Evenings and Weekends: A Novel

“explodes with brilliant language. . . . a lovely, richly written first novel.”

At the beginning of this bittersweet novel, it’s a hot June Friday in 2019 and the big news for Londoners is that a whale is stuck in the Thames, the perfect prelude to a book about a group of characters who feel out of place—who don’t even feel comfortable in their own bodies—and who have great difficulty communicating.

Evenings and Weekends takes place over one weekend as a group of characters face major changes in their lives. Maggie, who is 12 weeks pregnant, is leaving her job in a London café so that she and her partner, Ed, a bicycle courier, can prepare to move back to suburban Basildon. Life is cheaper there and they can better fulfill their role as parents; however, things aren’t quite right with Maggie and Ed’s relationship. They haven’t had sex in months, and Ed has never dealt fully with his desire for men. Ed’s real problem is his lack of a sense of self: “He doesn’t want to change his name or his life and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all.”

Maggie’s best friend, Phil, has a decent paying office job, which he hates. He lives with ten other people in an abandoned warehouse from which they could be evicted anytime. Phil is in love with one of his flatmates, Keith, but Keith is in an open relationship with a middle-class “rising star academic,” Louis. Louis and Keith plan to move out to Folkestone on the Kent coast. How can Phil make his feelings known to Keith, when he is still dealing with an adolescent traumatic experience: “From then on, this would happen to Phil nearly every time he had sex: during sex, he would cease to have a body at all. All he had was abstract trains of thought.”

Meanwhile, out in Basildon, Phil’s mother Rosaleen is dealing with a cancer diagnosis. She has told her older son, Callum, a drug dealer with a drinking problem, but hopes this weekend to tell Phil. Rosaleen’s neighbor Joan, Ed’s mother, has never gotten over the loss of her husband. In her loneliness, she drags her living room furniture outside every weekend so she can make contact with her neighbors.

During this busy weekend, McKenna’s characters’ minds go back and forth between present confrontations and memories of past experiences that have shaped their lives. The spirit of Virginia Woolf looms over this London novel. As in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the book is filled with details of present-day London, but the characters’ minds move back and forth from present to particular moments in their past. Rosaleen keeps thinking of her childhood friend, Pauline, with whom she had an adolescent romance. Each of the characters has a moment in their past that keeps coming back to haunt them.

Evenings and Weekends is about characters who still are wrestling with questions of sex, love, and commitment. Maggie asks herself, “Why is it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?” Much of the novel is about these characters trying to negotiate fulfilling relationships. What gets in the way is the need for language. When Phil discovers that his mother has cancer, he wants to respond appropriately, but “It’s just that he doesn’t know which words to use.” All the characters in this novel share that problem.

Yet the novel explodes with brilliant language. McKenna loves lists that give a sense of the exciting chaos of a metropolis. His descriptions of characters tell us more about their minds than their bodies. When Ed sees the whale in the Thames, “He thinks the whale is the latest in a long line of imaginary creatures he’s encountered recently, sometimes friendly, sometimes threatening, but never real.” McKenna take his characters crises seriously, but he also keeps a comic distance that leavens the novel.

The London of Evenings and Weekends, rendered in rich detail, is not the glamorous, opulent city of many romantic comedies. This is a world of tiny flats whose damp causes asthma, of derelict warehouses from which the occupants could be evicted at any time. Suburban living is shopping centers and chain restaurants. Ed and Maggie shop at Aldi, the cheapest of London grocery chains, when they can afford to shop.

By the end of Evenings and Weekends, the reader cares deeply about these absurd, sweet, lost characters and their hope for finding love. This is a lovely, richly written first novel.