Click Here To Purchase A Week of This 

Author: Nathan Whitlock

ISBN: 9781550228151

From literature, we always remember the truly exceptional characters, like Jay Gatsby and Anna Karenina. They are grand characters which have been erected, by their authors, as obelisks in tribute to the doom of all humanity. Their failures are the collective shortcomings of us all packaged into stories of tragedy that all can relate to. However, very few people ever actually experience the calamity of Tolstoy, for example, first hand. In Nathan Whitlock’s new book, A Week of This, the author more subtly explores the misfortune of our existence not by exposing the totality of human failure but by vividly and honestly portraying what Thoreau called the ‘silent desperation’ of most of our lives.

In the book, Whitlock follows an extended family living in rural Canada during an ordinary week of their lives. While the family is fairly typical, each faces the hardship the working and petit-bourgeois classes of capitalistic societies face everywhere—financial instability, employment insecurity, alienation, etc.  This is especially true of Whitlock’s primary protagonist, Manda who continually endures the eminent failure of her husband’s retail business, the care of her adult brother who is developmentally disabled, an ailing father, and the emotional menace of an abusive and estranged mother. She bares the weight of all of this while her house—her symbolic shelter and protection—slowly rots to pieces around her. Like most of us, Manda is simply a rider in what appears to be the pilotless world of late modernity. Still, in a completely relatable fashion she subsists despite the threat of total financial and, especially, emotional collapse.   

In A Week of This, Whitlock has done an outstanding job illustrating contemporary life in its nude figure. The title has captured, perfectly, the major theme of the book— the ‘This‘ being the persistent drizzle of problems to which there are no solutions. Probably Whitlock’s best accomplishment with this book is crystallizing that theme and showing great restraint doing so. He was able to resist the impulse to over sensationalize the essential adversity of modern life and have the troubles of his characters explode into an orgy of despair. Instead, in concordance with the realities of our time, Whitlock allows his characters to stew in their static levels of disaffection and gloom leaving them there, at the end of the story, where we remain in our own lives, at the end of the weeks we live—unresolved.

While overall the novel is certainly a success, the uninspiring and sluggish beginning of the book could easily prevented a reader from finding this out. Whitlock’s revealing of exposition was unwarrantedly dawdling and even quite tiresome to some degree. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the looming sense of disaster a procrastinator gets the day before a deadline, I might have never trudged onward. Furthermore, Whitlock’s developmentally disabled character, Ken seemed little more than an opaque silhouette of a character. Whitlock was unable to form an aura of authenticity to any of the character’s thoughts, words or actions. Admittedly, this type of character is very difficult to develop without going over the top or simply creating an offensive caricature. But, it’s a literary challenge Whitlock chose to take and by and large failed to execute.  

Still, Whitlock has created a rather raw and sincere account of contemporary life and although the gravité of the story is unquestionably substantial on the whole, the book was also darkly comic in places. Though the book is not without its rough edges, Whitlock’s frank and discerning presentation of the narrative was every bit the accurate indictment of today’s late bourgeois society it was meant to be.