DINOSAURS

Independently wealthy but bereaved in the wake of a painful breakup, a man moves from New York to Arizona in search of a fresh start.

Millet pulls back slightly here from the environmental catastrophe imagined in her National Book Award finalist, A Children’s Bible (2020). To be sure, Gil sees plenty of evidence of human destructiveness around his new home in Phoenix, especially the corpses of birds shot and abandoned by an anonymous hunter. Human cruelty is also evident in the bullying of his next-door neighbors’ son, Tom, by a schoolmate, who is himself maltreated by his brutal father. But Gil finds warm companionship with Tom’s parents, Ardis and Ted, and his memories of New York include close friendships with two men, the hilariously unalike Vic and Van Alsten. These relationships counterpoint the treatment he suffered from his abusive and manipulative former girlfriend, Lane; good-natured, almost pathologically unassuming Gil’s eventual extrication from her emotional clutches forms an important element in the plot. How we can nurture ourselves, the people dear to us, and the world around us are key issues in this gentle, meditative novel, told from Gil’s point of view to slowly build a marvelously full, if inadvertent, self-portrait. Gil rivals Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in sheer goodness, with a healthy dollop of Myshkin’s cluelessness, but he grows and learns as he settles in in Arizona and gets several kinds of closure from developments in New York. His new Arizona friends are also depicted as kind people striving to do right by others. Are they doomed to extinction, like Millet’s eponymous dinosaurs? Will they survive by evolving, as dinosaurs did into birds? These sorts of philosophical questions are raised with a very light touch by Millet, who enfolds thematic and psychological depths in elegant, deceptively simply prose. Her lovely, moving conclusion affirms that “separateness had always been the illusion…the world was inside you.”

Another life-affirming work from a writer who always carves her own literary path.