THE WEEKEND by Peter Cameron (Plume:...

THE WEEKEND by Peter Cameron (Plume: $9.95; 241 pp.). This thoughtful, elegiac novel suggests a ‘90s version of “The Big Chill.” Three people meet in Upstate New York on the first anniversary of the death of a man they all loved. Even in death, Tony’s personality continues to shape their lives. John, his halfbrother, hides in the garden, building a purposeless wall; Marian, his sister-in-law, frets and tries to care for the others; Lyle, his former lover, discovers he can move beyond his grief. An unexpected meeting with a promising young painter disproves his belief that “sex was a subject, like geometry, that Lyle had once learned and now assumed he’d forgotten.”