Extinctions
Josephine Wilson
Tin House Books $15.95
Reviewed by Dylan Ward
It seems fitting that I should have the opportunity to review Australian author Josephine Wilson’s novel Extinctions while the fires of Australia burn. Just as Australia now faces an irreparable loss of its landscape, Wilson trains her lens on “Australian history” and irreparable loss through the lives of the Lothians.
Extinctions takes place over the course of a few days in mid-January to February of 2006. Frederick Lothian is sixty-nine years old and already retired. He is not altogether happy, feeling old and stuck in the retirement village where he now resides with bare walls and frozen dinners. Fred’s wife, Martha, is deceased and he feels lonely, surrounded by reminders of the past and closeness to death. These reminders exist primarily in the collected furniture and books, among other objects in unopened boxes, now crowding his retirement villa. They also come from both the memories he has of Martha and the aging residents living around him in the retirement village where everyone seems to be “cut off from the normal ebb and flow of life and were being prepared for a slow and painful death” (88).
Fred shuffles around his villa and peeks into the boxes. The villa itself is “a bridge between his real life, which has ended, and death, which waited behind a wall of paperbacks” (101). Much of what Fred harbors in the villa he holds dear for personal reasons; others because they meant something once to Martha and are what remain of his attachment to his wife. Fred is unsure what, if any of it, he will impart to his children, Callum and Caroline. Fred also happens to be teaching himself Latin, one many consider a dead language. He even peruses the recent deaths in the obituaries. As he does, Fred begins to reflect upon his own life and decay, his mistakes, and the missed opportunities with his wife and children.
Without realizing it, Fred is falling into depression, trapped by these unresolved memories and complicated familial relationships. He mourns the loss of his career as a professor in engineering and concrete, the orderly world he once he knew and understood. He laments the fragmented relationships with Callum and Caroline. He mourns the traumas of his own childhood growing up with abusive parents. But above all, he mourns the loss of Martha, the “gorgeous American woman with snow-white teeth” (79).
Throughout the novel, as Wilson shifts between past and present, the layers of Fred peel away and we come to see him not as the cynical “monster” he is at near-seventy years old, but as a loving man, husband, and father who gradually comes to terms with his regrets. His new friendship with resident Jan changes Fred for the better and allows him to embrace himself as imperfect in an unpredictable life where he can no longer avoid disturbing “the precarious balance of things” (101). Meanwhile, Caroline equally reconciles her own complicated past as an adopted child with that of her unfamiliar Aboriginal heritage. Here, Wilson sheds light on complex issues of culture, adoption, dark pasts, and the unforeseen consequences of history. Wilson takes her time, keeping a steady control as the narrative unfolds and we learn more about the characters inhabiting Wilson’s world.
There is plenty to love about Wilson’s compelling, beautiful, humorous, and lyrical novel. It is chapter-less, separated into books instead, with black and white pictorials peppered throughout that provide commentary, related to the narrative at hand. These images, at times mysterious, make the reader stop to consider them, to ponder its deeper meanings.
Winner of the distinguished Miles Franklin Literary Award, Extinctions is a marvelous piece of fiction that examines our universal need for change and to reconcile with the past.
Dylan Ward lives and writes various things in North Carolina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Person's Trash, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. He also contributes as a fiction reader for Alternating Current Press and Flash Fiction Magazine. When not writing he's usually reading something with a strong cup of coffee, pondering the mysteries of the world, or dreaming of writing.