The Performance
A Novel
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A novel about three women at turning points in their lives, and the one night that changes everything.
One night, three women go to the theater to see a play. Wildfires are burning in the hills outside, but inside the theater it is time for the performance to take over.
Margot is a successful, flinty professor on the cusp of retirement, distracted by her fraught relationship with her adult son and her ailing husband. After a traumatic past, Ivy is is now a philanthropist with a seemingly perfect life. Summer is a young drama student, an usher at the theater, and frantically worried for her girlfriend whose parents live in the fire zone.
While the performance unfolds on stage, so does the compelling trajectory that will bring these three women together, changing them all. Deliciously intimate and yet emotionally wide-ranging, The Performance is a novel that both explores the inner lives of women as it underscores the power of art and memory to transform us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas's incisive sophomore effort (after Fugitive Blue) follows three women of different generations and backgrounds as they separately attend a performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in Melbourne. While bushfires rage across Victoria, the women sit in a dark, air-conditioned theater, watching the play unfold as they consider their own existential fears and desires. Margot Pierce, a literature professor in her 70s, grapples with the prospect of retirement and her husband's illness; Ivy Parker, a middle-aged philanthropist, contemplates the still-excruciating loss of her first child; and 22-year-old Summer, a drama student and usher at the theater, worries about her girlfriend, April, who must travel into the fire zone to help her parents. Though the women only cross paths briefly, during a witty section of the novel that unfolds at intermission, their respective anxieties about climate change, the confines of womanhood, and love and loss intersect magnificently throughout. Meanwhile, as the onstage drama progresses, the play's protagonist becomes increasingly trapped by the desiccated earth, thus serving as a performative embodiment of the women's own inexorable journeys through time. This richly rendered and perceptive meditation on motherhood, memory, and the challenges of living through frightful times will hold readers spellbound.
