How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

Overview

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 social responsibilities, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582439594
Publisher:	Counterpoint Press
Publication date:	03/01/2009
Series:	How the Dead Dream Series , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	289 KB

About the Author

LYDIA MILLET is the author of several previous novels, including Everyone's Pretty and My Happy Life, which won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

[Millet's] best when she makes startlingly odd events seem wholly real. The final act takes T. deep into the jungle for a conclusion that's both terrifying and moving. Yes, there's an argument for environmental protection here, but what's more profound is Millet's understanding of the loneliness and alienation in a world being poisoned to death.
—The Washington Post

Ron Charles

…on the whole How the Dead Dream succeeds, in large part because of Millet's intelligence and storytelling 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.
—The New York Times

Adelle Waldman

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

Library Journal

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 isthe inevitable result of communion. A hymn to love and an elegy for lost species, but not much of a novel.

Kirkus Reviews