How The Dead Dream

Lydia Millet, 2008

(November 2013)

  

Obviously metaphorical, and satirical bordering on the polemical. Also quite strange.

  

Our hero is T. and he is alone, so he’s always just ‘he’. We know his name, we find it out quite early in fact, so it’s not some mystery meant to tantalize and engage, it’s just that in all his relations with people he’s so far removed that there’s never really any need for the narrator to use his name to differentiate him from anyone else. Form and function together, and it’s very nicely done.

T is a profit obsessed property developer, who realizes the damage his work is doing and doesn’t recant so much as retreat back to some imagined form of the wild. As a commentary on late-capitalism it’s nicely done, even if the metaphors are a touch unsubtle in places (Look, his girlfriend’s lame! And now his dog! What could it all mean?) but you forgive this because the tone is all so odd yet compelling, and in places very funny.

She gave an impression of oblong brownness…

That’s about a rhino, by the way, and that’s not a metaphor. Well, it clearly is, in a way, but the rhino is both brown and oblong and real (if fictional) so it’s not a metaphor about a metaphor or something. She’s not talking about a woman, is what I’m saying. That would just be offensive.

Since finishing this I’ve learned that it’s the first part of a loose trilogy. This has made me very happy.