262 pp.

This novel is about three women of my age, the early seventies. Originally, it was a clique of friends comprising four women who had come to know each other when they were in their thirties: Sylvie, Jude, Wendy, and Adele. An important role is assigned to a dog, Finn, who was given to Wendy by Sylvie when the former’s male partner, Lance, had died. Finn is very unlike the clever Six-Thirty in Bonnie Garmus’ thoroughly entertaining and charming bestselling novel Lessons in Chemistry (2022). Finn is very old, frail, deaf, and probably blind and demented. Wendy’s friends think that he should be put to death to release him from his misery. His unintended triumph comes near the end of the book when he jumps on the silk sofa Jude had given to Sylvie, and that Jude still considers as near sacred. On top of this, the dog also vomits on this sofa what he had eaten from the chicken that Jude had prepared for dinner. Without Finn, there would be a great many blank pages in this novel. Its narrative style seems to have been designed to mirror the protagonists’ advanced age, except for the dramatic finale.

            The novel’s story is triggered by the death of Sylvie. When the group was still complete, it had spent many holydays at Sylvie’s seaside retreat. After her death, her female partner, Gail, disappeared abroad asking the remaining three friends to clear the house out, keeping for themselves whatever they liked. They did so on a Christmas weekend. So, the story tells what happened in this context among the three women, including their individual reflections. The cast of characters is as follows.

• Jude is a former restaurant manager, here cast in the role as the practical and bossy element of the three. She has a long-standing part-time affair with a man who spends most of his time with his official family. However, the relationship is emotionally of central importance to Jude, and it pays well since he is rich. When news of his impending death reaches her, she is deeply disturbed, but also sufficiently practical to wonder whether she can still stay in the apartment that had obviously been paid for him.

• Wendy is an acclaimed public intellectual with several well-received books to her credit. Until about p. 112, readers could well get the impression that Wendy’s main characterization relied on her struggle with Finn. At the end of the novel, readers are told that she published one more book after all that happened on that weekend.

• Adele used to be—and still thinks of herself as—a successful actress. Financially, she is basically broke. Homelessness is a real possibility since Liz, her latest female partner, had kicked her out, and Adele cannot serve the mortgage of her apartment. She has felt hurt many times by being at the fringe of this group of friends. For lack of money, she could never afford their lifestyles and thus missed their meetings in New York, Paris, and elsewhere. She also suffered from being ignored by the members of her profession: “She had important things to say about craft, about honesty, about impulse, about precision. Sometimes the frustration of never being asked pierced Adele so painfully she felt she’d been burned inside” (p. 71).

The story of this novel, then, relies on contrasting the four very different characters, their different approaches to fulfilling their assigned task, their group dynamics after an important part was removed by death, and the different approaches of the protagonists in dealing with their past, present, and future. This includes a painful insight, formulated by Wendy: “my life has not been what I believed it to be” (p. 247; italics in the original). Finally, Jude, Wendy, and Adele must also deal with the question of whether—after all the experiences on this weekend—they could still continue their friendship without the important presence of Sylvie.