Dinosaurs

I’ve always been drawn to lonely characters.

Gil, the protagonist of Dinosaurs, has two good friends and a live-in partner, but one feels his essential aloneness, and when his girlfriend suddenly abandons him, he leaves home in New York and walks to Arizona. After his arrival, a family moves into the glass-walled house next door and Gil soon becomes enmeshed in their lives.

This might seem far-fetched, but Millet captures the reader through close observation and empathy for her characters. The friendship between Gil and Tom, his adolescent neighbor, is the most surprising fictional friendship I’ve read in years.… show more.

Like most of my friends and family, I live in the sturm and drang of climate change and social injustice. In many ways, I feel the painful moral complexity of my time.

In particular, as an environmentalist, I very much enjoyed the quietness of this novel about modern American life, a sense of the efforts we must make to build community, with the underlying belief that this is possible. I liked the book’s heart of decency, the main character’s particularly befuddled decency, and the swells of the plot that never overwhelmed me.

I liked all the birds! I felt I… show more.