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.
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.
What do You think about How The Dead Dream (2009)?
I'm glad I stopped reading the third book and started this one, the first in the trilogy. It will be worth the wait to get to that final volume.Lots of ideas in this book, about how to be both a person in society and also remain connected to the dwindling natural world. I see in other reviews that this book is considered 'comic,' but I don't see it. It has an earnestness and sincerity about itself, the niggling questions about what motivates us in our daily lives, that makes it serious and with ample moral weight. I am anxious to see what will happen next.
—Sonya
How the Dead Dream is Lydia Millet's follow up after the excellent Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, one of the best books, I believe, in the 21st Century so far (an opinion that is subject to change on the century and whim).Originally published by Soft Skull Press, How the Dead Dream is the first in a trilogy of interlocking novels about extinction, of which the subsequent two, Ghost Lights and Magnificence were published by Norton. I purchased my copy when it was originally published, but have waited to read it since since then for the remaining books to be published so I can read them together--a choice, at the halfway point through Ghost Lights, that I think is going to work out for the best.How the Dead Dream is the story of T., a young entrepreneur involved in real estate who, in his youth, is obsessed with money, with the figures on it, with the presence of it around him. As he grows older, this obsession matures into a desire for considerable wealth, but under the experiences of life (his parents divorce, his relationship, lived experiences, etc) his love for wealth falters and T. finds himself, eventually, obsessed with animals that are endangered.Much of the focus of the book is on that transformation. How the Dead Dream is, narrative wise, a character study, and it follows T. from his childhood to his adulthood, stepping aside the plot heavy narrative that was part of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, but without sacrificing the substance that was part of that novel. Millet handles her narrative well--it is not unfamiliar to her at this point--and the shifts in T.'s character are done excellently across the board, with my only caveat being that his final choice to head down the river (in a way that is not reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, despite what many others say) being the only misstep that Millet makes in terms of characterisation. Otherwise, the shifts are done well, with the use of coyote, his family, and his relationships well employed.Yet there is, by the end, a sense of incompletion within the text. It is a difficult issue to address, because the book itself is the first of a 'trilogy', and thus I shouldn't expect it to be complete within itself. How then, do you judge a sense of incompletion? Is that not, by its very nature, part of a sequence? Well, it is, but part of the problem arises from the choice in narrative style that Millet has chosen. With a plot heavy narrative--one that genre fiction favours, for example--books in a trilogy can have a sense of closure baked into them by tying up a certain amount of plot lines, character arcs, etc. In Millet's novel, since the narrative is so strongly tied to T.'s life, to his emotional growth, and the theme of extinction, Millet has the problem that she doesn't have enough to tie up for a sense of closure, while leaving enough hanging so that it can thread its way through the following books. In the end, what she attempts to do is to tie up her plot through her theme, while leaving the narrative of T. incomplete, and it's not entirely satisfactory, though her narration in the final pages is full of excellent prose.Which is, of course, something that can not be ignored, since How the Dead Dream is an excellently written novel, with many fine turns of phrase. Her social observations are baked into her prose and are, at turns, insightful and funny, but can also be switched off to let the emotion of the scene--such as lunch with his father--flow. In this regard, Millet never skips a beat, and thus the novel, as it works towards its thematic conversation of arguing the responsibility of humanity in relation to other living creatures on the planet, is always done in a fine and measured hand, though your enjoyment of it, I imagine, will ultimately be decided by your response to her position in the book.
—Ben Peek
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 ...
—Holly
