A Week of This

Just to be clear: there are no happy endings awaiting the characters in A Week of This. Even though the novel chronicles seven days in the lives of a dysfunctional family, no epiphanies are reached, true love confessed or dilemmas solved. Yet the small-scale tragedy is weirdly enjoyable due to the protagonists, who are darkly amusing as they grind through life and ponder their bleak future.

Manda is the most rage-filled of the clan, still fuming about how her parents’ decision to move to the dying town of Dunbridge, Ontario, has kept her trapped her there decades after the fact. She also has plenty of resentment left over for her meek husband Patrick who, when not struggling to keep his sporting goods store open, is pressuring her to have a baby. But she has enough people to take care of already, including Ken, her mentally dim older brother, and Marcus, her barely employed stepbrother who she alternately dotes on and nags almost as if he was her own son.

Their miseries are a bit depressing to digest at first, but Whitlock’s has such a fine knack for observational details that one can’t help but become engrossed. A Week of This is filled with engaging prose about the mundane, such as the description of location of Manda’s workplace:

The call-centre where Manda worked sat above a bridal store that never seemed to be open. There was dust on the shoulders and heads of the mannequins, the dead-eyed brides and frozen flower girls. Manda hadn’t worn a dress like any of the ones in the window when she married Patrick, so it always pleased her to see them looking rotten.

In three sentences Whitlock communicates Manda’s bitter dismissal of her marriage, Dunbridge’s broken economy, and how the town has broken her. It is this quality of Whitlock’s writing that saves his novel from being too downbeat to finish reading. He is able to create characters that are painfully yet hilariously real in their diets (spaghetti, chocolate bars), choice of television shows (soap operas, cartoons) and their interaction with one another (a lot of squabbling). He renders them so vivid in their banalities that it’s hard not to deeply empathize with their predicaments, as Wednesday becomes Saturday becomes Tuesday, though it’s clear that nothing major is going to happen to them.

The cycle of debt and self-pity takes on deeper significance in the wake of current economic woes. The blaring headlines that about rising fuel costs and the subprime mortgage crisis could all too easily—and in all probability—affect the residents of Dunbridge. Patrick would lose his store; Manda would lose her job; they both would eventually lose their home. A Week of This is being played out in the headlines every day, but rarely do we let these stories make an impression on us unless they are given a fictional spin.