Apr 5

Apr 5 The Performance

Author: Claire Thomas
Publisher: Riverhead
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover 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.

TL;DR Review

The Performance is excellent. It’s deeply layered; impressive from a craft perspective but also approachable, emotional, and resonant.

For you if: You read literary fiction and like character-driven novels, and especially if you love the theatre.

Full Review

As soon as I heard the premise of The Performance — a novel from the perspectives of three women watching the same play as wildfires rage nearby — I was all in. And my friends, I was not disappointed. This book is excellent, from the perspective of both craft and enjoyment. It’s got so many delicious layers, not to mention deeply resonant characters. All in less than 250 pages.

The three women are Margot, an English professor nearing retirement age with private struggles at home; Summer, an usher and theatre student whose girlfriend’s family is in the path of the wildfires; and Ivy, who has a young child and also a large inheritance she’s hoping to use for good. They’re watching Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which is about a woman who is literally stuck in the ground, from the waist down, in a hill, as she prattles to her husband (who walks free), aching for his love and attention. The chapters alternate between the three women and the book takes place from the beginning of the play through the end.

What’s really cool about the book is that you absolutely do not have to know anything about the play (I didn’t) to feel engaged and understand what’s happening — the premise and dialogue are simple enough — and holy moly, metaphoric enough — to give you everything you need. And it’s incredible how Thomas has taken it and filtered it through these three women’s lived experiences and life stories to show what it meant to each of them while giving us plenty of backstory, perspective, and reasons to love them.

There is so much more I could talk about. The layers of the title — the play itself, the face we put on for others, the pieces of ourselves we hide from, and much more. The characters themselves, who are big and real and show us readers new things about the world and being human. But in the interest of not rambling, I’ll just say this: Read it.