaps the stereotypes she held up were just a little bit too close to home.
My rating: 7/10
Read because: CAE bookgroup
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 