Book Review: Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

My Rating:

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Gil, our protagonist, is an extremely wealthy man of forty-five. His inherited wealth has given him an easy life (he admits that his only paying job was a short stint as a bartender). He has few friends, and no family ( he was orphaned at a young age a raised by a grandmother until her death when was still a teenager). However, his outlook toward life is uncomplicated as are his perceptions of the people and places around him. He seems to be burdened by his wealth, guilty even and does his best to give back to society as much as possible. He fills his time serving the community with his philanthropy and volunteer work, where he meets most of his friends. His decision to move from Manhattan to Phoenix and his decision to walk all the way (two thousand five hundred miles over a period of almost five months), to experience life as he has never known it surprises everyone who knows him.

“But also, I wanted to pay for something. When you have a lot of money, you never pay for anything. You never feel the cost, so you live like everything is free. There’s never a trade-off, never a choice or a sacrifice, unless you give up your time, I wanted the change to cost me, you know? I wanted to earn it.”

As the novel progresses we see how Gil adjusts to a new life in the suburbs, finding his place in a new environment. His friendship with his neighbors – a family of four- takes center point in the novel as we follow him as he forms new friendships and opens himself up to new possibilities. The narrative switches back and forth between the present and flashbacks from Gil’s life – his friendships, his romantic attachments and much more.

“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. The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant. Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.”

Lydia Millet’s writing is beautiful, though some might find it a bit heavy on metaphors. With simple yet elegant prose with short chapters, the narrative at times feels like a collection of vignettes. Each chapter is named after a bird that Gil encounters in his immediate environment. The vividly descriptive details of nature in all its beauty and Gil’s reaction to it- his actions, thoughts and emotions are beautifully expressed. This is a slow-paced, meditative novel that needs to be read slowly. No shocking twists and minimal drama – a story about real, relatable people and their daily lives and the challenges they face trying their best to find their place in their families, in their communities and world, in general. I found Gil’s way of relating to nature, especially the birds he loves watching ( after a life spent in the city) particularly moving. The abrupt switches between past and present (even between settings in the present) were a tad confusing at times, but not so much that it detracted from the overall reading experience. My only complaint is that I would have loved to read more about his experiences from his journey between New York and Arizona. 

Overall, I found Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet a beautifully-written, thought-provoking novel – the kind that you would want to read more than once.

Many thanks to Lydia Millet, W.W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this beautiful novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.