I heard Lydia Millet asked once, in an interview, why she'd left the literary world of New York, where she clearly thrived, and she said that it was too easy to be mean there, and she'd rather be nice — or words to that effect. And niceness is not generally considered a literary virtue, but in Millet's work generally, and her new novel "Dinosaurs" specifically, it certainly is.
Niceness, in fact, is the defining trait of the novel's protagonist, Gil, who, after the abrupt and unhappy ending of a 15-year relationship, has just purchased a house, sight unseen, on the outskirts of Phoenix, and walked there, over the course of five months, from Manhattan. "At least you finally did something," his ex-girlfriend says sometime later, when they briefly meet. And though he never took money for it, Gil thinks, "I always did something ... They could put it on his gravestone: He tried to be of use."
Gil, an orphan raised in an austere fashion by his grandmother, is the heir to an oil fortune, uncomfortably conscious of his privilege and committed, in a modest way, to doing good works. In his new house ("he thought of it as a castle") he becomes involved with the family that lives next door, in a house that he thinks of as a "glass-walled stage."
