Review: The Performance by Claire Thomas

I’d love to sit down with Claire Thomas and deconstruct “The Performance.”

I am in awe of its architecture; the elegant circumscription of its staging; its multidimensional exploration of womanhood, the power of art, the geometry of relationships, and the state of the world; the vibrancy of its language, and the vividity of its character and place. This is a novel that thrums not with ferocious dramatic force, but with naked emotional power and insight.

As bushfires blaze on the outskirts of the city, three women — Ivy Parker, a forty-something philanthropist; Margot Pierce, a professor in her 70s; and Summer, a theatre usher in her twenties — watch a performance of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” during which they meditate on their lives. At intermission their paths briefly cross, but “The Performance” is not crammed with incident. Thomas’s gift is that she is able to make the most mundane detail beautifully compelling: she spins gold out of everyday material. Her novel is a sharply incisive, profound depiction of three women at different stages of their lives, rendered in gorgeously captivating prose.

An indisputable masterpiece.