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As a wealthy, young real-estate developer in Los Angeles, T. lives an isolated life. He has always kept his distance from people — from his doting mother to his crass fraternity brothers — but remains unaware of his loneliness until one night, while driving to Las Vegas, he hits a coyote on the highway.
The experience unnerves him and inspires a transformation that leads T. to question his business pursuits for the first time in his life, to take a chance at falling in love, and finally to begin breaking into zoos across the country, where he finds solace in the presence of animals on the brink of extinction.
A beautiful, heart-wrenching tale, How the Dead Dream is also a riveting commentary on inidividualism 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."
- Sales Rank: #651827 in Books
- Published on: 2009-09-15
- Released on: 2009-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .64" w x 5.25" l, .52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Lydia Millet, a social novelist with a master’s degree in environmental policy, has carved a reputation for herself by exploring difficult topics in edgy, darkly humorous works of fiction. How the Dead Dreamâ€"part philosophical meditation, part fable, and part comic escapadeâ€"argues for the importance of environmental protection as it portrays T.’s metamorphosis from coldhearted capitalist into compassionate child of the Earth. Critics differed in their opinions of T.’s character: is he a finely-wrought, sympathetic protagonist or a one-dimensional cardboard cutout? A few critics also complained about the many side plots that slow the novel’s momentum and blur Millet’s message. However, T.’s internal struggles and quest for redemption stress humankind’s responsibilities and limitations as stewards of the environmentâ€"a timely message indeed.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Review
"The finest book yet by one of my favourite contemporary American writers" -- Jonathan Lethem "Permeated with a dark, irreverent humour" Financial Times "Odd and compelling...surprising and funny...Millet is an interesting thinker" Guardian "Bewitching" Scotland on Sunday "Sad, strange and as jumpily shocking as an electric fence, How The Dead Dream brilliantly evokes a barren world in which human loneliness and environmental loss are inevitable consequences when a culture values capitalism over compassion" Metro
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The first book of a trilogy
By "switterbug" Betsey Van Horn
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, Magnificence, 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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
How the Dead Dream: the Lyrical Salvation of a Young Capitalist
By Brian d'Eon
Before reading this book, I had no idea who this author was. Yet, within a dozen pages, I was coming to understand that I was reading something quite special. The fact that I should be so impressed by Millet's writing is all the more amazing when I reflect that the protagonist of the book is a devoted capitalist--hardly a person I would normally be drawn to. Throughout most of the book, he is simply referred to a `T'. Yet T's transformation is both poetic and spectacular.
As a boy T's principle passion is to `collect' money and stash it under his pillow at night. He receives a visceral thrill as he studies the lithographic etching on the American dollar bill. In college, he is a friend to all, but intimate with no one. It is `T' who is the designated driver, `T' who sorts out his friend's indiscretions and messy relationships. `T' himself avoids all youth's usual excesses, in favor of focusing on the market, real estate and mapping out his destiny. He is enamored with a vision of high rises, new highways, bright lights, holiday resorts, retirement homes in the desert, the creation of which will become the source of his material wealth and self-worth.
It is worth noting that the protagonist of "How the Dead Dream" is a male, and the writer female. It is the most convincing cross-gender writing I have ever come across. Never once did I doubt the authenticity of the male voice of `T'.
But what makes this novel so good? The writing to be sure, which is extremely lyrical at times, and the psychological insights Millet has which are quite breath-taking. In the end, what is most impressive, is the journey she takes the reader on. We meet `T' arch-capitalist, without a soul it seems, at first, but then gradually we see a change take place. It begins when he is driving at night and hits a coyote. He stops his car to check on it. It's not yet dead. He feels obligated to carry it off road--even though he doesn't know what to expect--after all, it might bite him. He stays with it until it takes its last breath. That moment changes him, though he doesn't realize it at the time.
Later `T' who, till this time, has never surrendered himself to anyone emotionally meets Beth, the love of his life, but tragedy strikes, and that relationships lasts only a short time. His father, a man in his sixties, suddenly, and without explanation, leaves his wife. `T' does his best to console his mother, and has her live with him. She develops early dementia. The scenes of `T', the son, speaking with a mother who doesn't even recognize him, in fact thinks he is a criminal, are heart-wrenching.
Quite unexpectedly--to me, at least--`T' then develops an obsession with endangered animals, going to great lengths to be in their company. For him, they come to represent the world condition, the ultimate fate of each individual and each species, creatures near their end and alone, desperately alone. Some of the novel's most memorable moments take place as `T' stands eye-to-eye with some of these forlorn and mighty creatures.
This might help explain the otherwise quite obscure cover of the book: it is a close up of an elephant's eye.
I did not read Millet's book in one sitting--I never do, but I could very easily imagine myself making an exception for this book. It is that compelling, that beautifully written, that filled with compassion, longing and even humor. It's one of the best things I've read in years.
I have a new favorite author!
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Novel for Fans of 30 Rock and Arrested Development
By M. JEFFREY MCMAHON
There are a lot of well crafted contemporary novels coming down the pike about family problems, social crises, etc. and about 99% of them strike me as superfluous, self-aggrandizing exercises in which the author wants to show the reader his or her creative and intellectual might. The final result is mediocre and flaccid.
Happily, this is not the case with Lydia Millet, whose point of view is one of the most unusual, and I daresay genius, I've come across since Magnus Mills' Restraint of Beasts.
In her first novel (I will now eagerly read her other five) she has written a grotesque fable with the sensibility and pungent sense of humor found in 30 Rock and Arrested Development.
Here Millet's novel focuses on T. who at an early age develops and articulates a Machiavellian view of the world to rationalize his insatiable appetite for greed and unrestrained capitalistic enterprise. Imagine Jack Donaghy expertly played by Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock inhabiting the body of a five year old and you'll understand T.'s psychological underpinnings.
We watch T.'s devilish entrepreneurial enterprises in high school as he uses extortion to protect a sad sack kid from the bullies who beat him and steal his lunch money every day at school. Even more glorious is T.'s justification of the extortion to the bullied kid's mother. Her every question is counteracted with a high school boy expert in the ways of legalistic sophistry.
As T. grows up and excels in real estate, using his predatory insight into the minds of his clients/victims to establish his empire, he has an unexpected breach in his life when he runs over a coyote. Seeing the dying, suffering animal ignites a spark of humanity inside his soul and with his heart cracked open a series of mishaps afflict him that blow up what he had believed would be a well-controlled existence of exploiting others. Instead, his world crumbles around him and he seeks connection with an obsessive sympathy for animals that compels him to break into zoos.
There is an eerie fable at work here that reminds me of the aforementioned Restraint of Beasts. The fable is fueled by its own whacky, genius logic that takes the reader to strange places--places far different than the banal, familiar landscapes most novelists dwell on. Millet is an original voice in fiction, never sanctimonious, never glib, never going for the cheap laugh. She is a novelist of the highest order. Highly recommended.
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