Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION MIL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
T. is a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions. His orderly, upwardly mobile life is thrown into chaos by the sudden appearance of his nutty mother, who's been deserted by T.'s now out-of-the-closet father. After his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, T. finds himself increasingly estranged from his latest project: a retirement community in the middle of the California desert. As he juggles family, business, and socialresponsibilities, T. begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species. Soon he's living a double life, building sprawling subdivisions by day and breaking into zoos at night to be near the animals. A series of calamities forces T. to a tropical island, where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle. Millet's devastating wit, psychological acuity, and remarkable empathy for flawed humankind contend with her vision of a world slowly murdering itself.
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
Millet proves no less lyrical, haunting or deliciously absurd in her brilliant sixth novel than in her fifth, the acclaimed Oh Pure & Radiant Heart. As a boy, T. keeps his distance from others, including his loving but vacant parents, preferring to explore his knack for turning a dollar. Before long, he's a wealthy but lonely young real estate developer in L.A. Just after he adopts, on impulse, a dog from the pound, his mother shows up and announces that T.'s father has left her. His mother, increasingly erratic, moves in; meanwhile, T. finally meets and falls in love with Beth, a nice girl who understands him, but a cruel twist of fate soon leaves him alone again. As his mother continues to unravel, T. finds unexpected consolation in endangered animals at the zoo, and he starts breaking into pens after hours to be closer to them. The jungle quest that results, while redolent of Heart of Darkness and Don Quixote, takes readers to a place entirely Millet's own, leavened by very funny asides. At once an involving character study and a stunning meditation on loss-planetary and otherwise-Millet's latest unfolds like a beautiful, disturbing dream. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* T. is so devoted to earning money as a Los Angeles-based real-estate developer that he is content with his antiseptically solitary life until he is unmoored by a cascade of disasters. His mother loses her grip on reality after his father's abrupt defection. T.'s luxury desert subdivision has hastened the demise of an endangered species, and when T. finally falls in love, she, too, is lost. T.'s grief blasts open the doors of perception, and he becomes cosmically attuned to the suffering of animals. Strategizing like a solo commando, he breaks into zoos in the dead of night to sit with the animals, many the last in their line. In a work just as startling, powerful, and significant as her brilliantly inventive Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), Millet, a writer of encompassing empathy and imaginative lyricism, and a satirist of great wit and heart, takes readers on an intelligently conceived and devastating journey into the heart of extinction. Millet's extraordinary leap of a novel warns us that as the splendor and mystery of the natural world is replaced by the human-made, our species faces a lonely and spiritually impoverished future.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In this novel, a developer learns to love the animals he displaces. THE hero of Lydia Millet's latest novel is a real estate developer. Not a green developer, not a developer of affordable housing, just a regular, in-it-for-cash purveyor of tacky housing complexes and upscale resorts for well-to-do retirees and adventurous tourists. This is unexpected; Millet's fiction is heavy with ecofriendly themes. But the developer at the center of "How the Dead Dream" undergoes a conversion. He doesn't so much renounce his vocation as gradually lose interest in it, becoming instead fixated upon animals in danger of extinction. It's quite a turn for a character whose boyish money lust went well beyond that of your typical lemonade stand entrepreneur. Young T. - as the developer, Thomas, is usually called - runs a black market, selling things like "purloined bottles of liquor, a dog-eared copy of 'The Joy of Sex' ... brassieres and once a Polaroid of Adam Scheinhorn's naked sister," and cons money from his neighbors in the guise of various charitable causes. When his mother wants to know whether all the money he raised on one occasion really went to a group that helps starving children, T. cannily assures her: "All the funds went to children. Yes. They did." Soon after he graduates from college, T. sells his first building for a six-figure profit and by age 22 runs his own development firm in Santa Monica. But T. turns out not to be an antihero, and "How the Dead Dream" is neither satirical nor absurdist. So it is a departure from Millet's previous novels, which tended to be both: "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" imagines that three physicists who led the Manhattan Project come back to life in 2003; others, like "My Happy Life," which won the 2003 PEN U.S.A. Award, and "George Bush, Dark Prince of Love" were, while dark, full of comic high jinks. In contrast, T.'s transformation to friend of the kangaroo rats - endangered by one of his own developments - is presented in a deadpan tone, albeit in lyrical, meditative prose. The ostensible reason for T.'s growing fascination with threatened wildlife? As a person who has experienced loss, he can relate. "He knew their position, as he knew his own: they were at the forefront of aloneness, like pioneers," Millet writes. This concern is tied to more general environmental awareness: "Empire" - which T. previously revered - "only looked good built against a backdrop of oceans and forests," he realizes. "If the oceans were dead and the forests replaced by pavement even empire would be robbed of its consequence." T.'s conversion is not entirely convincing, nor is it inherently as profound as Millet seems to think. "Cities were the works of men," she writes, "but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan - it was God sleeping there and dreaming." Ifs poetic, but hardly revelatory. As T.'s obsession grows, he starts to seem a bit unhinged, and the rather pat implication is that what society deems insanity is actually a higher level of awareness. Yet on the whole "How the Dead Dream" succeeds, in large part because of Millet's intelligence and story telling grace. But it's also a function of a talent that was less central to her comic works but that Millet clearly possesses in abundance: a moral eye as sensitive to nuances of character as it is to social causes. When T.'s father comes out of the closet and abruptly abandons his mother after 30-something years of marriage, T. is moved by his mother's despair and stunned by his dad's blitheness. "So you're gay?" T. says. "Great. Whatever feels right. You look good, you look healthy. But do you have to be cruel to her?" His father bristles: "I don't have to listen to this, Thomas," he tells his son. T.'s dismay at his father's selfishness reveals his underlying decency - and illustrates Millet's ability to grant her characters a wide-ranging humanity, even if they are real estate developers. Adelle Waldman has written for Slate, The New York Observer and The Village Voice.
Kirkus Review
A story of extinction from Millet (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, 2005, etc.). As a boy T. collects donations for charities that don't exist and serves as middleman for schoolyard protection rackets. In college he joins a fraternity not for community but for connections, and he remains apart from the debauchery. His brothers mock his monastic tendencies, but they appreciate his clear head and powers of persuasion when, say, frat-party rape victims need to be talked out of pressing charges. As an adult T. is a real estate speculator. He has fulfilled the promise of his youth, which is to say he has achieved the apotheosis of human greed and narcissism. Events conspire, however, to disturb his cool self-interest. His father leaves his mother. His mother descends into dementia. And he hits a coyote with his very expensive car, killing it. T. becomes his mother's caretaker. He tries to communicate with his father. He adopts a dog. He falls in love with a girl named Beth. Transformed by these connections, T. becomes passably human, but he is undone once again by Beth's sudden death. T. sinks into an abyss of loneliness--which deepens as his mother ceases to recognize him--and his experience makes him aware of the loneliness of animals on the brink of extinction. He becomes, if not an activist exactly, then a self-sacrificing witness to these last creatures. Millet's latest doesn't work as a novel--it's exhausting and disappointing. The author seldom deviates from the expository voice, and her characters exist only in outline. She does, however, offer an interesting disputation on the meaning of life, one that posits love as the only useful response to isolation, even as it acknowledges that loss is the inevitable result of communion. A hymn to love and an elegy for lost species, but not much of a novel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
T. has always accumulated wealth. As a child, it was through paper routes and bogus charity drives; as a college student, it was through stock-market investments; and as an adult, it is by buying land and developing planned communities. He has never let anyone close enough to derail him from his commitment to accumulate. But the vagaries of love unhinge him: his mother's mental degeneration and subsequent indifference to him, the feelings he has for a dog he rescues from the pound, the love-at-first-sight experience with a woman he meets at a party, and the grief at her sudden loss--all these things affect T. in a powerful and bizarre way. He becomes obsessed with endangered species and routinely breaks into zoos at night to sleep in wolves' and elephants' paddocks. Award-winning author Millet's (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart) story culminates with T. tracking an endangered jaguar and coming face to face with the essence of his own being. With wry, brilliant dialog and insightful existential musings, Millet delves deep into the meaning of humanity's destructive connection to nature and the consequences of the extinction of both animals and love. Absorbing and not to be missed; highly recommended.--Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.