Within the first few pages of How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint Press, 256 pages, $25), novelist Lydia Millet masterfully describes a basic problem of life and the flawed central belief of T., the young real estate developer whose undoing drives this slim shard of brooding fiction: “Forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle towards affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.”

Following T. from his money-obsessed adolescence — his first business is brokering protection from bullies at a profit — until his quick post-grad financial rise, T. is a ghostly cipher (the kind of character favoured by Millet). The author could have invested him with base avarice but instead portrays him as near autistic and enthralled with the abstract flows of capital. Soon he’s developing retirement communities in the desert, but after a series of family disasters, T. finds himself drawn to the uncanny nature of endangered animals, eventually breaking into zoos to be with them as much as possible. Though this shift is an abrupt change for the icy, almost static T., the connection between retirement tracts and zoos is an instinctual one for both character and writer. 

Often compared to Don DeLillo, Millet captures characters who speak to each other while having completely different conversations. Also, her stories connect the dots between the quotidian and the catastrophic, as when T. and his mother argue over the virtue of Dresden china. “She paused to reach for the salad tongs and he leaned forward and laid a hand on her arm. ‘Mother. Listen,’ he said gently, ‘Isn’t it sort of a stretch? The firebombing of Dresden and my opinion of a toilet ornament?’”
Millet’s language, however, is anything but DeLillo-spare. Rolling across the page with ease, her adjective-laden sentences are never overly weighted. “His first houses went up,” she writes, “almost overnight — slab, frame, roof, electrical and plumbing, drywall, finish and landscaping — fast and cheap, designed not to last but to become obsolete. Retired people moved in, gathering in the desert from cold northern suburbs … He strolled alongside the tennis courts, watching the vigorous play of sweating players through the green mesh and idly calculating the probability of atrial fibrillation.”
T.’s fate — a word the character would have recoiled at in the book’s beginning — is played out in fragments by the end of How the Dead Dream, from the southern California deserts of the nearly dead to a failed hotel development in a tropical slum. Here the story takes on the air of an existential western and the ending is perfectly, satisfyingly bleak.

American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as of late, but it takes a writer of Millet’s sensitivity to enjoy the way down this much. 

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