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Overview
A People Magazine Pick and winner of the Miles Franklin Book Award
Funny, poignant, and galvanizing by turns, Josephine Wilson’s award-winning novel explores many kinds of extinction—natural, racial, national, and personal—and what we might do to prevent them.
Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, has quarantined himself in a place he hates: a retirement village. His headstrong wife Martha, adored by all, is dead. His adopted daughter Caroline has cut ties, and his son Callum is lost to him in his own way. And though Frederick knows, logically, that a structural engineer can devise a bridge for any situation, somehow his own troubled family—fractured by years of secrets and lies—is always just out of his reach.
When a series of unfortunate incidents brings him and his spirited next-door neighbor Jan together, Frederick gets a chance to build something new in the life he has left. At the age of 69, he has to confront his most complex emotional relationships and the haunting questions he’s avoided all his life. Unbeknownst to him, Caroline—on her own journey of cultural reckoning—is doing the same. As father and daughter fight in their own ways to save what’s lost, they might finally find a way toward each other.
A masterful portrait of a man caught by history, and a sweeping meditation on the meaning of family, love, survival, and identity, Extinctions asks an urgent question: can we find the courage to change?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781947793149 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tin House Books |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 358 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sunday, 15 January 2006
Out the window there was nothing that could be called poetry, nothing windswept, billowing, tossing or turning in a streaky sky, nothing other than a taut blue dome and the low drone of air conditioners. In car parks across the city women pulled on soft cotton hats and cowered under brollies. Babies kicked and squalled, itchy with heat rash. Fridges groaned. Water dripped from old rubber seals. Milk soured. Fans turned. The grid strained.
Light, an excess of light, as if there had been some kind of global mistake, a wrongful accounting.
At midday the UV index hovered on perilous, dispensed like a terrible penance. If the man in number 7 could remove the tiled roof of his two-bedroom unit and look up into that vaulted sky, it would not be out of the question for him to spot an evil archangel tumbling through that dreadful gouge and dropping right into the lounge room where Frederick sat, newspaper folded back, pen uncapped, reading the columns.
He picked up the remote and pointed it at the cream cylinder on the wall. Chlorine molecules rose around him, heaven-bent. Unaware of the presence of angels (either avenging or beneficent) he shuffled through the pages. Ossibus et capiti inhumato. Fred had returned to Latin around the time of his wife's diagnosis and he still found it a comfort. It had been surprisingly easy to find a tutor with the same passion for a dead language - a call to the university and a consultation with the phone book and he had his man, a retired classics teacher from a private boys' school. They were both Catholic by birth, Frederick lapsed, the professor by nature sceptical, but they had enjoyed their time together, which was largely spent mourning the introduction of Novus Ordo and the abandoning of the Latin Mass.
One Saturday the professor's name appeared in the columns.
An aneurysm on the golf course? A stroke in the shower? There were no clues in the columns. If the professor had not been divorced he could have called the man's wife. There were no children either. He believed there was a dog called Minos, but where could you go with that? And what did it matter how you died once you were dead?
This was what Frederick Lothian thought on Sunday, 15 January. Or what Frederick thought he thought. What he liked to think he thought.
The phone rang twice, and then stopped. Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium.
Sometime in the 1980s, Martha had dragged him off to pray with a group of Tibetan monks. The similarities between Buddhist and Gregorian chant were astonishing, but when he tried to tell Martha she refused to listen. 'You're ruining it,' she snapped. After Martha's death, he returned briefly to the church and took to hanging around after Mass to discuss his ecumenical epiphany with the parish priest, but the stupid man had glazed over and moved on to a group of parishioners fundraising for a new toilet block at the primary school.
The cistern flushed and filled in the next-door unit. He angled the paper towards the window. Despite the excess of light outside he had no northern aspect to speak of. He blamed his daughter. It was Caroline's fault he was here. He hated the word 'retirement', but not as much as he hated the word 'village', as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot. At sixty-nine he was getting on, but did it have to be rammed down his throat? He tried to inhabit only those sections of the complex designed for the more able-bodied citizens of St Sylvan's, but he still managed to run into ancient women on Zimmers and signs reminding him to 'Mind the Step', to go 'This Way for Wheelchair Access' and that way 'for a Courtesy Buggy'. Old had infiltrated his being, and that had to be the reason his left knee kept giving way and his right eye clouded over in bright light and emitted the odd salty tear, as it was doing right now onto the columns.
He took off his glasses to wipe his eye. Out the window a blurry figure was making its way across the open quadrangle in the direction of the dining room. Was that Tom Chelmsley? Frederick stood up and put on his glasses. What was he doing out there in the heat? Look at the poor old fellow, with his frame and leather braces and his bent old back, hanging on by a thread to his villa. Any minute now Tom would be up for reclassification and bundled out of his two-bedroom semidetached into a tiny single-brick box with a television, a kettle and a pop-up toaster. Would you look at him? It was a wonder they had ever let Tom buy into the independent area.
Frederick sat down. It was just too painful to watch Tom hobbling on the Zimmer in the fierce heat. Why would you bother going all that way for an indigestible meal? There was no shade out there and the temperature must be well over forty degrees. Fred had been to one or two meals in the dining room and he wouldn't be going again. Tom could have called for a gopher to take him, but that might have given the social workers a leg-up when they came to reassess his meds and mobility and tick off boxes and add up the columns and announce that Mr Thomas H. Chelmsley was no longer capable of reaching down to wipe himself or squeeze out his own tea bag, and he and all that was his were to be shrink-wrapped and trolleyed without ado across the green to the supported living units, which were just a hop, step and a jump from the high-care facility, where they were all headed anyway. They might as well have erected the villas over a sawdust pit in the ground, because that was how close death was at St Sylvan's. No archangel beating above you with soft Latin wings, but a dark stinking shithole right beneath your feet.
Fred swept a finger down the narrow columns of type. A name was usually enough to warn you off. You could be pretty sure there were no dead children around named Walter or Enid - or Frederick, for that matter, unless you were French. Frédéric.
It was a name fit for kings and queens when he was born, but now it was more likely to be someone from the television. His name was finished. He could well be the last of the Fredericks it was hard to imagine celebrities embracing little blond Alfreds or Enochs, although Caroline's best friend had called her first child Camellia and continued the weak theme by calling the second Rose. It was hardly appropriate from the point of view of Australian landscape or character, but then the mother's name was Fleur, so what could you expect? How could a little girl get on in this part of the world when she shared a name with an imported species requiring hand-watering and supplementary feeding?
He heard the metallic thunk of an instant gas hot-water system. An aged and decrepit body would be stepping across the flat tiled floor into a shower cubicle (no perilously high bathtubs or raised rims to clamber over in this village), gripping the sturdy metal rail on the wall, readying itself for the brisk application of liquid soap to crêpey flesh. Frederick shuddered.
The columns beckoned mournfully. The codes were easy once you mastered the iconography. To be avoided at all costs: little pairs of booties, ballet shoes, dummies and motorbikes. Wreaths, logos and Masonic imagery were generally safe - anything that signified late-middle-aged grown-up rule-bound behaviour. His eyes snagged on a line.
Our darling boy, four years old and lost. Wait for us, sweetheart. It won't be long. Mummy and Daddy will be there soon ...
Ambushed. There was only one notice for four-year-old 'Thompson, David Michael'. The boy would have died late in the week, on Wednesday or perhaps Thursday. Not Friday, though today was Saturday and that would be far too soon to come up for air. This would be the first notice, from his mother and father. 'Soon' was a disturbing choice of word. Surely they weren't planning on dying too? And why those three dots at the end of the sentence? What did they mean? Why would you use them in the columns? They should be banned.
Few books had made it out of the boxes stacked around the house, but he had managed to shelve the foreign-language dictionaries and the odd grammar reference. All was not lost. It was a Greek word, of course: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] elleipsis, meaning 'omission' or 'falling short': 'An ellipsis could indicate an unfinished thought ... or at the beginning of a sentence, a trailing off into silence. which could also be indicated by a long dash known as an em dash — which was known as aposiopesis.'
Known to whom, he'd like to know. He'd never heard of aposiopesis, and he was certain no one he knew had either. Did anyone use these words any more? What was the point of aposiopesis? He wasn't anti-intellectual - just the opposite. He was himself a highly respected professor of structural engineering (retired). He had studied Latin. He of all people knew that a specialised language was essential in real-world professions such as engineering. The people who designed and built the world had to have a terminology to deal collectively with challenging structural problems. Without specialised languages, buildings and bridges would simply topple over in a breeze. Aircraft would drop out of the sky. The hulls of ships would split open and sink into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. People would die.
Could a similar defence be mounted in the case of aposiopesis, which (he flipped pages furiously) according to The Dictionary of Rhetorical Terms meant 'becoming silent' and indicated 'the inability or unwillingness to continue'?
The example given was equally baffling: 'But I thought he was.' What kind of an example was that? Here you have some poor fellow lost for words, unable to go on, and the experts turn up and offer him the use of an obscure word of Greek origin composed of five or six syllables. Wasn't that a contradiction? Or was it irony? Could you call it a conundrum? Whatever it was, ellipses ought not to be allowed in the columns. What were David Michael's parents thinking?
He shook out his paper. Tomorrow there would a flood of notices from family and friends, playmates, distant relatives, the volume receding gradually over the following days, like the water level of the lake at Saint-Clair.
April 1946, almost sixty years ago.
Young people thought sixty years was a long time, but it was nothing really. It was like the day before the day before yesterday. Virgil would have been sixty-five in June.
Pasquale, il mio amore, sempre baci, Carlotta.
You had to hand it to the Italians. There was a community of people who were faithful to their roots, marking the death in print of an ancient lost brother in Calabria, or the tenth anniversary of the passing of Nonna in a stony village in Piedmont. Neither that stupid parish priest nor his very own wife understood the function of the Latin root, its capacity to illuminate from the grave something alive and vital. He was not ashamed of his attraction to the columns, not at all. It is animal to die. It is reasonable to face death. Everybody dies. My wife has died. My brother Virgil is dead. My mother died. My father, thank god, has died. My son ...
Frederick sought out the bare wall near the kitchen. He had yet to get around to decoration. Breakfast, lunch, a walk on Mondays and a turn on the bicycle followed by an occasional frozen dinner were about all he could manage. Monday was the keystone of his week. Remove it, and the whole structure would collapse. Every Monday, rain, hail or shine, he walked along the river. If anyone asked Fred Lothian what he'd been up to, Fred Lothian would be ready with a breezy, easy answer. 'Oh, I always walk by the river in the mornings.' They would nod encouragingly: 'Good job, Fred. Up early, keeping active, that's the way.' He studied the cream render and the single photograph hanging from the sole hook in his entire villa. He had inherited the hook from the previous owner - no guesses what happened to her. He walked over and stood right in front of the photo of his daughter and imagined the previous owner standing exactly where he was, gazing at a photo of her own children. The real estate agent had swept his arm around and muttered vague nothings when asked why the owner was selling, but the manager let the cat out of the bag. 'It was quick,' she said. 'A coronary in sitting dance' (yes, apparently you can sit and dance), 'in the break between "The Russian Jig" and "The Irish Washerwoman".'
It was a formal portrait of his daughter, no different from millions of others all over the world, a successful young woman in her black gown, glossy hair cascading from under her mortarboard, hand clutching a rolled-up degree tied with a red ribbon. He and Martha flew to meet her in Honolulu for the graduation ceremony. It was a last-minute decision and accommodation was so tight they had to stay at a themed hotel that cost him a fortune. 'I never want to see another hula hoop or lei in my life,' Martha declared in the airport departure lounge. At least she had the good grace to wait until they left to complain. Caroline spent the entire time reminding them that the hotel was an insult to the indigenous Hawaiian culture and he ought never to have booked them in there. She was too embarrassed to ask her student friends to meet her at the bar. 'We've just finished a masters in anthropology. I don't think they want a cocktail in half a coconut served by a barefoot native.' It was tacky, she was right, but did she have to make such a fuss? He told her she could go to the backpackers' if she liked. That shut her up.
He studied the photograph. There was no denying she looked like her mother, his wife, Martha. As Caroline grew older the likeness had taken root, as if physical proximity drove mother and daughter towards resemblance. Wasn't there a word for that? No doubt another Greek obscurity. Caroline's younger brother had taken after him. 'I've been trumped,' Martha said as the boy grew. Frederick was nothing like his own father, thank god, but looked a lot like his mother - pointy, sallow-skinned. But looks were one thing, temperament another. Caroline and her mother were given to smouldering feuds that lasted for days, if not weeks. Caroline's brother had a furious, spiking temper that passed quickly.
He had had a temper, he used to have a temper. Were given, used to be given, shall have been given, he parsed. He was still troubled by the distinction between the perfect - which he understood now to be the tense employed for complete actions in the past - and the imperfect, which was used for unfinished business.
My wife looks like my daughter.
My daughter's brother used to look like his father.
My wife is dead.
My son ...
Caroline flashed him a frozen grin. Another lie. Caroline was still sulking after a blow-up with her mother that started on their first day in Hawaii and lasted all the way through the graduation ceremony to the dinner afterwards. What was it about? What did it matter now?
Frederick sat down at the table and smoothed the newspaper with the palm of his hand. David Michael Thompson was only four. Four-year-olds shouldn't be allowed to die. Where was his mother? How did he die? It was an accident, he was sure of it. If it were cancer the parents would thank the hospital and the wonderful doctor who had been with them all along, and no flowers please, but donations to a charity of your choice. An accident then, a summer accident on a summer's day, on a perfect day for drowning in the backyard pool.
David Michael is in the playroom with Thomas the Tank Engine. His mother has her hands full with the washing machine and a blocked drain. That damn plumber will not return her calls. The phone rings somewhere in the house. David Michael looks around and sees the screen door is ajar. He walks out to the wheelbarrow next to the pool safety gate and begins to climb. His father was out there early in the morning, clearing the filter of leaves, and in his rush to get to work he has left the wheelbarrow against the gate. The boy climbs up into the wheelbarrow. The latch lifts up. The gate swings open. A lizard kicks hopelessly in the deep end. The boy leans right over to touch it and the waters part, then close over, as they did for the Israelites.
Above the town of Saint-Clair there are fierce, grey, billowing clouds. A ten-year-old boy stands on the green field, as stiff as a scarecrow, while his coat whips around his frozen body and his father bears down like a tank.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Extinctions"
by .
Copyright © 2013 2016.
Excerpted by permission of UWA Publishing.
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