The Fearsome Particles - Softcover

Cole, Trevor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771022832 ISBN 13: 9780771022838

Publisher: Emblem Editions, 2007

Synopsis

Trevor Cole’s bestselling debut novel garnered rave reviews and comparisons to Truman Capote and Kingsley Amis. Now the Governor General’s Award finalist is back with The Fearsome Particles, a brilliantly observed comic tragedy about the widening cracks in a family’s picture-perfect veneer.

Gerald Woodlore, a window screen executive, wakes one morning to find, to his utter dismay, that he has reached the limits of what he can control. The company he works for is rapidly losing market share and a junior assistant seems to be the only one with an idea how to fix it. His wife, Vicki, a luxury real-estate dresser, appears to be bending under the pressures of constructing an image of perfect happiness both at work and at home. But most worrying of all is Gerald and Vicki’s twenty-year-old son, Kyle, who quit school to volunteer with the military’s civilian support staff in Afghanistan. Now he has returned early and retreated to his room in the wake of a mysterious and traumatic event.

With his trademark wit and strong emotional insight, Trevor Cole has created a compelling, tender story that captures a family at a crucial turning point.

The Fearsome Particles has recently been optioned for film.


From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

About the Author

Trevor Cole was lauded in a recent Globe and Mail review as “one of the best young novelists in this country.” He has written two novels – Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life (2004), and The Fearsome Particles (2006) – both of which, in a rare event, were short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award for Literature and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Norman Bray was also short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Book, and each of his novels has been adapted for radio and optioned for film. Recently, The Fearsome Particles was added to the syllabus of a Canadian literature course at Whitman College in Washington, taught alongside works by Michael Ondaatje, Tomson Highway, Alice Munro and Carol Shields. And in the spring of 2008, Cole will be the Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at the Kitchener Public Library.

In addition to being a novelist, Cole is also a veteran magazine journalist and editor. He worked for 12 years as a senior or executive editor in the magazine division of the Globe and Mail before spending three years as a senior writer for Report on Business Magazine. For his work there, as well as his in-depth features for Toronto Life magazine and his notorious satirical column for Canadian Business, he has won a total of seven National Magazine Awards (gold and silver) and 21 nominations, in addition to several other prizes. While continuing to work as a magazine journalist and fiction author, he also contributes to Canada’s literary community through AuthorsAloud.com, his growing website of literary readings by Canadian authors. He currently lives in Hamilton and is at work on his third novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

An animal that small, that dextrous, could be anywhere. An animal that silent. There was no defining its limits. What troubled Gerald was not the threat of the threat per se, but his sense of helplessness in the face of it.

In his imagination, in those thoughts that lay just beyond his control, the cat he called Rumsfeld was stalking him. It was an absurd idea, but as he stood in his slippers at the foot of the bed, with the new light of April stealing across a floor of cinnamon cabreuva, Gerald could not quite reach the absurdity and smother it. So he was forced, in the sense that addicts are forced by their addictions, or invalids by their infirmities, to picture the cat mincing through the cavities and recesses (what interior design people liked to call “dead spaces”) of the sprawling turreted house on Breere Crescent. He was obliged to see in his mind’s eye its white whiskery face peering around the pants press and shoe trees of his closet, looking more resolute, more purposeful, than a cat’s face should be capable of looking. He was compelled to imagine it — ludicrous as it might sound to the great majority of people who ­weren’t him and ­didn’t live at 93 Breere — planning.

All Gerald Woodlore could do, and so did with conviction, was curse himself for thinking about the cat. Because this was not the time to be getting cat-­fixated; this morning there were other things of far greater importance to be addressing, mentally. His son, Kyle, was returning home from a hostile territory with an uncertain injury. His wife, Vicki, was edging toward madness. Work entailed its own many, many challenges. For these reasons there was no force in the world worthier of invocation, in Gerald’s view, than the will to ignore the cat’s presence in their lives. And if there had been a way to call forth the will, and impose it on his thoughts the way he imposed plastic wrap on a freshly lopped lemon, to keep its spiky lemoniness contained, of course he would have. But Gerald had to acknowledge, unhappily, that he ­wasn’t built to ignore sneaking threats to normalcy, to order, to the way things were supposed to be. He was much too conscious; he was conscious to the point of affliction. And so to him, the black-­and-­white cat, which a neighbour named Lorie Campeau had brought to the door in a wild panic three weeks before —

LORIE CAMPEAU: It’s my mother. They’ve taken her to the hospital. She fell. She lives in Vancouver and she fell! So I have to fly there today, and of course I have to take my daughter, Jewels. But we just got her this cat. Literally just got it. And we ­can’t give it back because Jewels is completely in love. And I ­don’t know what to do. We haven’t even named it!

— the cat that Vicki had taken in without consultation though he, Gerald, was in the nearby den, listening and perfectly consultable, was a threat. It was a rogue presence. It was their own small, fluffy insurgency.


From the Hardcover edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Emblem Editions
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771022832
• ISBN 13: 9780771022838
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352