How the Dead Dream

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.

"My Happy Life" is arguably one of the finest novels written in the last twenty years and if Lydia Millet had written nothing else, her place in the pantheon of authors would be secure because of it. Her fifth novel "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" is wildly erratic and thematically uneven though there are written passages of uncommon beauty. Millet is nothing if not a writer capable of producing cogent, thoughtful and gorgeous prose. And now there is "How the Dead Dream," Millet's sixth novel and one which combines the outright thundering emotionality of "My Happy Life" and the absurdities of "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart." "T" (we never know his real name as in "My Happy Life" we never know the "heroine's") is a Real Estate developer who has had a lifelong fascination with Cash: saving it, hording it and later...making it: "...throughout high school he also kept a small safe in his room. And on occasions when he felt rebuffed...he would retire there and carefully remove the portion of his stash he always kept nearby." T realized early on in his life that he had a facility with separating people (kids, adults) from their money. In one instance he acts as a middleman between a grammar school target and his bullies: "Mrs. G., we were lucky they took the deal at all. They really like beating on him, Mrs. G/ it's all they live for. They didn't want to take the bribe at first but I convinced them." As T grew, turned his avocation for making Cash into a vocation in the Real Estate game, his parents seemed to shrink from him: his father leaving one day and though T tracks him down later in the novel, his father has moved on emotionally...away from T and his mother. Though it is natural for a Mother to let go of her children, untie the apron strings as it were. T's mother: "In ceasing to be a child, he thought, he had disappointed her so fully that she came to believe he was someone else entirely...but he was no longer hers and due to that she was no longer his either." So, T builds a life around his business and his insatiable ambition ("What you needed more than anything, for the purposes of ambition was certainty, was a belief the rest of being, the entirety of the cosmos should not be allowed to divert you from the cause--the chief and primary cause--which was clearly--yourself.") his dog and his Mother who begins to lose her touch with reality through the tragedy of Alzheimer's. Then he meets Beth. Millet, as in "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart," introduces themes that on first sight have nothing to do with the narrative flow of the subject at hand: animals well on their way to extinction, the efficacies of Zoos and the Natural weeding process of Hurricanes and Tornadoes and even closes the novel with T adrift in the throes of a Natural disaster. Does this all meld together perfectly? No, but the basic T story is interesting and well written enough to hold your interest. And more to the point, T himself is quite interesting: vain, driven, money crazy, venal even

After reading Lydia Millet's wonderful masterpiece OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART last year, I quickly got my hands on all her previous books and started waiting impatiently for her next. It has finally arrived. HOW THE DEAD DREAM, while not as epic, as sprawling or as colorful as Millet's previous novel, is still a powerfully affecting, extremely effective novel filled with the author's typically gorgeous prose. Millet's books tend to be offbeat, and each is so different from every other that while you never know what you're going to get from her, you can always be sure it will be well worth your time getting it. HOW THE DEAD DREAM is no exception and only further confirms Millet's status as a bold and important novelist.