| Title | : | How the Dead Dream |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780156035460 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published December 28, 2007 |
A beautiful, heart-wrenching tale, How the Dead Dream is also a riveting commentary on individualism and community in the modern social landscape and how the lives of people and animals are deeply entwined. Judged by many-- including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post Book World-- to be Millet's best work to date, it is, as Time Out New York perfectly states: "This beautiful writer’s most ambitious novel yet, a captivating balancing act between full-bodied satire and bighearted insight."
How the Dead Dream Reviews
-
I had so much trouble writing this review and I finally figured out why. I went into this book super excited, since it was recommended by a friend who always gives me bingos. As I started it, 4 stars. Great language, interesting character, good story development.
But WTF? The Kindle edition is a mess! This isn’t the author’s fault; the book is grammatically sound. But I have to say she does use A LOT of dashes, which can get on your nerves. But horror of horrors, in the Kindle version, all the dashes appear as hyphens. Eek!! And there are other problems. Somebody’s head should roll in Kindle-land. If I were the author I’d sure want to know. I’ve never read an ebook with so many typos.
On a mission, I emailed the writer (a first for me, so I was uneasy about it) and told her about the problems. I felt all proud and cool, and raved about her book. She immediately thanked me and contacted her agent so it maybe could get re-Kindle-ized.
But then, but then, I suddenly didn’t like the book so much. It had plunged to a 2.5 (rounded to a 3), and I felt like shit. So see how this review is making me all squirmy? Here I had actually contacted the writer; sort of looked her in the email face, and now I dare to write a somewhat negative review? Twitch twitch.
Let’s start with the plusses: It’s super well-written. The language is sophisticated and even brilliant in spots. There’s some wisdom, and there are some paragraphs that made me think. I highlighted a fair amount.
Okay, I’ll just get it over with. The plot’s off. The first half of the book is about a guy who’s obsessed with money and becomes a real estate tycoon. His persona is well developed yet I must say he seems one-dimensional. I’m all in, though, curious where this is going. There’s a girlfriend (or maybe she’s his wife?) whom he adores, but she doesn’t have a speaking role, which is frustrating.
The second half is about how this same guy becomes obsessed with endangered animals. Earlier in the book, he had hit a coyote and apparently this had set him off. (There’s some preaching going on about the plight of endangered species, and you know how I hate preaching.) I’m always a sucker for stories about animals, but I never felt a thing about the guy’s involvement with them—and we don’t even get to hear about their cool behavior.
I'll add a spoiler here because I really have to say what bugged me the most.
So, it’s like two separate books, like two long short stories thrown together. I can see the work that went into developing each section, and as separate pieces they are good, but together they just didn’t gel as one coherent and believable piece.
I had no real sense of the guy. See? I’m not even hot to say his name! Truth be told, I don’t remember it and don’t even feel like looking it up. I didn’t relate to him or like him or believe him. He was far away in another universe. Reading it, I was perfectly stoic. My soul was aching for a connection, or at least a little nudge nudge.
And what about other characters? There are parents, who are little pieces of dust and add nothing to the plot, and they seem like caricatures. There’s a male character introduced halfway through. The author spends a fair amount of time on him, but his role, too, is relatively minor. So it seems all uneven to have spent so much time on him. And when he does serve his purpose, he says horrible things to a nice woman, which seems totally unbelievable. No one is that mean.
Also, after the half-way point, a handicapped woman is introduced. She is well developed. The guy and she spend a lot of time together and it’s a good little tale—it just didn’t fit in with the rest of the book. It felt like its own little short story.
The various sections are unevenly developed—not enough time spent developing his love interest, for example, and way too much time developing the jerk introduced halfway through. Mom pops in and out of the picture. Dad appears, but only for a brief time. The author misses an opportunity for drama when the guy finds his dad. It just sort of fizzles.
You can tell this was all frustrating as hell. I did not look forward to picking the book up. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to appreciate how the guy went from a materialistic jerk to a humanitarian, but I just didn’t buy it.
I must admit I had some personal stuff going on, so maybe I’d have gotten into it more at another time. As it is, it’s pretty much a so-so, leaning toward a no-go. I so hope they redo the Kindle version. In the meantime, read the paperback instead.
Note: For proofreaders and editors, here is the scoop on the abysmal Kindle problems. For the rest of the (normal) world, it will be one big yawn, so I’ve added it as a spoiler. -
Okurken sık sık karnımda bir boşluk, rahatsızlık hissettim. İyi bir eserle karşılaşınca böyle oluyor, hem güzelliğinden, hem geçirdiği histen, hem de "keşke bunu ben yazmış olsaydım" duygusundan kopmadan, hırpalanarak okudum. Çevirmeni Evrim Öncül harika bir iş çıkarmış.
Kesinlikle tavsiye ediyorum. -
Incredible, amazing read. Such a powerful story, one that still has me reflecting. It's told in a remarkable way, feeling as if each word was carefully chosen for the perfect effect.
The main character T. (short for Thomas), seems born with a love for money, the mere touch of it, and is drawn to the great men who's pictures he sees on the bills. He grows up to become a land developer, quickly learning the rules of the game. He makes a habit of studying the real motivations behind his investors, often finding them simple and brutish. After he develops land in a native jungle he becomes drawn to what he calls "last animals," those whose lives are so close to extinction that soon they will no longer exist.
While this may be the general theme of this novel, it is so much more. It is about the love of women, of wildness and the losses we all encounter and mourn. I don't think I've ever highlighted so much in a book. The intelligent and philosophical writing penetrated my heart, will I ever be the same? I simply adore this writer and this book. -
This is the first book of a trilogy that circles around the concept/theme of extinction. The second novel, GHOST LIGHTS, was released last year. The third, MAFNIFICENCE, is still pending (scheduled for Nov release). The protagonists in the second and third books are minor characters from the first book. Millet's advocacy with endangered species and her graduate degrees in environmental policy and economics inform this novel without clamminess or preachy rhetoric. Her deft, precise language is lyrically noir and philosophical, and is plaited with satire and pathos, nuance and caricature. The dream-like narrative is ripe with imagery from the animal world. The motifs of absence, destruction and obsolescence reflect the moral decay that inhabits a capitalistic society in all its latent anxieties. It is also a rich story about the vicissitudes of the human condition.
Since childhood, T. has been a mercenary disciple of authority and financial institutions. His idols were the statesmen and presidents of legal tender. This led to a cunning acquisitiveness, scamming neighbors out of their money with his phony charities and by hemorrhaging money from bullied classmates in return for protecting them. In college, he learns the key to success, while remaining emotionally apart from others. He is the frat brother always handy with sage advice, and renders aid when they get in serious trouble. His vices are almost nonexistent, but he gladly provides rides for his drinking buddies. Everything T. does is calculated toward success. As an adult, he becomes a wealthy real estate developer, acquiring some of his clients from his former friends grateful for his past support. Money is T.'s religion.
"Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was only a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free."
OK, you get the drift. T. worshipped money.
A few unfortunate events out of T.'s control happen. His father leaves his mother to embrace his same sex love openly, and his mother gradually declines from that end point. Furthermore, he accidentally hits and kills a coyote on the desert highway in Nevada, which plagues him periodically and is the genesis of a sea change within him.
"He saw the coyote's face, ...eyes half-closed, the long humble lines of her mouth. Any animal could be gentle while it was busy dying...That was hardly a mark of distinction. But the sorrow persisted, as though he were worrying an open cut." Eventually, he is compelled to get a dog, one that he forms a bond with over time.
Then, T. falls in love, which aids in refining his disposition from aloof and isolated to engaged and attached.
"This was how he lost his autonomy--he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung."
But the experience is truncated by a chilling event, and T. subsequently becomes obsessed with endangered species, particularly from learning that the paving of one of his subdivisions had displaced an almost extinct species of kangaroo rats. He becomes preoccupied by the repercussions of real estate development on animals, the expansion of cities and the utopias of convenience and consumption:
"Under their foundations the crust of the earth seemed to be shifting and loosening, the falling away and curving under itself."
T. laments the biological blight caused by economic growth, mourns the progress of civilization. Tormented, he bemoans the extinction of animals, dying in sweeps and categories. After learning locksmith trade secrets, he starts breaking into zoos at night. T. doesn't free them from their cages; he merely wants to watch them. The force of a spiritual crisis arrests him with the same possessive absorption that money used to do.
The last section of the novel concerns T.'s journey to Belize, where he owns some property he's developing into a resort. It reads with an ephemeral, ethereal quality, like a mystical epitaph, with Heart of Darkness tendrils infused throughout, and the reminder of the cyclical nature of man's imperialism.
"When a thing became very scarce, that was when it was finally seen to be sublime and lovely."
Encompassing, imaginative, and meditative, this is a must-read for literature lovers. -
La dolcezza del buio
“Per consolarci, quando pensiamo ai morti, ci piace credere che in un certo senso siano parte di noi, che siano nell'etere o nelle fibre della mente. Ma poi dobbiamo ammettere che se fossero davvero presenti, astrattamente presenti come vogliamo credere, se fossero nelle molecole, ovunque con lo spirito...quali nuovi orrori troverebbero? Se i morti possono essere spiriti, possono anche leggere nella mente? Andavano venerati, andavano percepiti nell'aria; e al tempo stesso non bisognava lasciarli entrare”.
Thomas è attratto dal denaro, ne comprende la natura materiale e l'immenso potenziale immateriale. Diventa un uomo di successo: ha compreso alla perfezione che con le cose importanti per gli esseri umani è possibile fare dei bei soldi. Diventa un broker finanziario, si occupa di transazioni di immobili, a Los Angeles. Si innamora. Sembra felice. Qualcosa poi cambia. Suo padre abbandona la madre senza spiegazioni, vivendo una seconda vita con un differente genere di identità. Sua madre ha un esaurimento, Thomas si occupa di lei. Lei sembra riacquisire un equilibrio. Ma poi accade l'imprevedibile: la sua giovane sana compagna muore fatalmente. Thomas precipita nel dolore e nel lutto. Rimane solo come il coyote che vede morire nella sofferenza. Con la madre cerca di sopravvivere, piano piano rimettendo insieme i pezzi. Ma comincia a comportarsi in modo inconsueto: di notte si reca negli zoo, superando i confini e i muri di sicurezza, e inizia a cercare strane corrispondenze nella relazione con gli animali in custodia. Mente per spiegare le conseguenze di queste azioni inspiegabili. Così da adulto vive l'eco dell'infanzia: l'alchimia del denaro viene a riflettersi nei corpi di queste bestie in estinzione, tigri, orsi, leoni marini e scimmie, nelle zanne dei lupi e nelle figure illuminate di pesci e piovre, mentre il sonno giunge a creare una cifra di comunanza silenziosa e oceanica con queste specie naturali e differenti. In questi luoghi metafisici e irreali, il corso dei pensieri di Thomas esce dal caos diurno per entrare in un ordine crepuscolare fondato sull'intesa e l'ascolto. Thomas vicino agli animali sente di assolvere al solo bisogno di esistere, superando variazioni alternative tra passione e novità, sentendo il riverbero della sfida rispetto alla vittoria, incontrando fede e bellezza invece di conferme e piacere. Thomas giunge così alla consapevolezza che il desiderio forma l'anima, se viene teneramente custodito e mai dimenticato; in questa nuova dimensione, il protagonista sente, immagina, si gode il presente, senza concludere, senza una strada, senza risultato. Thomas, in quel tempo di vicinanza e fraternità, si accorge che gli animali non attendono il cibo, ma aspettano sempre, non smettono mai di aspettare, perché non hanno altro da fare: aspettavano di tornare nelle loro terre luminose; aspettavano di tornare a casa. Leggendo, percepiamo l'esperienza della fine, il tempo che sta per finire, il lungo momento nel quale gli animali sensibili e intelligenti vivono ciò che precede la scomparsa definitiva. Il mondo è in grado di percepire questa perdita? Lydia Millet in questo sentimento di collasso è in prima linea, mette il lettore di fronte alla solitudine, come un pioniere in avanscoperta, per vedere com'è il nuovo mondo. Infine, Thomas si metterà in viaggio con un piano, una ricerca, per mettersi in salvo, per raggiungere un luogo di pace. Inevitabilmente fallirà, scoprendo qualcosa che non era stato possibile nemmeno immaginare.
“Era fortunato. Era finito lì, nel cuore della realtà, del mondo vero: non era la via più facile, bensì il punto più vicino alla verità. Era finito lì, sotto il nero del cielo, con il desiderio di copiare l'amore di sua madre. L'affetto che lei gli aveva dato quand'era ancora in sé, prima di esserne privata: quel senso di protezione e di lealtà. Quella era la cosa importante da sapere, pensò: semplice, semplice”. -
this phenomenal, mind-blowing book starts quietly with a little boy who worships money -- coins, notes, the touchable stuff. jump forward a few years and he's an über-successful early-20-years-old living in manhattan and devoting his life to the accumulation of capital via real estate speculation and land developing.
except this is not the story. the story is about love, in particular about t.'s (the protagonist's name is thomas but the book calls him t.) love for women (his girlfriend, his best friend, his mother) and, then, his love for "last animals" (last animals are animals who are so close to extinction, each exemplar may well be the last of its kind).
in a delicate, perfectly balanced mixture of traditional and surrealist narrativity, this beautifully-told story covers immense swaths of ground: how we love and lose; how the planet is rapidly being transformed into a vast expanse of gray; how obscene wealth and abject poverty live next to each other without mixing (because there is simply no mixing between them, however much we try); how animals enrich us in truly ineffable ways; what makes life worth living; the link that connects us all to our mothers -- biological, metaphorical, existential, religious, etc.
like
Americanah, another masterful book, How the Dead Dream deals with Great Themes without seeming to do so. like
Americanah, with which i compare it only because it's the book i read immediately before, it's a page turner. but while
Americanah is comic and biting, How the Dead Dream is elegiac, always treading the line of ultimate loss, playing with the irreparable, the gone-forever, the too-late.
i loved the language. so beautiful, so lyrical, so incredibly erudite, so rich, so precise. how can you convey so much love and so much loss with such precision? but you can.
this book will make you love animals like you never thought possible. it will also make you want to get out there and touch them, and be with them. -
I really did not find anything redeeming in this book. I have itemized the most annoying points below, but really the whole thing was just a waste of time.
1. We have the overblown, overwritten masturbatory non-sensical language: "He was reminded of the potential for all shackled beasts to break from their bonds and rise, their ragged wings beating, into the stratosphere." What? Shackled beasts are not usually birds (shackled beasts tend to be the grunt workers like mules and horses and oxen, etc). How the hell are they going to beat their ragged wings?
2. The main character is such a ridiculous mess of inconsistency that nothing (and I do mean nothing) about him makes sense. He starts out very American psycho and Wall Street and worships the dollar: "he felt keenly that money was both everything and nothing, at once infinite, open potential and an end in itself." He is corrupt and manipulative and fairly sociopathic (and certainly interesting): "...forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free." Or what about: "His crafitness in boyhood, his single-minded enterprise--all was for the sake of gain, for gain was his religion, simple and stunning. No grown man could love accumulation as fully as a boy did. Indeed he never recaptured the joy of that love, and it passed out of his grasp."
And then he meets Beth and accidentally kills a coyote and his building project facilitates the extinction of the kangaroo rat and he finds a dog and so all of a sudden we are not supposed to believe that he is love with nature? Everywhere? Always? But wait, he is not so in love with it that he quits his real estate development business (even though he has touted that he pays MILLIONS IN TAXES last year and so could clearly just retire) and focus on saving the manatees or something. Instead, he continues working slavishly but also (sometime, when, how, I don't know I mean I know people who work 60-80 hours a week, they don't have energy to research extinct animals at night) spends all this time learning lock picking and stalking zoos and studying animals. BUT HE DOESN'T ACTUALLY DO ANY GOOD. This hyper-pragmatic guy does not think to donate money or time to the cause, he just stalks the animals.
3. The religious overtones were just annoying. At first, I thought was hysterical that his hyper-religious mother thinks that hell is IHOP. And certainly, the fact that Millet assigns a hyper-religious character can only mean that either she is hyper-religious or she is mocking Catholicism. But then, Beth dies because mom forgets her cross and we get "It was a bestselling love story, beautiful sad mother and perfect child, and in the background the absent father, pure energy, who was apparently benevolent despite appearances to the contrary, who was present despite his apparent absence, good despite his apparent cruelty, right despite his apparent wrongness, and beyond that all-knowing" and then T. goes kind of crazy over the Jesus doll at Beth's grave and needing to save it from the mud and as T lays pseudo-dying and hallucinating about his own mother-worship (which is simultaneously gross and long winded and just boring), I am left to only believe that Millet is proselytizing.
4. He never named his dog. She is always just "dog", even when she is missing, even when her leg is being amputated. Millet really needed to name the fucking dog.
5. The paraplegic character was totally unnecessary and random and just stupid. Yea, I get that she is adding depth (or just trying to Jesus-ify T. more) but really? I mean, really?
Overall, Millet doesn't know what she wants to do with this book. She is trying really, really hard to make a comment on the distinction between loneliness and being alone and the importance of nature despite capitalistic desires, but ultimately she just falls way short and nothing is consistent or interesting or plausible in any way. -
The Correspondents #5
Hey Lydia!
Come on, what do you say to a bit of modern-day metafiction? Do you really believe it breathed its last breath thirty years ago? Or can metafictive novels set in Scotland really find readers in an indifferent marketplace? All right, I know you’re rolling your eyes! But let me pitch some ideas to you. Check out these pearls of originality:
1) A writer struggling to write his novel falls in love then writes his novel
2) A writer struggling to write his novel has an affair with a teenage girl then writes his novel
3) A writer struggling to write his novel visits a foreign country, sleeps with a prostitute, takes LSD and writes his novel
4) A writer struggling to write his novel writes his novel after four years of torturous re-writing
5) A writer struggling to write his novel abandons writing his novel and takes a job in a call centre and spends his life forever fielding questions about the novel he one day planned to write
6) A writer struggling to write his novel writes a haiku instead
7) A writer struggling to write his novel escapes the novel and writes the novel the author-scriptor is writing
8) A writer struggling to write his novel eats his own his head then publishes the resultant turds
9) A writer struggling to write his novel moves into Mulligan Stew, steals Antony Lamont’s Sur-fictional opus, moves back into the original novel and publishes Lamont’s novel to complete critical ignorance
Let’s team up. Light some firecrackers of invention.
MJ
Next
Previous -
A singular reading experience, this is a protean novel in that it keeps changing, not just genre but nearly everything but the prose style. An odd bildungsroman turns into pictures of an odd marriage, an odder obsession, a few odd relationships (and a more ordinary one with a dog), and finally a quest. What holds it together, besides the prose style, is dark satire and a vision of today’s capitalism as destructive in every possible way. The last section didn’t work as well for me as the others, but the novel wouldn’t be what it is without it. This is a novel to admire rather than enjoy. I look forward to reading more of Millet’s work.
-
By Marc Weingarten
If Lydia Millet played by the normal rules of social satire, she might have been as large as T.C. Boyle by now. But whereas most satirists are looking for laughs much of the time, regardless of how sharp their knives might be, Millet is more the whimsical polemicist. Her novels are fanciful and surreal; rather than gently nudging everyday life into the realm of fluffy absurdity, she's trying to knock reality upside the head, thus revealing our venal and craven natures to ourselves.
Consider her last book, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), in which the fathers of nuclear fusion — Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Szilard and Enrico Fermi — rise from the dead and are dragooned by the book's bored librarian protagonist into seeing the damage they've wrought with their nuclear dreams. What follows is a bizarre missionary campaign of sorts for global comity that becomes a lively smack-down between reason and faith, science and God. It's a novel of ideas presented in the appealing guise of a warped picaresque.
Millet's empathetic and angry new book, How the Dead Dream, takes up many of the themes from Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, exposing as it does the moral rot of America's go-go capitalism. The book's protagonist, T., is a man given to poetic rapture over the restorative properties of enormous wealth. This is no Gordon Gecko wannabe, a venal bounty hunter looking for the big score. Rather, T.'s relationship to money verges on the religiously devout; he feels a deep kinship to his filthy lucre. "As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun... In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free."
Read the rest of the L.A. Weekly review here. -
From the start, I didn't think I was going to care too much for T., the guy I was reading about, first seen as a child obsessed with the figures of the stately men that adorn money. I figured it would be a slightly absurd jokey type of character that would illustrate the authors imagination. But before I knew it, fifty pages had flown by, and I really got this guy. How disarmed I was at first by its whimsy made it all the more sneak up on me.
That's what Millet does here. She makes you slowly come to care for these characters who are presented unconventionally. First we learn their quirk, but that only paves the road we take to get to their core.
T. is a man who's never really gone out of his way for much more besides money. His parents failed him for the most part, both in childhood and then as he came to be a man. But he's forced to become closer to his mom when his dad leaves and wants nothing to do with them - not that he ever wanted much to do with them in the first place. He was never allowed to have pets as a child, his mom finding something repulsive about each and every possible furry or finned companion. A man on his own now, good at the only thing he ever really applied himself to - the pursuit of money - he gets a dog. He likes the dog. Then the girl he loved who changed everything for him dies in a car accident. And he hits a coyote.
His life moves quickly and unexpectedly. Like in our lives, we never really see what's coming. As his life unfolds, we see his themes emerge, we see him grow. The relation he feels to animals slowly grows on him, becoming more important than the slow accumulation of security and comfort that's become his life.
He finds himself hiring a man to teach him how to pick locks. He uses that information to sneak into zoos at night. He learns about animals by being with them when no one else is. He feels he can understand them. Or that they help him understand himself better. Or life better. Its unclear. But it's creating thought, progression. Growth.
The book chronicles how feelings lead to beliefs, and beliefs lead to causes; building up in people overtime, defining a person's constantly developing consciousness and being in unexpected ways. How causes become lives, or big parts of them. How ignorant mistakes lead to regret, then introspection, then to cathartic reaction.
His interest in all animals leads especially to the extinct ones. Animals that will soon be gone to the world forever. And how that process comes about. How they are overlooked. How they are disappearing all the time, and no one seems to notice much. Through this he gains a growing awareness and feeling for others, besides animals, the people around him he used to not notice much.
And during all this, an amazing thing is happening: as he relates more, we relate to him more, see him as more of a human, whereas at first he was just this characature we looked on out of amusement, because we were reading a book, and we wanted to be amused. This is the greatest success of the novel, that our growth in perception of him mirrors his growth of perception for the world around him. Through absurdity and animals and overview, Millet reminds us that connecting is being human - all forms of connecting. Even just breathing together. It has one of the most touching and rewarding yet mysterious endings I have ever read. -
I have always meant to read Lydia Millet. Instead of starting with her first novel, as I usually do, I decided to begin with the first of her trilogy.
How the Dead Dream is an intriguing title. I was expecting something like Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. I didn't get that but I got something equally astounding and good.
A curious mix of dry humor, tragedy, and unique characters makes up the story of T. As a boy he grows up with a reverence for money and institutions. He becomes a savvy and successful real estate developer only to be felled in the end by loss. After learning the truth about his distant and indifferent father, finding and losing the love of his life, and taking on the burden of his loopy, Christian, and somewhat senile mother, T turns to animals for comfort and answers.
Not just any animals but animals who are on the verge of extinction become his obsession. When Barbara Kingsolver writes about what mankind is doing to each other and the environment, she lays it on the line in no uncertain terms. Lydia Millet takes a different approach.
By way of T's gradually developing awareness of how the practices that have made him successful are the very actions causing losses in the natural world, Millet shows the answers to two of my most perplexing questions: how will mankind ever wake up to the damage being done and will we wake up in time to avert our own extinction? Her answer to the first is, very slowly. To the second, possibly not.
One of the recent developments in writing style is evident in How the Dead Dream. It is a certain deadpan, reportorial, removed voice. I am coming across it more and more in contemporary fiction and sometimes find it disconcerting. I wonder if the trend in non-fiction writing toward a more creative, literary style is having an inverse effect on fiction toward a fact-based journalistic style.
Millet took me into the psyche of T but with a distinct lack of sentiment. And yet, when he loses his girlfriend, her rendering of the grief process is one of the best I have ever read. Some of the scenes between T and animals have the potential to rend the heart with a Steven Spielberg-type sentimentality, but she never crosses that line. She keeps her distance. It is as though she were practicing tough love on her readers, saying this is what real life is made up of, so you better just suck it up and keep trying for some semblance of being admirable.
In the end, the book did not end but left me hanging. Then I remembered it was the first of a trilogy and there is more to come. Some readers complain about author manipulation. I've never been much bothered by it. I expect an author to have her way with me. Why else would I read so much? Along with the voice I mentioned above, Millet's prose is also poetic, even other worldly at times.
Reader, beware. You will be manipulated and you might just like it. -
The jacket of this book has a blurb that says "If Kurt Vonnegut were alive, he'd be jealous." I would argue Kurt could write a novel better than this in his current state. I don't think I've ever been less interested to read a book after the first chapter than this. It doesn't get much better.
-
Heavy-handed and preachy, two-dimensional and unbelievable characters. I would write a more comprehensive review, but I don't want to waste any more of my time on this book than I already have.
-
Actual rating: 4.25
This is a beautiful novel of grief, loneliness, and the mournful yearnings to connect with one another as humans and animals, and, in general, to the world in which we live. How the Dead Dream is one of quiet profundity, and I found myself constantly awed and subdued by some of the observations and ruminations. I know I’ll have a difficult time reviewing this book further, and I admittedly was a little chuffed about how it ended (but then I remembered it’s a trilogy). So, I’m a bit relieved this is not the end.
I’ll leave you with this: if How the Dead Dream was a single adjective, it would be— pensive. -
Nature can be deceptive. You could be enjoying a cool and nice day at the beach, everything placid and fun, and then you see the tsunami off the shore come hurtling to carry you away. As part of the world's most dominant and intelligent species, you could erect steel and wood towers to live in; build a society of ease and technology until a solar flare hits or an earthquake rumbles, and then you realize all that you built, all that man created for himself is an artificial construct, and that the true nature, of wild trees and animals, of rivers and lakes, is the real power behind the throne. That animal in the zoo you think is just a stupid, simple-minded creature, too dumb to feel and think anything, but before it was brought to this prison, it had a mother and father, it had love and wanting to be loved.
People can be deceptive. They can live whole lives without realizing who they really are. They can play the role society and obligation has assigned to them without really liking it. They can change and become different men. They can grow and become better, or they can become worse. A boy who worships the gods of capitalism can become a man who breaks into zoos at night and sits wordlessly with the animals in a strange sort of communion. A slick operator, a go-getter, someone always playing the angles will always keep his true nature hidden from his friends, try not offend, try to be everything to them--a listener, a helper. Then he changes to become really those things but not to people--to animals.
Novels can be deceptive. They can start of serious and profound and then you realize they're joking, that they are pseudo-profound leavened with hilarity and the mocking of what they earnestly and with a straight face present. You think that the hero introduced in the first chapter will be totally different than who he turns out to be; a thought mocked by the author in the second chapter. He turns out to be the opposite of how he is introduced, and you like him all the more for it, and realize that this could have been the author's plan: to present him in an unflattering way so that when he is truly revealed, you'll stay with him and his strange journey. What a strange journey it is. What starts as mock serious turns real. What starts as hilarity turns mystic. Millet is juggling tones and genres. She can write all it seems. The end of this book is like the end of Apocalypse Now or Heart of Darkness or an acid trip (I presume.) But the beginning is Coen Brothers. What this novel really is about his man and nature and how the two meet or diverge, how man and animals are alike even the first puts up the artificial, deceptive barrier of civilization in between. -
I was immediately engaged with this book about extinction, yet I'm having a hard time writing a review. T, as a boy, is fascinated with dollars and the faces on them. He has some Aspergersish features . T is socially alienated, very bright, and attracted to money, only money. He is oblivious to his surroundings except when they will help him get more money.
After a rewarding college experience (he makes enough money to buy a house) , T begins a meteoric career in real estate. Although he has many acquaintances and colleagues, he has no friends. He cares about no one and nothing but money. After hitting a wolf on a road and watching it die, T begins to contemplate life for the first time.
As his fortune rises and his real estate ventures create developments for senior citizens, T becomes preoccupied with endangered wild life. Millet shows us the dangerous path of T, the loner, uncivilized, as his corporation eats undeveloped land to feed his hunger for money and his more dangerous path as he becomes more civilized and cares for his mother, finds love and a companion, all the while studying caged animals.
There is so much in this novel which reaffirms humanity, but also shows its destructive and savage side. We like to think that lions and tigers are ferocious beasts of prey. We picture their fangs tearing into flesh. Well, they only kill one at a time and only what they need. T's housing projects displace and sometimes decimate wildlife but also displace seniors, caging them in developments isolated from working communities and fostering faux activities.
What else can I say? You need to read this book which will take you from vicious venture capitalism to the nervous but stagnated life of protected endangered animals, to Belize a poor country which is be canabalized by progress and fortune hunters. T's trail and many trials makes this a Bildungsroman. ( I hope I'm using this correctly.) -
While I greatly appreciate the messages Millet is conveying here about extinction and how the built environment affects wildlife habitat, the novel feels a bit too much like a vehicle for said ideas, rather than a fully integrated story. Particularly the first half of the novel lacks the solid character development I need to remain engaged in straightforward realist novels. Part of this is due to Millet's passive third-person narration, so much telling in lieu of showing, which renders a glossed-over effect to the characterization of T., the main character, who receives the most character-building attention. Then when T. finally gets a girlfriend, which is a 'big event,' the woman never moves beyond the level of a two-dimensional cardboard cutout labeled 'T.'s girlfriend' . Finally, T.'s mother, the only other major character in the book, is so unevenly developed that I was confused about her up until the very end. The few other characters in the book felt merely like devices for T. to interact with in order to move the plot forward. Ultimately, for the first half of the book or so, I had the impression that Millet was just trying to get past this rote albeit necessary stage of the telling in order to get to the parts of the story she really wanted to write. All that being said, it does improve in the second half and I was intrigued enough by the end to want to read the second book in the trilogy, which I've just started and already feels like a better written book. [Note: I was thinking about Joy Williams as I was reading this, and sure enough at the end Millet cites her as an inspiration, though I'd say the comparisons touch most in theme.] -
Lately I've had trouble writing remarks about books that have had a profound effect on me. I fear being glib or facile (because I am often that with the books I dislike).
Not long ago - before I'd read Magnificence, I'd picked up the mistaken impression that Lydia Millet was too quirky for my tastes.
T. is an outsider, outlier, replete individual -
most others would not have been able to respond to the personal changes, the calls to comprehend ....
I am not reading the trilogy in order but I've made my peace with that. Knowing a bit about T.'s future made me less nervous than I might have been ... -
I assumed that Lydia Millet was a writer of generally fanciful fiction. I was convinced to check her out by a good friend and decided on this book, the first of a trilogy. And I found this book to be totally devoid of anything fanciful--no ghosts or fairies here. Millet writes for the Center for Biological Diversity, and her knowledge and caring for animals, particularly endangered ones, permeates the 2nd half of this strange but wonderful novel. It follows T. (short for Thomas) as he develops as someone obsessed with money, even as a young boy. He gets into real estate development and makes a mint. He appears to be somewhat socially independent, avoiding contact with anyone except for those who can help him make money. That is until he meets Beth, his obvious soul mate who also happens to be fashion model beautiful A turn of events causes him to become obsessed with endangered species, and he spends his life searching for creatures that he can spend time near in zoos and reserves. He ends up on a grand quest, a la Joseph Conrad, through the jungles in Belize.
There is much humor spread throughout, though most of it occurs in the early part of the novel. One such example is T's mother, a devout Catholic, who dreams one night that heaven is actually an IHOP. So every time T does something suspect, his mother warns him about the prospect of spending eternity in an IHOP. I found myself laughing out loud at various points in this novel.
There is the obvious theme of the planet facing a total extinction, and the author deals with it in a real and metaphorical sense. There are some absolutely beautiful phrases that talk of this, and they are both haunting and lyrical. I am eagerly awaiting part deux from this wonderful writer, Ghost Lights. -
dug it. the switch of themes from high finance to endangered animals seemed satisfyingly arbitrary and wonderfully personal. two or three oddly artificial and/or melodramatic plot devices mar a very disciplined and beautiful performance. a prose style that i think of almost as stately, which seems to owe a debt to delillo. i haven't read any of her earlier novels, but it makes sense the below (from a bookslut interview with the author)--this move from "hard" to "soft," which concentrates on characterization over event. here it allows the idea of "T." to gently not so much evolve but migrate. (and maybe, to risk a generalization, that's what our personalities, in fact, do.)
Q: How do you feel your approach to writing has changed since Oh Pure and Radiant Heart?
LM: My approach hasn’t changed since that book, but it has changed since my earlier, harder-edged books. George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and Everyone’s Pretty are books that are encased in a kind of protective seal of cynicism. Both of them were quite planned, structurally. But since I wrote those I’ve moved from writing in a hard way to writing in a soft way. I don’t plan and I allow myself to move in and out of satire, to play with stereotypes and also delve more deeply into character, to try to contain both humor and more serious abstract thought in a single volume. In a nutshell, when I was in my twenties I didn’t allow emotion to shape my novels, but now I do.
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008... -
Darkly poetic and disturbing, Millet's novel alternates between the cynical viewpoint of T., the real-estate developing protagonist, and empathetic portrayals of the living creatures (both human and animal) that surround him, and gradually become the focus of his obsession. Millet manages to make T., an emotionally distant and ultimately lonely man, sympathetic as he becomes increasingly aware of the natural world around him. The genius of Millet's novel is that as we witness T.'s development, we become increasingly aware of how he represents our own species and our awkward attempts to connect with each other, and our world. Millet's approach to her theme is subtle, but, by the end of T.'s journey, the emotional impact of his (and our) situation has become emotionally devastating. The conclusion of this novel pulls no punches, but Millet's prose draws the reader in without becoming bombastic or overstated. This is a brilliant, powerful novel with enough philosophical and ethical weight to keep you engaged long after the story ends.
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This book was such a disappointment -- you definitely can't judge a book by its cover. The first half of the book was uneventful, and any relationships that T. had with others seemed one-dimensional. I wish the author had explored the quirkiness of T.'s mother, father, his girlfriend, Julie and Casey. When Beth died, it didn't matter to me at all, as she seemed so insignificant like an eye floater, some spot moving in the periphery. I also kept reading for T.'s nightly zoo excursions (which drew me to the book to begin with) but those didn't start happening until halfway through the book. The book doesn't do the cover justice.
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moved very slowly. got to chapter 2 and felt like i had read 10. the idea of it was nice. a man dedicated to building and real estate development, tearing out nature to replace it with civilization, re-evaluates his choices and learns to appreciate animals, the earth and what it has to offer. but i did not like the author's writing style. and the part involving his mother was downright depressing.
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Gorgeous prose, crackling dialogue, mystical, funny, and yet emotionally astute. I found this writer through a summer Tin House issue and am amazed everyone isn't saying her name. A brilliant novel. I want to sneak into her brain, pack a suitcase, and sit down and write.
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I just read two novels in a row (the previous was Erdrich's
The Bingo Palace) in which the hero found himself in a sticky outdoor situation, and woke up beside a wild animal. Imagine that. -
Genoten van deze kleine, ogenschijnlijk eenvoudige roman, die bijna stiekem de paradox (?) van het mens-zijn in het Antropoceen temidden van de zesde uitstervingsgolf en het onverstoorbaar - maar toch niet helemaal! - voortrazende neoliberale kapitalisme blootlegt. En dat alles gevat in een bijzonder boeiende, vlot leesbare vertelling met een prachtige apotheose.
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Unfortunately just didn’t work for me, felt like a disjointed collection of connected short stories instead of a cohesive novel
