| Title | : | Ghost Lights |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0393343456 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780393343458 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published October 17, 2011 |
Ghost Lights Reviews
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Lydia Millet has a remarkable way of taking you into her characters' heads; a way that probably shouldn't work given normal novelistic conventions. It's almost all internal dialogue, nudged along by a very loose plot. In fact, if you don't read
How The Dead Dream first, I'm not sure this plot would make any sense at all.
I enjoyed this second in the trilogy possibly even more than HtDD: a) it was wayyyyyy funnier; Millet's sardonic, absurd tone really worked with this particular character (although I still don't get the Vonnegut comparisons on the GL and HtDD jacket blurbs); and b) this character - a father, a husband, struggling to come to terms with his life and in particular his relationship with his paraplegic daughter - is more poignant, more human, more relatable. His obsessive, obtuse self-reflections as he comes to terms with who he is, why he is, are more touching and less annoying than those of T., the protagonist in the first, although they are in the service of less grand, less esoteric philosophical musings.
Taken together, both of these characters are creating a bigger commentary on meaning, purpose, love, connection, and here - "companionship" - a motif that points to something simpler, more elemental for us humans. It is the thing, the only thing, that wards off the angst of that bigger, existential aloneness that is almost too much to face. That is, too much to face alone.
And the final bonus: lots of lovely digressions on dogs - the ultimate companions. :-) -
Ghost Lights is an odd little book. It was recommended by a woman in my writing workshop for its sardonic narrative voice. And that voice is easily the book's biggest strength, the reason I chose four stars instead of the three I am inclined to give it.
The protagonist of the book is Hal, 50 years old and working for the IRS, having something of an everyman life crisis. His 20-something daughter is paralyzed, has a boyfriend he disapproves of, and is working as a sex line operator. He suspects his wife is cheating on him with a much younger paralegal at her office. Moreover, his wife's boss, T, has gone missing in Belize and she's obsessed with finding him, channeling (Hal thinks) her energy/enthusiasm for the paralegal into the search.
Wanting to prove himself capable, having accrued lots of vacation time, and having nothing to lose anyway, Hal volunteers to go to Belize and find T. There he meets a young German couple -- Hans and Gretel -- who make a project of helping Hal find the missing man. He has his own brief tryst with Gretel (not a spoiler, this is on the jacket). Things go otherwise wacky with regards to the disappearance.
The reason I didn't love the book: the plot. My mistake was probably not reading it in one shot, which produced some disjointedness in pacing. Too much time spent in the jungle! Not enough time spent on his relationship with his wife after he tells her he thinks she's cheating! I don't know. It's a wisp of a book, and maybe it's reflective enough to satisfy others, but there's a lot going on in Hal's head and in the pages that only 255 of them to explore this world feels somewhat like a short shrift.
Lydia Millet's writing, though, is worthy of these four stars, if only because many times Hal's trains of thought into the absurd made me laugh out loud. Whenever he thinks about the oppression of Guatemalans, for example, he thinks about Rigoberta Menchu. But it's such a privileged, American, innocently blithe recollection that all he can remember is that she wears bright scarves. He admires a co-worker's earnestness, while mentally castigating him for wearing high-waisted pants. Most hilarious, to me anyway, is his/Millet's sense of humor about the Germans. For example:
Once they were back on the powerboat, the boys hunched over and were pushing buttons on their handheld games again and the German couple became caught up in the momentum. They were enthusiastic.
"You must contact your embassy in Belmopan," said the husband. "They have military forces! Maybe they would help you."
Germans. They thought you could just call in the army.
Even though I feel a bit less fulfilled than I was hoping to feel by the close of the book, it's still a very good recommendation. German humor! Love it. -
This second book of Millet's trilogy, following the intrepid HOW THE DEAD DREAM, centers on middle-aged IRS bureaucrat, Hal Lindley, Susan's husband, both who were minor characters in the first book. Susan works for T., the protagonist of book one, the man who is missing in Belize, and presumed dead. You don't have to read the first book to engage with the second, but it adds more background and material on several of the characters (especially T.), and some more dimension and history on the story as a whole.
The only writer I can think of that reminds me of Millet is Paul Auster, with his postmodern, darkly comic and surreal novels of characters earnestly struggling, and yet with an absurd haplessness, too, to comprehend their lives. They suffer from disorienting delusions, so that their self-directed journeys are fevered with mortifications. Millet is somewhat quirkier, even, and without the assembled, careful structure of Auster. She is less antiseptic than Auster, with an undertone of gallows humor.
After Hal comes to the conclusion that Susan is having an affair with her preppy office paralegal, he decides to play the potential hero, offering to travel to Belize to find T. Stern, who has been missing since he went on a boat trip with a guide up the Monkey River. Several issues plague Hal, besides Susan's affair. First, he feels like he is responsible for forcing Susan to suppress her bohemian, free-love spirit that she possessed when they first met in the 60's (it is now 1994, dated by the death of Kurt Cobain).
Secondly, and more importantly, he is emotionally choked with guilt and pain about his daughter, Casey, who had an accident when she was 17 and is now a twenty-six-year-old paraplegic. Apparently, she once had an intimate affair with T., (if you read the first book, you get the full story), but she isn't sharing the details. T. was responsible for her new and improved outlook--her shedding of cynicism, self-enmity, and former scorn for all of existence. Now that Casey is engaged with life, she has taken on an acrimonious, mocking ex-cop paraplegic boyfriend, and an appalling telephone job that Hal found out about inadvertently.
Hal's feelings of profound loss over Casey, and his frequent interior dialogues about her "before" and "after" state, as well as the shock of his wife's infidelity, crushes him with an awareness of his own obsolescence. This keeps with the themes of extinction started in the first book. Although it is animal extinction that was How the Dead Dream's concern, there has always been a subtext of human dissolution and annihilation.
"...suddenly he was older and part of the architecture, its tangibility and the impulse behind it, its failings and strengths. The heavy installation had lost their majesty and seemed temporary, even shoddy, with a propensity for decline."
"He was a surplus human, a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men."
Hal's adventures in Belize include breakfast:
"Eggs arrived, with a slice of papaya to remind him of his location. Lest he mistake them for Hackensack eggs or eggs in Topeka, the papaya cam along to announce they were tropical eggs, to remind him that congratulations!-he was on a tropical vacation."
Hal meets a German couple named Hans and Gretel (seriously!), (with twin blonde young "cornboys" obsessed with table tennis and video games), who are resolutely cheerful and beautiful to look at, and radiate a glowing bliss. "Such Germans were irritating. On the one hand they were an unpleasant reminder of Vikings and Nazis, on the other hand you envied them."
Hans, an avionics genius and specialist in something called tactical sensor networks, is well-connected to the military, and after hearing Hal's reason for coming to this island, organizes a search for T., with the U.S. armed forces, the Belize Defence Force Cadets, and NATO on board. Hal joins Hans and the muscle bound military men, and has his own Heart of Darkness trip through the jungle, as T. did in the first book.
This next quote, although not plot progressing, is an example of Millet's sly, dark wit as channeled by Hal's interior thoughts:
"Armed forces personnel were not as bad as cops, when it came to the aggregate probability of antisocial personality disorder...They were not homicidal so much as Freudian; they liked to feel the presence of a constant father. And their fringe benefits included fit and muscular bodies."
Millet's charismatic wit blends with her piercing, philosophical insights and compassion to portray a man on the brink of an existential crisis. What is especially endearing about Hal Lindley is his humanity as a parent, ripe and heartfelt with touching contradictions. The ending is surreal and mystifying, with a touch of the bizarre, a soul-searing finale that makes me impatient for book three. MAGNIFICENCE is scheduled for November release. -
I don't know how I discovered Lydia Millet. She has never had a big bestseller but has been a finalist for literary prizes and is loved by literary book bloggers. A few years ago I decided to read How the Dead Dream, the first novel of a trilogy. I was just so pleased.
Ghost Lights is the second in that trilogy and I read it now because I wanted to get through all three novels before her new book, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, came out. For one thing, it does not suffer from the common occurrence where the second of a trilogy is the weaker of the three. If anything, it just carries right on.
In How the Dead Dream the main character, known as T, dumps his successful real estate development business in the hands of devoted secretary Susan and takes off for Central America. He goes completely out of touch leaving Susan consumed with worry.
Ghost Lights opens with Susan's husband Hal, a deadbeat IRS employee who has just discovered that his wife might be cheating on him. In a convoluted attempt to win her back, he volunteers to go find T somewhere in the jungle and bring him back.
Millet's characters are always just this side of whacked out. In that respect she reminds me of T C Boyle and Michael Chabon, two of my favorite authors. Hal is so oblivious. Obsessed with his confusion about Susan, he bumbles around on the outskirts of Central American tourist towns, takes up drinking, has serendipitous encounters with people who help him, and finds T.
And this is only half of the novel! The thing about Millet is she combines elements that shouldn't work together in the same story but they do. Wry humor bordering on slapstick sometimes, political and environmental viewpoints laced with irony, a smidgen of magical realism, all wrapped around the very real sorrows and quandaries of the human heart.
It's like when I invent dishes in my kitchen that are a mashup of various cultures. They are usually delicious and I just call them "fusion." Because if the flavors complement each other and the ingredients meet up in interesting ways, everyone's palate is happy. Well, almost everyone.
Lydia Millet delivers something that delights my reading tastes. And she does not care one whit what she does to you. Ghost Lights ends so surprisingly, as did How the Dead Dream. I can't wait to see if or how she wraps things up in the third book, but with the title, Magnificence, she promises quite a lot. -
I really want to like Lydia Millet. Her writing is very clever, very odd, very funny and very polished and I can see why she's gotten the recognition that she has but at the same time, her writing is characterized by all these authorial nudges. Aren't libertarians awful? Isn't the environment worthy of protection (you really get this sense through all the environmental facts she drops)? Aren't American 'liberals' kind of ignorant and ridiculous half the time? Some of these nudges can be amusing - I did laugh at the bit where our protagonist comes across a boy and "felt an impulse to apologize to this boy in case he was one of the retarded ones. Not that Hal himself was personally responsible for the lead in the gasoline of this foreign country, but in the sense that they all were, that individuals were culpable, especially individuals like him, secure and comfortable and well-educated [...]" and gets mugged - but mostly, it's intrusive and it's irritating. It feels like a book written by a grad student with a degree in environmental policy, and well, it is. And that sense was particularly bad in this book because the premise - harried American civil servant runs away to the jungle - wasn't even interesting to begin with. (And tbh, if this were written by a man, that German woman he has an affair with? We'd all be rolling our eyes to the ceiling.) With the first book in this series, How The Dead Dream, the main character and plot had more spark - sure it was bizarre, but it took you on an interesting ride. This was a major blah and made me want to reread A Handful of Dust, tbh.
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this book is critically acclaimed, but i totally didn't want to finish it. from the first page, it just left me hollow and disconnected, a three-legged dog in the world of four-legged beasts.
i don't know.
there are some nicely written parts but the story is not what you might assume from a book called "ghost lights" - it's not really a fantasy so much as a chronicle of a mid-life crisis or breakdown.
not my thing at all. -
So, so good. I've now read all three novels of Millet's cycle (what's it called? Michael Silverblatt gave it a name, but I can't recall it). In addition to all the wonderful qualities of her writing, Millet writes beautiful, stunning, strange, and quiet conclusions. Her beginnings seem a little rocky, and with each of the novels I had a bit of trouble getting inside the new protagonist's mind, finding a reading flow, immersing myself. At about one-third of the way I achieved it in each book. Then, each one moved toward a swelling crescendo - I don't want to call it a classic "climax", even though I guess that's what a crescendo is... but each one ended on the upsurge ... There are no denouements - but the reader also isn't really left hanging: when T. was lost in the jungle at the end of How the Dead Dream it made me strangely happy for him - I was okay leaving him there for a couple of months; I didn't have to rush to read the second book....
Also, they can be read as stand-alone novels - they make up a cycle, not a trilogy, I now realize. But each informs the other. And it doesn't really take a week to read; I was just very busy. -
"People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them--dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end--dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.
You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms . . . there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men" (100). -
Pleasant but facile. A bland character vacillates about a few thinly-drawn situations as he avoids both conflict and relationships. This makes for a personal narrative that feels impersonal. The observations the protagonist makes don't comment on anything outside the blatantly fictional circumstance; I find it difficult to connect them to anything in my life, or to experience another life vicariously through them.
Rightly or wrongly, I get the sense of an author "bravely" writing a character with whom she doesn't identify, and consequently falling back on "everyman" cliches that apply to no real person. It's not funny enough for the humor to be the point, but there's not really drama either - just non-committal outlines for dramas that could be explored but aren't.
The ending was unearned and non-sequitor, like the author hit a deadline and needed to suddenly resolve an aimless freewriting exercise in a way that felt "important." -
I rate this a low 2 stars. I stuck with it all the way to the end, but it was not a book I can say I enjoyed. In fact, I often found it annoying. Millet chose a protagonist she portrays as a world-class jerk and spends most of the book inside his head. Seems like a strange choice. His thoughts are rarely amusing, never enlightening and usually boring. Wasn’t Millet bored writing from his viewpoint?
On the other hand, she's a strong enough writer and storyteller that I kept on turning those pages. Maybe this was Millet's challenge to herself: am I skillful enough to keep myself and my readers interested in this turkey? -
Millet's writing is, as ever, flawless. So why does this read like a peculiarly defanged entry of Updike's Rabbit trilogy?
A NYT Best 100 of 2020 book.
5.66 hrs, 207 w/m -
The second book in Millet's trilogy marks an improvement in cohesiveness from
How the Dead Dream, though it lacks the same philosophical messaging that made that novel interesting. Here she closely follows, in third-person limited viewpoint, the IRS agent Hal, husband of Susan, who works for T., the main character in the first book. T. has gone missing while checking on the progress of one of his real estate investments in Belize. For less than selfless reasons known only to him (and us), Hal decides he will travel down south to investigate T.'s disappearance. While the element of mystery surrounding this occurrence helps to drive the narrative forward, unfortunately the book never rises much above the level of a rather humdrum tale of a middle-aged white dude's midlife crisis. Hal is a much less interesting person to spend so much time with than T. was in the first book, despite the structural and stylistic problems plaguing the narrative in that book. His personal growth is marginal at best, making him difficult to like since he wasn't very likable to begin with. Whenever I began to slightly empathize with him, he inevitably slipped back into his middle-aged navel-gazing ways. Finally, the light satire of diplomatic culture and U.S. intervention in Central America just felt kind of tacked on to Hal's story rather than fully integrated, a problem which was also manifest in the first book. I also found the ending here to be pointless beyond perhaps a cheap way to get readers to pick up the final book, which I will not be reading after having read the description of it. Ultimately what I read about the thematic focus of this trilogy prior to starting it did not substantially materialize in my reading. And the comparisons of Millet to Joy Williams are particularly irksome as at most they only apply on a surface level. Perhaps Millet is better in her other works, but if these two are representative of her writing in general, she is nowhere near the writer that Joy Williams is. -
What we've got here, as far as I can tell, is a book about a very passive IRS agent, Hal, who finds himself involved in a story bigger than he is. The writing has a distanced quality. I'm not sure how the author intended Hal to be viewed, but I didn't think he had much depth of feeling--a bit of a snoozer--and I certainly couldn't connect to him based on his reactions to things. For example, he finds out his wife is cheating on him, he has sex with a beautiful young woman who's way out of his league, he has adventures in an exciting foreign locale, and he's successful in the big mission that comprises the novel's entire plot. And his reaction to all of this? Kind of hard to judge, really, but he just seemed a bit off, not fully human. There's the chance that this is all intentional, that the author here set out to write a story about a passive snoozer who's been living a kind of rote mechanical day to day grind for so long that he's lost some essential piece of his humanity. There's also, I'm aware, a case to be made that the whole story is a kind of semi-hallucinogenic death dance. I'm not sure I'm willing to buy the latter explanation, so more likely the author here set herself up with the challenge of writing a story about a protagonist who is, well, a bit boring. It's an interesting challenge, and a nice thesis. Can such a story be engaging? Should such a story be written?
I'm not sure what separates this book from others with passive narrators like Ford's Sportswriter books and Percy's The Moviegoer, both of which I gave five stars. Part of it, I think is that, when Hal's doing so much moving around, and so many big things are happening, it's hard not to focus on his passivity.
It may just be that I personally related to the characters in those books better. I do admire the attempt here, and I think that someone somewhere could definitely pick this book up and think it was the best thing they'd read all year. -
Hal, the taxman, civil servant, dutiful husband, devoted father, cuckolded and distant husband flees to Belize on trip of salvation. It's purpose is to find T (Thomas Stern a missing millionaire who is his wife' boss and daughter's friend) , to lose himself, to shake off his suspicions and to find himself.
Lydia Millet, in the second book of this trilogy takes us on the ride of Hal's life time. Hal sheds his suit and tie, picks up a mug of beer or whatever anyone else is drinking and almost by accident travels to the Heart of Darkness and returns with the jungle mad T..
Don't worry, there's lots more, and no one is really safe in Belize anyway. To read Millet's novels, you'd have to say safe is just a "Dream". Strangers can be helpful, loyal, disloyal and powerful. Family which is what life is built on is tenuous and treacherous. Rich American companies which pump millions of dollars in investments into small economies like Belize's take more than they receive.
This is not a didactic or preachy novel. It shows rather than tells how American life, commerce, social institutions are crumbling as they are insidiously attaching themselves to new old shores. Military bombers are vegans. Life is fragile. Alleyways are dangerous. I can't wait to read the final part of the trilogy. -
In contrast to the first book of the trilogy--How the Dead Dream--Ghost Lights is pretty quiet. Less happens in terms of plot, instead focusing solely on Hal and how he goes about sorting himself after finding out that his wife is having an affair. Sure, tons of stuff happens--Hal goes to Belize to search for T., the star of How the Dead Dream, and while he's there, he gets tangled up with some radiant Germans, discovers the joy of drinking, and has an affair of his own. But so much of the writing is concerned with Hal figuring out his place in his world, what with his wife banging a young paralegal and his paralyzed daughter's plight constantly on his mind.
It's a really beautiful book, and a great continuation of the trilogy. Can't wait to get to Magnificence . . . -
**** This is a Goodreads free book****
I wanted to like this book. The blurb sounded interesting. Unfortunately i didn't care much for it. The premise was good, the storyline was good. However the plot could have been completed in one chapter. The rest of the book was background and descriptions which went on page after page everytime the main character, Hal Lindley, had a thought. The story became more and more tedious the longer it went on. The ending was, I felt, totally uninspired and even then, went on page after page with Hal Lindley's thought processes. -
With such positive reviews, I expected more. Well written, but the story was not very satisfactory: I cared more about his wife and daughter, waiting in the US, than the protagonist's plight involved in an odd search in South America. That said, I kept waiting for him to return to find out what happens to the three of them, only to find that he doesn't return.
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The second impressive novel in Millet's trilogy, written in a different character's voice, with its own sensibility, but with the same moral imperative as the first (How the Dead Dream).
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An IRS officer waist-deep in mid-life ennui is a tough sell as protagonists go and few can do so with the humor and human tenderness Millet can.
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I felt the narrative was uneven and as the book progressed, I ceased to care about the characters.
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This is part two of a trilogy that started with How the Dead Dream. At the end of that novel, T., a high level retail developer, had ended up lost in the wilds of Belize and for all practical purposes was probably already dead. But in this novel, Hal, the husband of Susan, who works for T., discovers that his wife has been having an affair. He gets drunk one night and decides to go and search for T. as a way to impress Susan. The rest of the novel involves his time in Belize, much of which is taken up with his relationship with a "beautiful" German family (a young couple and their young boys).
This is the novel of the middle age crisis in extremis. Hal has been working for the IRS and hasn't led the most exciting life. Going to Belize, hanging with these beautiful young people, and going on an adventure through the jungle is all about him assessing his life at the age of 50. He does discover what happened to T. and learns a lot about himself.
In addition, Hal is dealing with the feeling of not being a good protective father as his daughter was in a car accident when she was 17 and is now paralyzed and in a wheelchair. This is a very important theme and motivator in his life, and he is unable to come to a comfortable place with it.
Of course as well, Lydia Millet deals with humans in general and our place in the natural order. She writes for the Center for Biological Diversity, and she is well aware of our general disdain for the planet, at least as far as our actions go. She is a great writer, though some may find her to be not as plot driven as they desire. She is more a developer of character and deals with important philosophical issues. -
I guess when I read the follow up to this book and thought, oh it's called a trilogy but it's NOT REALLY a trilogy, I might have been wrong? I was reading this one and the plot partially involves a 50 year old man who works for the the IRS believing that his wife, with whom he kind of does and doesn't have an open relationship with, is cheating on him, or if they do kind of have an open relationship, then sleeping with someone else, which is causing him distress. Anyway, this leads him to volunteer to travel to Belize to try to convince her tech bro (well, whether he's a tech bro or merely one of the archetype tech bro) to return to the US or maybe just find out if he's dead or not. Anyway, I thought, why does this sound so familiar and then I realized that all of this happens in the pre-text of her novel Magnificence, which of course how sequels work, in sequence.
So anyway, this book has the same ethereal warming glow of brilliant narration accompanying terrifying dissonance in reality. The language is also so wonderful and the thoughts so driving, and the plot and action so so awful. I guess in my mind, as I narrate a much more cheery (delusional) outlook on most of life, that I might as well get some of that in my reading. It doesn't make the world much better for me, but it does make it less alien. -
“He was a surplus human, a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men.”
And here we follow Hal, surplus human, sad sack. That was tough to get through sometimes, but at least it gets better at the halfway mark. Early on, I could see what the author was doing with the main character of this novel in contrast with the main character of the last one: they are each other’s inverses. I was a little annoyed when she came right out and said it. Show, don’t tell! Still, I was glad for the continuation of this plot, and the ideas in this one were as fascinating as in the previous. Less about humans and their relationship with animals and more about their relationships with other humans — the haves and the have-nots. The sacrificial lambs (yes, there are biblical references as usual) who keep the lucky few safely in their lavish lifestyles. I’m looking forward to the last book if only to read more of Millet’s deft handling of themes. -
I picked this up because of the stickers “Clearance - $3”, “Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize” author, a “NYT Book Of the Year”, etc.) and the promise of something different, but I don’t think I’ve ever DNF’d a book so quickly. From the second you step in this guy’s head, you know you’re in for a long ride through a midlife crisis that likely does not get resolved satisfactorily. Took a look at some reviews to make up my mind and confirm that there’s no real worthy plot to carry me through. Sorry.
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An Ordinary Man Tries to be a Hero
Lydia Millet is very funny and very sad in Ghost Lights
Hal is surprised when he gets home early to pass a member of his wife's office leaving his house. This leads to constant worrying about his wife's fidelity. She is worried about her boss, called T., who went to Central America and disappeared. Hal volunteers to go to look for him and bring him home.
Very well written and often quite witty. -
This followup in the trilogy doesn't mesh quite as well as HOW THE DEAD DREAM, but it's still a pleasure to read because Millet's wit and prose increasingly gets better with each book. This was the first book away from Soft Skull. So perhaps there was some editorial interference from Norton that sanded out her biting edges. But the subtly fucked up family dynamic and the duplicity of her characters are fascinatingly understated here.
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I loved the first book of this trilogy and I really liked this one too. Hapless Hal finds himself on an unlikely rescue mission, which serves as the backdrop of him waking up to his life and coming to terms with himself and his place in the world. Beautiful writing and both funny and thoughtful.
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I know in my heart that Lydia Miller is a good writer but I can’t get past the main character’s annoying, simpering traits. He is so unlikable, I can only imagine she wrote him this way to contrast with the other two characters that bookend this book in the trilogy.
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About twenty-five percent in to this book, I thought I was going to like it. But that was when I still thought it had a plot and the POV character was though a bit self-involved was also witty. By the end, I was mystified at how much he changed for the worse, and that I finished reading it.
