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a highly polished novel
Although technically adults, few of the characters in Nathan Whitlock’s A Week of This have finished growing up. Following seven consecutive days in the life of a small-town family, Whitlock’s debut novel reveals the long-term damage parents can unintentionally do to their children.
At the centre of the novel is Manda, a middle-aged woman who refuses to have a child with her husband because she’s convinced that doing so is a kind of slavery practiced only by the very selfish. If that sounds like a trite teenage complaint, it’s because Manda and her two brothers’ own traumatic childhoods have prevented them from maturing. Manda’s developmentally handicapped brother is becoming more and more isolated. Her stepbrother coaches a junior hockey team to avoid real work and is childishly jealous of his girlfriend’s four-year-old son.
Whitlock has an excellent grasp of metaphor and simile, and A Week of This is a highly polished novel. It may not chart new thematic ground, but it effectively shows how broken families and middle-class life have failed to prepare an entire generation for adulthood.
