Extinctions by Josephine Wilson (review)

2017 Winner, Miles Franklin Literary Award

While I was reading Josephine Wilson's novel Extinctions, the thought that occurred to me most frequently was, "Why did I not hear of and read this book sooner?" Despite escaping my notice for the past two years, it did not go unrecognized in its country of publication: the book won the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript as well as the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award for 2017, and it is easy to understand why. This book is as humorous as it is profound and as original as it is successful.

Extinctions is the story of Frederick Lothian, a retired engineering professor and widower who recently has moved into a retirement community. Frederick prefers to cut himself off from the outside world as much as possible, ignoring professional and social opportunities from his former employer and colleagues. He barely maintains a strained relationship with his daughter, Caroline, now a curator who creates exhibits on extinction, an obsession that relates to her personal struggles with her own identity. Worse yet, he maintains no contact at all with his son, Callum. We soon learn that his formerly brilliant and lively son is now in a care facility with severe and irreversible brain damage from a car crash that took place as he was finishing his architecture degree over a decade earlier. Frederick blames himself for the crash and subsequent damage, although his refusal to see his son compounds his guilt in the view of his daughter and, while she was still alive, his wife.

When Jan, his neighbor in the retirement village, pressures Frederick into eating lunch and then spending much of the following day with her, he is forced to acknowledge to himself the ways in which he continues to fail as a father, both to his son, whom he has neglected, and to his daughter, whose coping with being an adopted child from an Aboriginal mother he exacerbates by pretending that no such struggle of identity ever should have existed within her. He must then acknowledge that at any point he could choose to change, a lesson as terrifying for Frederick as it is hopeful.

One of the most praiseworthy aspects of this book for me is the way in which Jan and Frederick are not relegated to the tropes of the elderly so commonly found in film and literature. Rather than simply being wise or bitter dispensers of advice or caution, as the stereotypes of the elderly could dictate, Jan and Frederick are active participants in their own lives. The daily complications of life brought on by family, in particular, have not wrapped up neatly but, rather, continue to entangle them in a way that rings true to life. Wilson also does not allow her characters to become the lovable, bubbling old folks we have come to expect in fiction. This refreshing and rare portrayal that makes seventy-year-olds compelling protagonists contributes to the originality and appeal of Extinctions.

Furthermore, from the opening pages, this book is so darkly funny that I caught myself chuckling out loud from time to time. For example, toward the beginning of the book, Frederick reads the death announcement of a small child in the paper, after which he spends an inordinate amount of time dissecting and critiquing the grammatical choices of the boy's parents, ultimately concluding, "Ellipses ought not to be allowed in the columns. What were [the boy's] parents thinking?" (6) Later, after making a series of hurtful remarks to Jan, he thinks that he "was truly contrite. Contrition, from the Latin contritus, 'ground to pieces' or crushed by guilt. Could there be a link with concrete? He'd have to look that up" (183). It is this type of humor that makes readers root for the unsympathetic Frederick despite themselves. It also encourages readers to be amused enough to let their guard down and then feel the painful moments more deeply...