The Weekend (First Edition)

Three friends gather for a midsummer weekend in a country house in upstate New York on the anniversary of the death of a man related to them all by ties of blood or love, but their sojourn is interrupted by the arrival of two outsiders. By the author of Leap Year.

Vapid dialogue and a uniformly languid cast of characters doom this sporadically insightful novella that explores themes of bereavement, change, love, loneliness and the quest for connection. A year after the AIDS death of a loved one, three friends are reunited for a weekend at the upstate New York country house where they used to convene in summers past. John and Marian, half-brother and sister-in-law of the late Tony, have permanently fled Manhattan for a life of leisure in this idyllic riverfront home. Tony's lover, Lyle, an art critic and lecturer, pays his first visit since Tony's death, bringing along his new young paramour, Robert, an aspiring painter. Stymied by insurmountable tensions and inner conflicts, this mildly neurotic group fails miserably to resuscitate past contentments. Aging Europhile neighbor Laura Ponti, whom Marian invites to dinner, faces similar disappointment in her efforts to invigorate ties with her daughter. Cameron ( Leap Year ) interposes vignettes from Tony's lifetime between pieces of the currently developing plot and, through frequent shifts in point of view, takes the reader into the listless mind of each of his characters. The contrast between his rather elegant prose and their insipid, unconvincing speech, however, contributes to an unfortunate emphasis on explication at the expense of illustration, leaving the reader with little attachment to this sorrowful group of survivors.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

What's planned as a peaceful summer weekend instead stirs up all its participants' insecurities in this beautifully modulated novel of relationships, Cameron's fourth work of fiction (after the story collection Far-Flung, 1991). John and Marian, 40ish and filthy rich, wait in their lovely upstate New York home for the arrival of art critic Lyle, the lover of John's half-brother and Marian's very dear friend Tony, who died of AIDS exactly one year before. Lyle has in tow a new partner: a poor, young, half-Indian landscape painter and waiter named Robert who has rescued him from the severe depression that followed Tony's death. Marian is upset that Lyle would bring a last-minute mystery guest to this anniversary weekend and dinner party, which will also include an Italian neighbor, Laura, herself put out by the surprise appearance of her actress daughter, Nina. Cameron exploits these tensions skillfully while probing his characters' vulnerabilities. Marian is an anxious hostess and mother, fearful her baby Roland is retarded; the reserved John feels he is too dull for company; Lyle flounders without the support of easygoing Tony; Robert feels like a resented intruder; and Laura believes Nina has exposed her as a pathetic old woman. Yet Cameron has a light touch; social comedy offsets the introspection. After a difficult dinner, the novel's climax comes when a lovers' quarrel with Lyle prompts Robert to bolt for the city, leaving the others to some painful reassessment. Vigor and directness save Cameron's portrait of the chattering classes from preciosity; this fine storyteller is wise as well as clever. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Cameron's second novel is so easy to visualize, so full of articulate dialogue that reading it resembles watching a movie. It's a variation upon a time-honored movie setup (cf. Rules of the Game, Intimate Lighting, The Big Chill, etc.): the old friends' get-together into which a few outsiders intrude. The former here are a fortyish couple with a new baby and a gay man whose lover (the husband's brother) died a year ago from AIDS. The latter are the gay man's much younger prospective lover and the couple's summer neighbor, an American woman who usually lives in Italy. Only the young man is not well heeled, and all are cultivated and intelligent, so that when fallout from the past abrades the present, frayed feelings are civilly, no matter how dramatically, expressed. A gay writer, Cameron sore-thumbishly injects the current hot gay issue--marriage--into the book by having the characters banter about their various experiences of family life, but otherwise his friends'-reunion story is so well done that fans of the form simply must see--er--read it. Ray Olson

Poor Robert. A young painter, he's invited to the country by his new love, Lyle, a middle-aged art critic and a bit of a prig. They are off to stay with the useless John and the unappealing Marian, a rich married couple and Lyle's best friends. Their house is also where Lyle's lover Tony died, exactly one year ago, as we creepily learn. And not only was Tony Lyle's lover, he was also John's half-brother. Get off the train!, you want to yell to Robert. But by the time all the pieces are in place it's too late, and the beautifully controlled horror of the novel has begun. Tensions develop rapidly on all fronts: between the generations, between the new lovers, between the past and the present, between those with hope and those without. And just when you think that the story of this weekend is all memory and conversation, things start to happen. This brief novel confirms what readers of Far-Flung Stories (LJ 9/15/91) and Leap Year (LJ 3/1/90) have long suspected: Cameron is one of our very best writers. For all fiction collections.
Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.