Gil has just moved from Manhattan to an expensive neighbourhood in Phoenix, Arizona. Thanks to his inherited wealth, the house he is moving into is palatial – his nickname for it is “the castle”. The view of the house next door, however, is its most striking feature, as the wall that faces his windows is made entirely of glass. He can watch the neighbouring family as if they were fish in an aquarium.
This seems to set us up for a strange and unsettling story. Magnifying this effect is the laconic minimalism of the prose. Scenes mainly consist of unadorned dialogue. The average paragraph is two sentences long; many are shorter. Millet likes fragments, so it’s not unusual, either, for a sentence to be one word long. Lurking beneath this clipped surface are mysteries: what crisis drove Gil to leave New York? What will he observe through that glass wall? What is the secret behind his wealth? Gil is determined to use his life in service; to be a good man. Is that possible in 21st-century America for a man of such extreme privilege?
Nothing could be more readable and frictionless than this book. The dialogue flows; the characters rise naturally off the page; the scenes rise and fall in perfect cadences. It’s particularly masterful how Millet develops Gil’s fascination with birds, weaving closely observed descriptions of them into a text that is otherwise very blank. It is as though within the prose itself, we feel them threatened by a hostile human environment.
In the opening we are given reason to expect at least one shocking revelation. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say this doesn’t transpire. The stakes are kept low; every question is answered with the simplest, least sensational explanation. Gil’s relationship with the fish-aquarium family develops into something sweet. The book’s focus is entirely on his quest to be a good person.
The trouble here is that, from page one, Gil is never anything but good. He has no dark places, no dark thoughts, no struggles with internal demons. When he first walks into the neighbours’ house and realises the very attractive wife is about to emerge from the shower, he thinks: “An intimacy hazard. Inappropriate.” When he cottons on that his ex-girlfriend of 15 years was an abusive gold digger, he grows not angry but maudlin. “So the question was answered. After so long. He’d attached everything to her once. Everything that he was. And wasn’t. But he’d been mistaken. The error had always been his.” The conflicts in the book mostly involve other good people being unfairly treated, and Gil waltzing in to solve the problem by giving kindly advice.
Even Gil’s money, which is framed as a kind of original sin, is carefully sanitised by the author. It comes to him through a tragedy when he is still an innocent child, and he somehow grows up without suspecting he and his family are rich. When, as a young man, he finds out at last, he immediately wants to give his fortune away and is only convinced to change his mind by the mercenary girlfriend. From that moment on, all wealth means to him is that he is free to devote himself to good works: helping out at a refugee centre, being an escort at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. Millet has written a book about the attempt to live a moral life that dodges every moral issue.
This dodging is not always successful. Readers may notice that while environmental destruction is an underlying theme, the book never addresses its possible relationship to the life choices of people who buy castle-sized houses in desert areas like Arizona. The closest we get is Millet reflecting sadly on Gil: “But still he went along. Performing small tasks. Planning his own minor life. As though there was no emergency in sight. If only the birds would take up the fight.” A particularly uncomfortable subplot involves a second saintly rich man of leisure, Van Alsten, who is a former Navy Seal traumatised by his experiences in Afghanistan. Van Alsten spends his idle hours playing basketball with poor Black kids in the inner city, who all uncritically love him. Unlike Gil, Van Alsten does have rough edges: he uses a lot of swear words.
I’m sure there will be readers for whom this book is balm to a weary soul. It can be comforting, certainly, to read about the unfailing goodness of people who never want for funds. As mentioned above, Millet is exceptionally skilled at what she does. Even though this book is mostly very quotidian, it is never boring, and she can make you interested in what happens even to her least convincing characters. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is feeling cynical, but if you were craving the literary equivalent of a Ted Lasso Christmas episode, this might be exactly what you need.
• Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet is published by WW Norton (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
