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From the winner of the 2016 Stella Prize comes 'The Weekend', a tedious drama rife with clichés older than its walking-framed cast. When three caricatures and a heavy-handed canine metaphor come together in the wake of the novel's sole plot-point - a friend's death - they spend a weekend womansplaining the faults of their so-called friends. The story sizzles with mundane conflict - a dog coming indoors, a dog coming off its leash, a dog coming to the beach, stale bread - between characters who lean on one-dimensional personalities as though they are walking canes. 


Wood flouts the opportunity to establish any form of connection with her reader, maintaining a third-person narration that acquires the opinions of its subjects without changing its timbre. The same voice that criticises Jude with Wendy's thoughts criticises Wendy with Adele's thoughts, creating a soulless parade of vacuous nit-picking that fails to culminate meaningfully. Sprinkled throughout, the reader is forced to encounter gratuitous appraisals of feminism, modernity, misogyny and ageism; Wood enfeebles her own story in order to say nothing new or worthwhile about them. Meanwhile, name-dropped Australian suburbs are used as substitutions for character development and cursory profanities - piss and tits, mostly - are sore thumbs hoping to propel the story forward. 


The underwhelming Christmas setting is neglected until a cheesy final chapter rediscovers it, trembling. Rather than providing a backdrop against which emotions are pitted, the festive season is a half-baked blanket character trait, undercutting human complexity in favour of I Love Christmas/I Hate Christmas filler. The book has little to say about its primary theme of grief, instead spending its time fiddling with repulsive and ultimately meaningless metaphors: the hibiscus flower is a blood clot in her drink, the waves do not retrieve a dead creature from the shore, the room is a dark cave (tautology, anyone?). 


Excruciatingly derivative, 'The Weekend' is written like mass market crime fiction but lacks the depth of character and plot you might expect in such a book. 


1.5 stars, rounded down.