Product Description

An only child in a typical middle-American family, T's first love is money, and specifically the faces on the bills - Jackson, Hamilton, and Lincoln. As his peers go through teen crises, T accumulates, playing the responsible capitalist individual, and set up a successful real estate business. But T's material life begins to change after he adopts a dog meets a girl, and takes his mother in after she splits with his father. But when events conspire to leave T isolated again he starts to lose faith in people and civilisation and turns to nature instead, developing a strange and powerful obsession with endangered animals...How the Dead Dream is a brilliant, moving novel about human loneliness and environmental loss, from one of America's most exciting literary voices.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1536508 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From the Back Cover
An only child in a typical middle-American family, T.'s first love is money, specifically the faces on the bills – Jackson, Hamilton, and Lincoln. As his peers go through teen crises, T accumulates, playing the responsible capitalist, setting up a successful real estate business.

But T's material life begins to change as he adopts a dog, meets a girl, and takes his mother in after she splits up with his father. But when events conspire to leave T isolated again he starts to lose faith in people and civilisation and turns to nature instead, developing a strange and powerful obsession with endangered animals…

How the Dead Dream is a brilliant, moving satire about human loneliness and environmental loss, from one of America's most exciting literary voices.

Praise for Lydia Millet

'One of my favourite contemporary American writers' Jonathan Lethem

‘Subversive, shocking, pertinent… Combining the personal and the political, this is a sweeping tour de force’ Esquire

‘Millet writes beautifully... Shocking, hilarious and meaningful’ Scotsman

About the Author
Lydia Millet is the author of several previous novels including the gloriously titled George Bush: Dark Prince of Love, My Happy Life, winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, shortlisted for the 2007 Arthur C Clarke Prize. She lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, with her husband and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Dreaming
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.