Ramona Ausubel’s ‘The Last Animal’ soars as a mediation on what drives us : NPR

What exactly is a family? Deeper still, Why is a family?

Entire sections of the literary canon have grappled with these questions, usually by placing them in the context of human families alone. That is why the last animalRamona Ausubel’s latest novel, rises where so many other books on family dynamics simply rub shoulders.

Certainly, the story of Ausubel has a very recognizable family core, a mother and her two teenage daughters, bound by blood but fractured by tragedy. Or the last animal breaks from the pack is the addition of an ostensibly generic element: the bio-engineered resurrection of an extinct animal species. Namely, the woolly mammoth.

Don’t let this x factor put you off. As Ben Mezrich’s 2017 non-fiction book proves Woolly, there is a rich vein of human narrative to be drawn from the paleontological exploration of these large, shaggy, dearly extinct pachyderms. But where Mezrich dramatized real scientific events, Ausubel brings deep emotional truth to his work of dramatic fiction. The setup is solid and promising: Jane, a graduate student in paleobiology, takes her 13- and 15-year-old daughters, Vera and Eve, on an arctic dig. The girls’ father died in a car crash a year earlier, and that loss hangs heavy over their heads as the trio head to the top of the earth “a bare place, a lost place, where ancient beasts had once erred”. Jane is looking for fossils; at the same time, his own family feels like one, a shell-like remnant of something that was once thriving and whole.

Rather than wallowing in internalized melodrama, however, the last animal instantly injects Ausubel’s telltale zing in the form of an ice-bound baby mammoth and Jane’s decision to go rogue on some kind of crazy ethical bender. But even more refreshing is the grieving family’s utter rejection of misery, even as their quest for a shaggy dog ​​(woolly dog?) begins to go off the rails. Naturally, the question arises of whether it is possible to clone the baby mammoth, followed by the question of whether it is right to play God in this way, followed by the much more earth-shattering possibility of reviving the humans. Read this as metaphorically as you wish. Ausubel does.

The book also addresses sexism, both personal and institutional, and it does so with irony rather than clickbait cliches. “Guys, ugh,” Vera groaned, trying to make sense of her mother’s apparent willingness to abide by the rules of the boys’ club academia: “The patriarchy, and all that.” It’s comedic, and it’s cutting, and it helps lend a witty courtroom air to Jane, Eve, and Vera’s constant banter. The fact that Ausubel chilled the character of Jane’s husband in a tale about frozen creatures is no less a neat gender reversal in and of itself. But this is not revenge; during one of Vera’s characteristic spells of joyful mischief, “a spark of Daddy shone, a pilgrimage to a part of him”.

“They would all be bones sooner or later, but they were not specimens themselves,” Ausubel writes at the end of the story, just as the full moral consequence of Jane’s chimerical actions begins to weigh on her and the girls. The path of the book with distanced, almost clinical turns, is strangely part of its charm. Images like “pots of pickled mutants” don’t just slide off the page; they also evoke the dark fantasy of Katherine Dunn’s classic geek love another novel that uses genetic manipulation and macabre oddities to probe the nature of family. Ultimately, however, Ausubel is about pride: mother’s pride, daughter’s pride, sister’s pride, and how that power can maintain unity. And even resuscitate wholeness. Combining spirit and wisdom, the last animal is a lucid meditation on what drives us, both biologically and emotionally but above all, family.

Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning editor and book author Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music and the Science Fiction Decade Blown Up.