Dinosaurs

May 1, 2022

Following The Children's Bible, among the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020, Millet uses the lives of humans and other animals in the desert to contemplate the difference we can make in the cosmos. Her focus: one Arizona man's relationship with the family next door, whose house has a wall fashioned entirely of glass.

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Starred review from August 1, 2022
Millet returns with a brilliant story of survival, one subtler and more effective than the NBA-shortlisted A Children’s Bible (2020). Gil, the decent and well-meaning 40-something protagonist, leaves Manhattan for Phoenix, Ariz., where he moves into a “castle” next to a glass house. The neighbors are a family of four, and Gil, still bruised from a breakup three years earlier and ever uncertain how to find his footing after he inherited his family’s fortune at 18, eventually lets his guard down and becomes friendly with the family next door. They are Arlis, a beautiful psychotherapist; her handsome husband, Ted; Clem, 14, sullen and smart; and the sweet and martial arts–obsessed Tom, 10. There are occasional whiskeyed bro-outs with Ted (“I could ask to borrow a tool,” Ted says to break the ice on his first social call), and Clem seems to appreciate Gil for keeping Tom out of her hair with baseball and other sports, but Gil also becomes close with Arlis in a way that feels symptomatic of a problem in her marriage. A series of little interventions on Gil’s part ratchets up the tension—there’s a coach at Tom’s dojo with a swastika tattoo; a bully on Tom’s bus; and someone illegally shooting birds, whom Gil tracks with night vision goggles. Millet bakes a sense of foreboding into the atmosphere, making the scenes especially fraught. Her character work—notably of the men—is precise and stunning, as she locates their foibles and virtues, and injects a surprisingly moving dose of optimism into Gil and the married couple as they try to endure. This wonderful and dynamic writer is at the top of her game.

August 26, 2022

Millet slips among various modes and genres, blends the commonplace and the conceptual with ease, and there's an undeniable disposition to her novels that links them in spirit if not always in substance. Coming off the heavily allegorical A Children's Bible, she returns with yet another pivot, which tells the story of Gil, a mid-40s man with immense inherited wealth who decides to leave New York City for Phoenix and proceeds to walk the entire way. This conceit alone offers plenty of meat for a Millet novel but actually takes up only the first few pages. The central story line follows Gil's relationship with the family who moves next door, into a home with one entire side made of glass. Clearly, Millet isn't entirely abandoning metaphor, but the author's best trick is leveraging expectations in order to build tension, only to reveal that the narrative's primary currency isn't its littered symbolism but its profound sense of human intimacy. It's about those who enter and exit our orbits, and Millet elegantly shapes the swirling chaos of existence into fragile, memorable human forms. VERDICT More tender and less mercurial than anything Lydia Millet has written before, this is an elegant, subtle novel of profound emotional heft and deceptively simple prose of immense power, ending on a grace note that marks a high point in the author's career.--Luke Gorham

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Starred review from August 1, 2022
Gil decides to walk from Manhattan to Arizona. "He had nowhere to be and no one who needed him." Millet follows her climate-crisis drama, A Children's Bible (2020), with an intriguing portrait of a lonesome man trying to do good in a grim world. The sorrowful heir of immense wealth, bruised and confused by the abrupt end to a love affair, Gil heads to the desert hoping for a new orientation to life. He buys a castle-like house bordering public lands with one neighboring home in view made of glass, its alluring occupants unwitting actors on an exposed domestic stage. Psychotherapist Ardis is beautiful and kind. Ted travels a lot for his global infrastructure projects. Teen Clem is "glued to her phone," and young Tom longs for companionship. Gil volunteers at a woman's shelter, keeps Tom company, and becomes fascinated with birds, feathered "descendants of dinosaurs." Intricate conflicts and conundrums develop at a meditative pace as patient, generous Gil tries to suss out the feelings of others while contending with his own painful memories. Anguish and tenderness mesh with piquant humor as Millet, empathic and imaginative, reveals her humble hero's Batman-like backstory. Birds, bats, humans, and many other creatures may be facing extinction, but the desert is an ongoing marvel and love still thrives.

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Starred review from July 15, 2022
Independently wealthy but bereaved in the wake of a painful breakup, a man moves from New York to Arizona in search of a fresh start. Millet pulls back slightly here from the environmental catastrophe imagined in her National Book Award finalist, A Children's Bible (2020). To be sure, Gil sees plenty of evidence of human destructiveness around his new home in Phoenix, especially the corpses of birds shot and abandoned by an anonymous hunter. Human cruelty is also evident in the bullying of his next-door neighbors' son, Tom, by a schoolmate, who is himself maltreated by his brutal father. But Gil finds warm companionship with Tom's parents, Ardis and Ted, and his memories of New York include close friendships with two men, the hilariously unalike married couple Vic and Van Alsten. These relationships counterpoint the treatment he suffered from his abusive and manipulative former girlfriend, Lane; good-natured, almost pathologically unassuming Gil's eventual extrication from her emotional clutches forms an important element in the plot. How we can nurture ourselves, the people dear to us, and the world around us are key issues in this gentle, meditative novel, told from Gil's point of view to slowly build a marvelously full, if inadvertent, self-portrait. Gil rivals Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin in sheer goodness, with a healthy dollop of Myshkin's cluelessness, but he grows and learns as he settles in in Arizona and gets several kinds of closure from developments in New York. His new Arizona friends are also depicted as kind people striving to do right by others. Are they doomed to extinction, like Millet's eponymous dinosaurs? Will they survive by evolving, as dinosaurs did into birds? These sorts of philosophical questions are raised with a very light touch by Millet, who enfolds thematic and psychological depths in elegant, deceptively simply prose. Her lovely, moving conclusion affirms that "separateness had always been the illusion...the world was inside you." Another life-affirming work from a writer who always carves her own literary path.

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