Dinosaurs
Lydia Millet
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Dinosaurs
Lydia Millet
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Lydia Millet’s magnificent new novel, Dinosaurs, highlights our shortcomings in terms of how we treat each other and our environment, and subtly seeks to draw some lessons from the natural world.
... the notable thing about Dinosaurs is that no deviancy bubbles beneath its surface.
In her 15 books, Millet has perfected charged, science-based prose that takes a surgeon’s loupe to how people interact with nature.
Millet never lets surrealism darken into delirium, and her misanthropy feels circumstantial, not cosmic.
[It] all unfolds in the most natural way, with current moments tracing back to Gil's past, and the sense of his character accumulating from quiet moments with Tom, Tom's parents and Sarah, a new, slowly emerging love interest. And through it all, there is a concern about what's happening in the world, depredations environmental, political and personal.
Millet keeps thwarting the reader’s expectations of drama, and offers instead a subdued portrait of a wounded middle-aged man’s journey toward wholeness.
The story is so gentle that it’s a safe choice for any reader with a heightened startle reflex.
Gil’s belated coming-of-age is sometimes bumbling or ridiculous—the man is, after all, out of touch. Indeed, a risk Millet runs—or courts—in Dinosaurs is that some readers may be put off by the idea of taking interest in Gil’s rich-person problems. To make matters trickier, Gil is hardly interested in them himself. Millet’s challenge, then, is to keep readers from following Gil’s example and dismissing his story as one that doesn’t need to be told.
The way these birds journey together and build upon one another’s human counterparts is where the novel’s authenticity and beauty lie.
Millet explores the tension that arises from all of these entanglements with expert pacing and prose that possesses the virtue of never calling attention to itself.
Slim, quietly powerful.
Nothing could be more readable and frictionless than this book. The dialogue flows; the characters rise naturally off the page; the scenes rise and fall in perfect cadences. It’s particularly masterful how Millet develops Gil’s fascination with birds, weaving closely observed descriptions of them into a text that is otherwise very blank. It is as though within the prose itself, we feel them threatened by a hostile human environment.
A couple of later scenes go on too long, but even if, like Millet’s other works, this novel is like a delicious meal that doesn’t quite fill you up, it’s still a feast worth tucking into. Millet makes critical points about American aggression, destructive attitudes toward wildlife and the American concept of freedom.
An intriguing portrait of a lonesome man trying to do good in a grim world.
Millet slips among various modes and genres, blends the commonplace and the conceptual with ease, and there’s an undeniable disposition to her novels that links them in spirit if not always in substance.
... a basically boring albeit earnest book, weighed down by a pretentiously terse style.
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.
A brilliant story of survival...subtler and more effective than the NBA-shortlisted A Children’s Bible.