It was no longer held to be true that all the dinosaurs had gone extinct sixty-six million years ago, after the Chicxulub impactor made its crater in Mexico. Blocked out the sun. And killed off the plants the dinosaurs needed to survive. Only the ones that wouldn’t turn into birds. There were about three thousand active satellites up in the sky, he’d read. Some twenty-thousand pieces of orbital debris. At any given moment, an average of nine thousand passenger planes flying. And yet, he’d thought as he walked, without the last of the dinosaurs the sky would be empty.
I haven’t read Lydia Millet’s phenomenally popular A Children’s Bible, but it was so lauded by my goodreads friends that I decided to take a chance on her latest novel, Dinosaurs, when I saw it was available. And it was just okay. Kind of a straightforward story arc of character growth with snappy dialogue and some interesting nature writing, this certainly wasn’t a waste of time, but it didn’t really wow me either. Short and sweet and not much to dissect. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He recognized the pattern. He went to new places because they weren’t the same as the old ones. But he wanted to feel the distance in his bones and skin, the ground beneath his feet. Not step onto a plane and land in five hours after a whiskey and a nap. And not drive, either, with the speed and convenience cars gave you. He wasn’t looking for easy. He had nowhere to be and no one who needed him.
As the story opens, we meet Gil: Incredibly wealthy and with few personal ties (he was orphaned young and claims to have only ever had three friends and one long-term romantic relationship), Gil decided to relocate from Manhattan to Scottsdale, AZ, walking the 2500 miles over five months (“I wanted the change to cost me. You know? I wanted to earn it.”) Having bought a big house (nicknamed “The Castle”) in the suburbs, sight unseen, Gil is bemused when a family soon moves into the glass-fronted home facing him, giving the solitary man a fishbowl view of a family life he’s never known. Gil has always tried to make meaning in his life with volunteer work and he soon makes a life for himself in Scottsdale: volunteering with a women’s shelter as a “Friendly Man” and getting to know the family next door. And that’s about it.
Gil is captivated by the birds he sees from his new home (the only birds he recalls in Manhattan were the pigeons in the park) and each chapter is named for a different bird — Mourning (for the dove), Quail, etc. — and each type of bird then appears in that chapter and has a metaphorical connection to the content. If I have a complaint it would be that, as awkward as Gil tells us he feels around people, he is continually intervening with the people around him, and even with the teenagers next door, he always offers exactly the right advice; everyone who meets Gil finds him attractive and smart and charming. (And if I could make another complaint: It’s not ironically clever to have a wealthy orphan grow up to wear a bat costume on Halloween and hit the street to prevent a crime. I sighed.)
You could see what was true — that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh. The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant. Before that, of a multiplication so large it couldn’t be fathomed. Back and back in time. A tree in a forest of trees, where men grew from apes and birds grew from dinosaurs.
I will say again that the dialogue was snappy and charming (even if I didn’t really buy that this character, as presented, was up to this kind of banter), but also need to reiterate that there aren’t a lot of surprises: Man seeks a fresh start, meets new people, realises he is connected to humanity after all.
