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Summary
Summary
Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is "one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation" (Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times). Salon praised her for writing that is "always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself." The Village Voice added, "If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, he would be extremely jealous."
This stunning new novel presents Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle's sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the neglected, moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerie--including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women--joins her in residence.
In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion's unknown spaces. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence explores evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and revelation. The result is the rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.
Author Notes
Lydia Millet is the author of Omnivores and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Suddenly alone after the death of her husband, Susan Lindley is unmoored in Millet's elegant meditation on death and what it means to be alone, even when you're not, in this companion piece to How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights. When Susan's boss, T., goes missing in a Central American jungle, her husband, Hal, flies down to find him, a "generous" gesture that Susan sees as an "excuse to get away from her" after an "unpleasant discovery, namely her having sex with a co-worker on the floor of her office." But when T. appears alone at the airport, bearing news that Hal has died in a mugging, Susan takes her husband's death as "the punishment for her lifestyle." Susan's prickly, paraplegic adult daughter, Casey, who recently traded college for phone sex work, slips into a grief that "seemed to be shifting to melancholy," which doesn't help Susan assuage her guilty conscience; nor does the closeness of the relationship that begins to bud between Casey and T. But into the mourning comes an unexpected ray of light: Susan's great uncle, whom she only vaguely remembers, wills her an enormous Pasadena estate overrun with taxidermy. Every room is filled with all manner of exotic beasts, divided into "themes." Surprising everyone, including herself, Susan moves in and the taxidermy menagerie becomes a comfort, a way to bring order to a chaotic world, particularly when angry relatives come calling. A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story beyond that tired tale of a grieving widow struggling to move on, instead exploring grief and love as though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing in deep and scooping out the innermost layers. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Millet brings her searching, bitterly funny, ecologically attuned trilogy of Los Angeles-based novels (How the Dead Dream, 2008; Ghost Lights, 2011) to a haunting crescendo. This tale of loss and realignment homes in on Susan at the end of a tragic chain of events involving her adult daughter, Casey, ending up in a wheelchair; her boss T.'s disappearance and return; and her husband's death. Susan struggles with grief and guilt and marvels at the ceaseless, atomic whirl of life and the persistence of the past. She is also astringently hilarious on the subject of men and her life as a secret slut. Millet creates a brilliant deus ex machina when her spiky protagonist unexpectedly inherits a vast mansion in Pasadena that is filled with hundreds of stuffed and mounted animals from all around the world. Susan is transformed by her new life as caretaker for this private natural history museum, this library of the dead, which becomes an unlikely haven for T.'s dementia-afflicted mother and others in need of succor and companionship. Millet is extraordinarily agile and powerful here, moving from light to shadow like a stalking lioness as Susan's strange stewardship casts light on extinction and preservation, how we care for others and seek or hide truth, and crimes both intimate and planetary.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BAD things happen in the surreal landscape of Lydia Millet's Los Angeles, many of them involving cars, those "cages along the roads by the billions with their tailpipes shooting out poisons." But despite the smog, the traffic and the hideous, soul-killing office parks, you couldn't call this L.A. noir. It's as colorful as the flock of parrots that inexplicably flies through Millet's suburbs. Amid all the misery, a certain innate good nature - and a desire to survive - shine through. A three-legged dog that stumps through the novel could serve as a mascot for Millet's grim but grinning vision: tail wagging, the maimed dog just keeps on keepin' on. At the beginning of "Magnificence," Millet's provocative, evocative ninth book, a secretary named Susan Lindley learns that her husband of 30 years, Hal, has been killed in a freakish street robbery and stabbing in Central America. An I.R.S. agent, he had gone in search of Susan's employer, a real estate developer "who fetishized his Mercedes and wore no suits retailing at less than 5K" and "had been discovered a few weeks ago living on a tropical island with poor hygiene, ribs showing, and a hut made of twigs." Susan blames herself for her husband's death, since he'd stumbled upon her in flagrante delicto - one of many infidelities, truth be told - right before he hastily left the country. But having her husband shipped back in a coffin isn't beleaguered Susan's only tragedy. Her daughter, Casey, left a paraplegic after a car accident, has now embarked on a career in the phone sex industry. Susan blames herself for that too: "She was a bad mother and a slut; her daughter was a bad daughter and a slut. Two sluts." Completely awash in guilt, Susan gets a life-changing call: she has inherited a house from her great-uncle Albert. And not just any old house. Susan is more than shocked at what she finds inside the mansion at the gated estate on 20 acres in Pasadena - hundreds and hundreds of taxidermied animals, from the regulation big game with their roaring, open mouths and huge antlers to flamingos and minks. Every species seems to get a spot in this odd ark. To her astonishment, the menagerie even includes a common quail being trailed by its minuscule stuffed chicks. "How could you shoot something so small and put it together again?" At first appalled by this "goth bordello," Susan begins to appreciate the bizarre collection. "The dead were almost as beautiful as the living, sometimes more so," she concludes. "They had far fewer needs." Although she barely knew her greatuncle, he clearly chose the right steward. But as she turns her attention to restoring the collection and trying to fathom what it meant to him, she must also defend it against a rapacious cousin intent on contesting the will. Luckily, one of her new paramours is a lawyer who proves useful in trying to have the house declared historic. While working to accomplish this, Susan gets her next shock. An architect brings her the original plans and reveals that the house had a huge basement - except they can't find the door to it, or any staircase. At last a workman discovers a manhole in the backyard. The climax of "Magnificence" reveals what's down that manhole. It sounds like the plot of an action-adventure film, but Millet doesn't play it that way. In fact, the discovery (no spoilers here) takes up very little space in the novel, which mostly involves Susan musing as she sleeps with the help, walks around the house's many rooms and anxiously awaits messages from her daughter - who, to her surprise, has accompanied Susan's now ex-boss, T, to Borneo on a mission to save the rain forest. They've left her the three-legged dog. They've also left her T.'s demented mother, who, in turn, brings a menagerie of old ladies for a "slumber party" that becomes semipermanent. What can Susan say? It's not as if she doesn't have space. Readers who aren't familiar with "How the Dead Dream," the first novel in the trilogy in which "Magnificence" is the concluding volume, won't have much background about T.'s relationship to Casey or his environmental activism. (Before his Borneo mission, his obsession with animal extinction led him to stage liberating raids on zoos - quite a contrast to Great-Uncle Albert's hunting savagery.) Although Millet has credentials in environmental policy, this novel doesn't push an argument about animal rights. And those who haven't read the trilogy's second book, "Ghost Lights," won't know much about the Lindley marriage or the adventure (complete with his own infidelity) that brings Susan's husband to his death. That book makes a more forceful argument about the failure of our solipsistic culture. "He was a surplus human," Hal thinks, "a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men." A different kind of writer would combine these three short, lyrical books and call the result an epic. Millet's approach is much more jaggedly imagistic. In "Ghost Lights," she gives the tropics an underwater glow, eerie as bioluminescent fish. Here her focus is on hides. The skins of slaughtered animals contrast, for example, with the skin Susan craves during sex and ruefully recalls when missing her husband: "She liked the smell and feel of his skin . . . and the way he felt when she touched him. It was the skin that bound you most, the contact of two skins." But contact, Millet implies, isn't easy. Susan and the people she encounters are mostly as isolated from one another as commuters on a Los Angeles freeway. They can connect - briefly and mournfully - only through sex. Some readers may be irked that Millet doesn't spend more time exploring the enticing contents of that basement. But her oblique, elliptical style serves her vision well. The earth and its inhabitants may be going to hell in a hand basket, but most of us may not even notice. "You didn't know what was happening out of view," Susan learns. "You lived your life in a small part of the world, with only the faintest inkling of what was everywhere else." Lisa Zeidner's fifth novel, "Love Bomb," was recently published. She is a professor at Rutgers University in Camden.
Kirkus Review
Millet's conclusion of the trilogy that includes How the Dead Dream (2008) and Ghost Lights (2011) draws a detailed map of the healing process of an adulterous wife who suddenly finds herself a widow. Susan's husband, Hal, goes to Belize in search of Susan's employer ,T., a real estate tycoon who has gone missing. (Spoiler alert: Readers of the earlier novels who don't want to know what happens to T. or Hal, stop reading now.) Hal's quest is successful: T. returns to Los Angeles. But he's alone, because Hal has been fatally knifed in a mugging. Susan is both grief- and guilt-stricken. She genuinely loved Hal but has been seeking sex with other men ever since a car accident left their daughter, Casey, a paraplegic. She believes Hal went to Belize largely to recover after discovering her infidelity. Millet's early chapters insightfully delve into Susan's internal anguish as she tries to come to grips with the seismic change in her life caused by Hal's death. Her intense maternal love for Casey, who refuses the role of noble victim, is as prickly and complicated as her mourning; her capacity for experiencing extremes of selflessness and selfishness within a heartbeat is refreshingly human and recognizable. Plot machinations get a little creaky, though once Susan sells her house and coincidentally inherits a mansion full of stuffed animals from a great-uncle she barely remembers. Bringing the mansion back to life and figuring out the secret of her uncle's legacy take over Susan's life. The deeply honest, beautiful meditations on love, grief and guilt give way to a curlicued comic-romantic mystery complete with a secret basement and assorted eccentrics.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Death and damage hover over the tenth work of fiction by Pulitzer Prize finalist Millet (Love in Infant Monkeys), yet it's a refreshingly buoyant and unsentimental tale. After her husband's death, Susan Lindley- seeks a new direction, which she finds unexpectedly in an inherited mansion full of taxidermied animals. Into that house she eventually welcomes an assortment of people also in need of repair, including an unhappily married man and an elderly woman who needs to be needed. Beyond the activities of this menagerie is a plot about the psychic healing of Susan's daughter, confined to a wheelchair years before as the result of a car accident. The characters all find a kind of salvation, but in very convincing ways. The story develops naturally, an ironic contrast to the artificiality of the preserved animals, and the novel becomes a lyrical meditation on what it takes to survive and evolve. VERDICT Recommended for fans of How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights, the first two books in this trilogy. Millet's spare but powerful prose also calls to mind the work of J.M. Coetzee. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/12.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
