Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 11, 2022

After Lane left Gil, he sold his apartment in New York City, purchased a house in Phoenix that he found online, and walked to Phoenix from New York. The stroll took five months. Years later, when he returned to New York to visit the death bed of his friend Van Alsten, he told Lane about the walk. “You finally did something,” she responded.

The walk was apparently the first and last noteworthy act in Gil’s meek life. He’s a fine person in his own way, but colorless. We learn almost nothing about the walk. If Gil has any other story worth telling, the story is never told.

Gil has the kind of background that might shape an interesting person. His parents were killed by a drunk driver. He later inherited his grandparents’ ill-gotten wealth and wore the money like “a coat of shame.” He might have given the money away but for meeting and falling in love with Lane. When she disappeared from his life, she left behind a note that said, “I met someone.” That all happens before the story begins.

In Phoenix, Gil befriends Tom, the son of his neighbors (Ted and Ardis), because Tom needs a playmate and Gil is available. Gil befriends (but initially refuses to date) a surgeon named Sarah. He befriends a man who is obsessed with birds. None of these friendships have an obvious impact on Gil, who drifts through the novel with the substance of a ghost.

Gil nevertheless finds ways to fill his days. His focus is on being helpful. He volunteers for a battered women’s shelter, where his gender causes him to be viewed with suspicion. He intervenes on Tom’s behalf when Tom is bullied and later offers to help the bully. He helps the drunk driver who killed his parents. He learns that a friend is cheating on another friend but keeps the information to himself. He buys night vision goggles so he can search for someone who is shooting birds at night.

Otherwise, Gil takes note of the world he inhabits without making much effort to interact with it. He notices birds, the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, and learns how climate change has reduced the number of avian species. Handing out Halloween candy, he feels like a dinosaur himself.

Gil is far from interesting. When Gil wonders how he would behave if he had unrestrained freedom, he thinks he would tear down all the No Parking signs. Gil is unhappy with the direction of the country after Trump’s election and wishes the birds would help. Yes, that’s strange, but it is no less strange that someone with wealth and unlimited time on his hands cannot envision doing anything more revolutionary than removing No Parking signs. Why should a reader care about Gil? I can’t find a reason.

Gil learns another secret at the novel’s end but, like everything Gil learns, he does nothing with it. Gil is among the most passive protagonists I’ve encountered. He does manage a nonviolent confrontation with a sketchy character as the story winds down, but the momentary hint of drama merely highlights the story’s failure to manufacture tension.

The novel’s lesson seems to be that being alone can be good but being with other people is better. How Gil manages to internalize that lesson by drifting into the lives of people with whom he never fully engages is far from clear. Nor is the expression of the lesson particularly meaningful. To assure the reader gets the point — I admit I might otherwise have missed it — Lydia Millet explains that being alone is a “closed loop” but opening the loop brings the world inside you. And we’re all linked to each other by evolution and dinosaurs. And only fear and loneliness prevent us from becoming one with the world. Or something like that. I might have been yawning so much when this anticlimactic explanation arrived that I failed to bring it inside me and become one with the novel. Maybe the final observation, that we all have no beginning and no end, is a little too zen for me.

Lydia Millet’s prose is graceful. Some of her characters skate on the edge of being interesting. Those attributes save the novel from a “not recommended” rating, but Dinosaurs doesn’t earn an enthusiastic recommendation because Millet fails to deliver the wisdom that she must have intended.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS