Verwandte Artikel zu The Missing Person: A Novel

The Missing Person: A Novel - Hardcover

Ohlin, Alix

 
9780375415241: The Missing Person: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375415246 ISBN 13: 9780375415241
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

The disappearance of her younger brother brings artist Lynn Fleming back from New York to Albuquerque, where she discovers the missing Wylie among a group of eco-warriors and is forced to come to terms with her memories of her late father, her mother's married boyfriend, her brother's activism, and her own love affair with one of his cohorts. A first novel. 15,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Alix Ohlin was born in Montreal in 1972, graduated from Harvard University, and studied at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. Her fiction has appeared in the One Story series and Shenandoah, among other periodicals, and in Best New American Voices 2004. She has received awards and fellowships from The Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, and The Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshop. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Lafayette College.

Alix Ohlin teaches at Lafayette College.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Days started in Brooklyn with bright, compromised light. I'd been sleeping late. In the mornings, the blinds sending geometric stripes across the sheets, I kept willing myself to wake up, then slept again, fifteen minutes each time. Construction and conversation, dogs barking their greetings, the irritated beeping of vehicles in reverse-none of it could get me out of bed. By the time I got up, it seemed too late to bother doing anything; the day was almost gone. This was a problem I'd been having.

The phone rang early in the morning, early in June.

"Lynn," my mother said. She was panting slightly, as if she'd been running to the phone, though hadn't she placed the call? "I didn't think you'd be home. You're always at the library, or teaching, I thought."

"I almost always am," I said, pulling back the covers and pushing myself finally out of bed. I opened the blinds and looked out through the grate. Across the street from me, between the pet store and the souvlaki place, was a psychic's office. A neon crystal ball-blue pedestal, red base, under a pair of cajoling hands-stayed lit in the window twenty-four hours a day. The psychic herself was a stocky woman with long frizzy hair, given to flowery housecoats and red lipstick. I sometimes watched her sit in the window drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, gazing out at the street. I never saw anybody go in there. What did she do all day, and how did she survive? I'd lived across from her for three years, ever since I started graduate school, but still I often asked myself these pressing questions.

"Lynn," my mother said again. "So what do you think I should do?"

"About what?"

"I've been talking," she said. "By convention, on the telephone, one person talks while the other listens. People have agreed that this is the best way to approach it. Do you have a different idea?"

"Sorry. My attention must have drifted there for a minute. I just got up."

"It's ten o'clock!"

"I was up late, um, studying."

"I've been up for hours. I couldn't sleep. I'm worried about Wylie, and I thought, I'll call Lynn, she always knows how to handle him, she can communicate, and now you're not even listening." "What's wrong with Wylie?"

"He cut off his phone. He lives like a monk and weighs about as much as a tin can. An empty tin can. Not only that-he won't speak to me. I have one child who won't speak to me in person and another who won't listen to me on the phone."

"I'm listening."

This she ignored. "I want you to come home."

"To Albuquerque?" I gave a shudder I hoped was inaudible and went into the kitchen to make coffee, cradling the phone against my shoulder.

"Don't take that tone," my mother said. She seemed to have heard the shudder, which was an uncanny ability of hers.

"What tone is that?"

"The I'm-too-good-for-Albuquerque tone. You've had it ever since you moved to New York."

"I hated Albuquerque just as much when I still lived there."

"I don't know why. You're just like Wylie, do you know that? You have all these objections that don't even make sense."

"Mom," I said, "I feel like we're not actually getting anywhere in this conversation." Across the street the psychic entered the window and stood with her arms folded, a cigarette tense between her fingers. The souvlaki guy, passing by her window, waved good morning. With slow elegance she raised her eyebrows and blew a perfect smoke ring, and he laughed.

"It's those eco-freaks," my mother said plaintively. "Wylie's friends. They've turned him against me. He won't call, won't come over for dinner. He says he's breaking away. He says I'm too complicit, but I don't think it's complicit to cook him a hot meal. I don't even know what I'm complicit in, do you?"

"I'm not sure. The dominant paradigm?"

"I'm a travel agent," my mother said, "not a paradigm." Sorrow and annoyance chimed together in her voice, a mother's chord.

"I know," I told her. We observed a moment of silence. Afterwards a gentle plastic rattle came through on the line, the sound of my mother's short manicured nails against her keyboard, and I realized she was calling from work.

"I'm booking you a ticket. We have some great deals through Minneapolis."

"Don't do that, Mom."

"I'm not taking no for an answer."

"No," I said.

"What did I just say? We've got great deals. Minneapolis is desperate for flights. They'll do anything. They'll pay you to fly there, practically. Listen, I'm pressing a button. I'm confirming. I'll e-mail you the reservation."

"Don't do that," I said.

"You're coming home."

Outside, summer heat was putting pressure on the day. My super, Guhan, stood by the door rifling through the building's garbage cans, sweat inking a line down the back of his Yankees T-shirt. He was very nosy and went through everybody's garbage, supposedly to make sure all the right paper got recycled. When he saw me he grunted. Originally he'd helped my old roommate-a dark-haired, six-foot-tall Swiss woman from my art history program-get a rent-stabilized apartment in the building. I moved in; then Suzanne finished her dissertation on a little-known Swiss surrealist and went back to Bern. For months afterwards Guhan kept asking me when she was coming back. Now he just sighed, eternally disappointed by what was left.

The street smelled of coffee in paper cups, car exhaust, perfume that had just been sprayed too strongly in the privacy of apartments, dog turds baking in the sun. I crossed the street and passed the psychic, gone now, and the pet store, where mangy kittens lay curled in the window in sad, scruffy balls. I bought a coffee and a paper to read on the subway. All the news involved natural disasters in faraway places: earthquakes, droughts, fires, floods.

A man wearing fake breasts under a black dress came on the train and sang a Spanish song while shaking his hips and holding his palm out for money, which nobody gave.

The woman beside me, middle-aged, short-haired, and suited, fell asleep, her tired face smearing makeup against my shoulder.

I thought about Wylie, my baby brother, fat and jolly when he was little, tall and bony and righteous now. Our father had died two years ago, when his heart suddenly failed him; it was quick and painless, the doctor said. I went home for the funeral and stood with my mother and brother at the graveside, thinking that these were the most appropriate words for death I could imagine: "heart" and "failure." Ever since then, Wylie'd been getting both thinner and more radical. These days he was some kind of environmental crusader, a haranguing activist with a philosophical bent. He supposedly was finishing his biology degree at UNM, but only registered for one class a semester. My mother often said he took after my father, who was a scientist; but my father had a Ph.D. and a job at a lab, whereas Wylie was twenty-four and years away from any degree at all. Instead of doing course work, he devoted his time to writing his undergraduate thesis, a massive opus "about all of nature," as my mother told me on the phone when I asked why it was taking so long. The opus seemed to have more to do with ideology than biology, and sometimes he sent me chunks of it by e-mail, in the middle of the night, after too much beer: The desert is deconstruction in...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375415246
ISBN 13 
9780375415241
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
292
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith
London
W6 9PE
Vereinigtes Königreich
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar