In some novels, sex or desire is the key to all meaning. But for Millet, animals are more than props in a human drama she’s interested in them for their own sake.
How we treat animals always reveals something about our capacities for cruelty and compassion, and one arc of “Dinosaurs” concerns how Gil takes responsibility for the creatures - human and nonhuman - around him. In the confrontation that ensues, the shooter scoffs, “They’re not your birds.” When dead quail and raptors start appearing on Gil’s property, he buys SWAT gear and night-vision goggles to catch the person gunning them down.
(One side of their house is glass, so Gil can see right inside.) He becomes especially involved with their son, whom he tries to protect from a neighborhood bully. This fall, Millet will publish her 12th novel, “Dinosaurs,” a quiet, penetrating character study of a middle-aged New Yorker named Gil who, devastated by a breakup, buys a house in Phoenix, sight unseen walks across the country to get there and becomes enmeshed with the family who lives next door. It’s an incident that would fit right into one of her novels or short stories, which, despite being wildly various in tone, often involve some absurd and/or tragic meeting of the animal and the human. “It’s the thing for which I’ve been atoning all these years.” She called it her “original frog sin.” She was speaking in that ironic tone that suggests extreme earnestness. “I sometimes feel much of my life was determined in that moment,” Millet said when we met this summer in Tucson, Ariz., where she has lived for more than 20 years. The toad had been alive, and then it was dead. Looking back now, she can’t explain why she did it. It was a Fowler’s toad, Anaxyrus fowleri, one of those humpy little spotted guys who live up and down the East Coast. Millet was out in the yard at her cousins’ house, spied a toad, raised her sandaled foot and squished it to death. I don’t mean she tripped and the toad was underfoot. When the writer Lydia Millet was in grade school, she went on a trip to visit her cousins and stepped on a toad. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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