L.A.Weekly's review of How the Dead Dream
How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet
By Marc Weingarten
If Lydia Millet played by the normal rules of social satire, she might have been as large as T.C. Boyle by now. But whereas most satirists are looking for laughs much of the time, regardless of how sharp their knives might be, Millet is more the whimsical polemicist. Her novels are fanciful and surreal; rather than gently nudging everyday life into the realm of fluffy absurdity, she's trying to knock reality upside the head, thus revealing our venal and craven natures to ourselves.
Consider her last book, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), in which the fathers of nuclear fusion — Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Szilard and Enrico Fermi — rise from the dead and are dragooned by the book's bored librarian protagonist into seeing the damage they've wrought with their nuclear dreams. What follows is a bizarre missionary campaign of sorts for global comity that becomes a lively smack-down between reason and faith, science and God. It's a novel of ideas presente...more
If Lydia Millet played by the normal rules of social satire, she might have been as large as T.C. Boyle by now. But whereas most satirists are looking for laughs much of the time, regardless of how sharp their knives might be, Millet is more the whimsical polemicist. Her novels are fanciful and surreal; rather than gently nudging everyday life into the realm of fluffy absurdity, she's trying to knock reality upside the head, thus revealing our venal and craven natures to ourselves.
Consider her last book, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), in which the fathers of nuclear fusion — Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Szilard and Enrico Fermi — rise from the dead and are dragooned by the book's bored librarian protagonist into seeing the damage they've wrought with their nuclear dreams. What follows is a bizarre missionary campaign of sorts for global comity that becomes a lively smack-down between reason and faith, science and God. It's a novel of ideas presente...more
comments
No comments have been added yet.
