Review: 'Dinosaurs'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Dinosaurs
By Lydia Millet
Literary Fiction
W.W. Norton

The idea is not a new one, whether we express it through the words of John Donne -- "no man is an island" -- or even the New Testament notion that "we who are many are one body" because of sharing communion (1 Corinthians 10:17). And when Simon and Garfunkle sing about being a rock, it's obvious how forlorn that idea is.

Gil, the protagonist of Lydia Millet's Dinosaurs, has always been alone. HIs parents were killed in an accident when he was very young. He was raised by a frugal, distant grandmother who died when he was a teenager. The tie he has had the longest with any other person is the attorney who helps manage the vast wealth he inherited as part of a gas and oil family.

And yet Gil has always been one of those searching souls who doesn't curl up into a ball. He volunteers for various charities and ends up friends with two other guys. He falls in love with a woman and they move in together. But things happen and people drift apart. And when Lane leaves him for another man, Gil decides to walk across the country to a new home.

The walk itself is not a pilgrimage and not much time is spent on it. The reader does learn toward the end of the novel why Gil felt compelled to do it, and it fits in with everything we know about his character.

What matters are his new Phoenix neighbors, who live in a literal glass house. Soon, the wife, Ardis, has him hanging out with the young son Tom. The teenage daughter, Clem, is busy trying to make friends. Their father, Ted, is busy at work but genial. Gil volunteers at a women's shelter where another fellow soon becomes part of his circle. A friend of Ardis takes to Gil and soon he and Sarah are involved. Millet tells the reader early on what's really up:

Do your best all your life. What was that? Nothing but self-pity. All it meant was, you expected some surprising change, some exciting reversal, while being exactly who you’d always been. He pictured crowds hunkered down. Committed. Being themselves with dogged perseverance. But all the while they hoped to be interrupted by an unexpected event—deliverance. They dreamed of being lifted up. Being swung out in giddy delight over glittering peaks. Aloft in the sparkling air.

That's Gil. That's who he is to the core. And this passage resonates all the deeper when seen through the lens of what happens to Gil in his new home.

But Gil doesn't see it that way. He sees himself trying to do right by people, trying to justify his existence. He thinks that as a guy who inherited great wealth, he hasn't earned anything. That Millet could create such a character and portray him as forthright and sincere without being maudlin is a marvel. Dinosaurs is a comforting read, especially in as the continuing saga of chaos rages on.

He didn’t want to win. He only wanted to be worthy.

Throughout the novel, there are tidbits about birds and insects. Both existed when dinosaurs did, and both have survived. It's not very forthright until the end, when Gil is loopy after an injury, that the reader sees the connection between the tropes. There are flocks and hive minds in the species that have thrived and survived. They are not islands unto themselves.

And it's not the reality of whether people are connected or not that Millet focuses on, but Gil's realization about the truth of this, that provides the shining moment of the novel.

But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself. You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone. Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh.

When everything sinks in for Gil, the reader can feel the goodness that is still possible in this crazy world, goodness that comes from being open and being there for others, and letting others be there for you.