How the Dead Dream: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Lydia Millet (Author)
Key Phrases: Lydia Millet, Los Angeles, Ian Van Heysen (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

A few years ago, the wacky social novelist Lydia Millet published an essay attacking mainstream environmental organizations for being glib, sentimental, even onanistic. "Die, Baby Harp Seal!" opened with a witty comparison between a calendar from the Nature Conservancy and a glossy photo spread in Hustler magazine. (Millet knows more than most of us about both: She has a master's degree in environmental policy, and she once worked as a copy editor for Larry Flynt.) Those airbrushed photos -- girl and seal -- "satiate by providing objects for fantasy," she wrote, "without making uncomfortable demands." The environmental movement, she went on, "has failed to generate a compelling language for itself. Its propaganda falls flat, its style is outdated, its rhetoric is stale." To avoid "a long slow slide into obsolescence," activists will need to develop "the guts to assault us with the impacts of our own desires."

That battle cry would seem to call for a pretty heavy-handed novel, something like T.C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole or Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. But How the Dead Dream surprises in the other direction, largely avoiding the hectoring, lecturing tone of those big-name, environmentally self-conscious novels. For one thing, Millet doesn't spend a lot of space on the old news that the ecosystem is slipping into a silent spring. Instead, How the Dead Dream focuses on the quiet existential crisis that arises from living in a dying world.

The novel opens with the author's signature zaniness: suburban satire about a mercenary boy named T. who's obsessed with the presidents on American money. After a "brief early flirtation with Grover Cleveland," he explores ways of making more profit than his paper route can provide: protection rackets on the playground, walks for various vaguely named charities, and a black market in stolen bottles of liquor, copies of "The Joy of Sex," Super Plus size tampons and brassieres. "Oh yes," Millet writes, "he knew where value lay." He graduates to day-trading and gambling during college, developing a slick, ingratiating personality that makes him indispensable but also separates him from his acquaintances.

This is all witty, but that satiric tone fades away early in the novel as T. begins a lucrative career in real estate development. He's astute, viceless and wholly self-contained -- qualities that make him attractive to business associates but a little unnerving at the same time. Everywhere around him he sees successful men who are desperately lonely, but this insight does nothing to keep him from feeling the same way.

Just as the novel falls into a dark lull, T. hits a coyote on the highway and finds himself surprisingly upset. His brief encounter with the natural world awakens him to its existence, even as he makes a fortune developing "battlements of convenience and utopias of consumption."

In this melancholy state, he's dealt a devastating blow by the sudden death of his girlfriend, but she's such a brief and blank presence in the novel that it's hard not to feel his reaction is a little melodramatic. Nevertheless, this marks a turning point in the story: His grief and loneliness suddenly resonate with the creatures that his real estate developments are pushing to extinction. He can't fathom why everyone isn't alarmed about the environmental crisis: "In the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearances, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed."

There's more in this vein, preaching to the choir about the destruction of the natural world. But what's striking is T.'s reaction. The novel's most haunting scenes involve him breaking into zoos around the country. He's not trying to free these exotic animals or strike back at their captors. He just wants to watch them; then he begins sleeping in their cages. "He knew their position, as he knew his own: they were at the forefront of aloneness, like pioneers. They were the ones sent ahead to see what the new world was like."

This isn't a call to action so much as to lamentation. Beyond the anti-growth theme that, frankly, Millet doesn't pursue with much energy lies a dark, deeply affecting exploration of one man's spiritual crisis in the face of biological decay. Breaking into the Bronx zoo, he stands next to the Sumatran rhinoceros:

"He was alone with her -- and he was content. It was not to claim the animal's attention that he was here but to let her claim his. . . . After a while the rhinoceros sighed. It was a familiar sound despite the fact that they were strangers. He knew the need for the sigh, the feel of its passage; a sigh was not a thought but substituted for one, a sign of grief or affection, of putting down something heavy that was carried too long. In the wake of the sigh he wondered exactly how lonely she was, in this minute that held the two of them. Maybe she saw beyond herself, the future after she had disappeared." In scenes such as this, when T. feels "the sad quiescence of the animal's own end of time," the novel reaches heights of real pathos.

But unfortunately, Millet clogs her moving story with a variety of distracting dead ends: T.'s father "goes" gay; T. has an affair with a crippled woman; T.'s mother slips into dementia; T.'s only friend is a wealthy jerk of cartoon-like crassness. These episodes take up a lot of room in this short novel without contributing much to its central concern. Worse is Millet's tendency toward abstraction and pretentiousness, which sometimes smothers her wit.

She'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.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (January 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593761848
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761844
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #591,204 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darkly Dreaming Deadly, January 12, 2008

By	Nathan Blumenfeld "mastadge" (Wilmington, DE United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Unforgiven, March 1, 2008

By	MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"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 yet humane and concerned with the future of the Earth and also with finding Love.
Millet is not completely successful here; certainly not as successful as she is in "My Happy Life" whose narrative flow is perfection and in which Millet's point of view is secure and complete. Yet , "How the Dead Dream" is certainly a qualified success: full of flavor, full of love...ripe with the sweetness and tartness of a perfect, in-season fruit.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Novel for Fans of 30 Rock and Arrested Development, March 15, 2009

By	M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.