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Lydia Millet [Millet - Magnificence: A Novel

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Lydia Millet [Millet Magnificence: A Novel

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A woman embarks on a dazzling new phase in her life after inheriting a sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy.Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation (Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times). Salon praised her for writing that is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself. The Village Voice added, If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, he would be extremely jealous. This stunning new novel presents Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husbands death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncles sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the neglected, moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails. Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerieincluding an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old womenjoins her in residence.In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansions unknown spaces. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence explores evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and revelation. The result is the rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.Review[Magnificence is] elegant, darkly comicwith overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is. (Jonathan Lethem - *The Guardian* )Lydia Millets Magnificence is a novel of ideas. I mean that as a high compliment, for the ideas Millet invokes are the only ones that matter: life, death, love, longing, extinction, the ongoing existential quandary of what we are doing here.... [A]n ambitious book, not so much for the sweep of its action, which is essentially domestic, but for its deep and nuanced investigation of inner life.... (David Ulin - *Los Angeles Times* )Millets prose, which is both sensitive and strange... creates a thick atmosphere that immediately pulls the reader deep into this saga of love, death, sex, and taxidermy. (NewYorker.com )...[W]arm, moving, funny, earnest, hopeful, honest, and engaged in a way at odds with current literary fashionMillets lush prose has you in her thrall from the start. (Jenny Hendrix - *Boston Globe* )...[U]unnervingly talented Lydia Millet completes a trilogy... each stands independently; you can read just one of them if you please. But you wont want to, any more than youd want to leave Chez Panisse after the appetizer.... There is something of Paula Fox in the way Millet provokes deep thinking without being overbearing. But I hate to compare Millet to anyone; shes truly an original. (Mary Pols - *San Francisco Chronicle* )Millet is simply an incredible writer. Her prose displays the exceedingly rare combination of philosophical introspection with poetic grace and flourish. (Nicholas Mancusi - *Daily Beast* )[A] novel of ideas or philosophy, disguised as a portrait of one womans midlife upheaval. (Laura Miller - *Salon* )Millets writing is as lush as the house Susan lives in. Theres a marvelous musicality to her prose; shes a writer who tackles human emotions with scientific precision and an artists voice. Theres a cataloging going on here of the ways that people navigate the world once their world has shifted; Millet does a fine job of breathing life into people who are surrounded by dead things. (Michele Filgate - *Minnesota Star Tribune* )Starred review. [An] elegant meditation on death and what it means to be alone, even youre not A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story[,] exploring grief and love as though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing in deep and scooping out the innermost layers. (Publishers Weekly )Starred review. Millet brings her searching, bitterly funny, ecologically attuned trilogy of Los Angelesbased novels (How the Dead Dream, 2008; Ghost Lights, 2011) to a haunting crescendo. ...Millet is extraordinarily agile and powerful here, moving from light to shadow like a stalking lioness.... (Booklist )... draws a detailed map of the healing process of an adulterous wife who suddenly finds herself a widow. The deeply honest, beautiful meditations on love, grief and guilt give way to a curlicued comic-romantic mystery complete with a secret basement and assorted eccentrics. (Kirkus Reviews )Theres much to explore in Magnificence, which is ambitious, often funny and deliciously provocative. One neednt have read the entire series to be consumed by its pleasures, but by the time you reach its beautiful end, considerable comfort lies in the existence of two more novels in which to delight in Millets writing and imagination. (Christine Thomas - *Miami Herald* )Starred review. [A] refreshingly buoyant and unsentimental taleMillets spare but powerful prosecalls to mind the work of J. M. Coetzee. (Jeff Ayres - *Library Journal* ) About the AuthorLydia Millet is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Ghost Lights and eight other works of fiction. Her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives with her children outside Tucson, Arizona.

Lydia Millet [Millet: author's other books


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ALSO BY LYDIA MILLET

Ghost Lights

Love in Infant Monkeys

How the Dead Dream

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Everyones Pretty

My Happy Life

George Bush, Dark Prince of Love

Omnivores

Contents The author thanks Maria Massie Tom Mayer Jess Purcell Ryan - photo 1

Contents

The author thanks Maria Massie, Tom Mayer, Jess Purcell, Ryan Harrington, Denise Scarfi, Amy Robbins, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Tara Powers, Louise Mattarelliano, Steve Colca, Ingsu Liu, David High, Bill Rusin, Dan Christiaens, and David Goldberg for all that they have done.

I t was a stricken love, but still love. It was the kind of love that gazed up at you from the bare white flood of your headlightsa wide-eyed love with the meekness of grass-eaters. Soft fur, pink tongue, and if you got too close a whiff of mulch on the breath. This was the love she cherished for her husband.

The love had other moments. Of course it did. But its everyday form was vegetarian.

She suspected it was the love of most wives for their husbands, after some time had passed. Not for the newlywedsthat was the nature of the conditionbut for the seasoned, the ones who had seniority. When she thought of conjugal love she saw a field of husbands stretched out in front of hera broad, wide field. Possibly a rice paddy. They were bent over, hoeing. Did you hoe rice? Well, whatever. The way she saw them, the husbands had a Chinese thing going on. They toiled like billions of peasants.

Technically, historically, and at this very moment in most of the world it was the wives who toiled. The wives toiled for their livelihoods, for the husbands and the little children. Sure; those were the facts. It was the wives, historically and factuallyin that limited historical, factual sensethat were the beasts of burden. Even in the richer places, it was the women who shortened their life expectancy by marrying, whereas the husbands lived longer than their freewheeling bachelor counterparts.

Still, there was something about the essence of husbands that made them seem like sturdy toilers. Husband, housebound. It might be the wives who were bound to the houses, materially speaking, but the husbands were bound to them. This was because of the narrow focus of most men, how they tended to have few intimates, in emotional terms. They left the social bonding to the wives, so they were bound to them.

And she was ready to tell him all the details, if that was what he wanted. She was prepared to come clean. But a toiler could so easily be hurt. A toiler was chronically exhausted from his long days of labor. What labor, you might ask? The labor of being a man, of course. It was hard to be a man. The men were all insane, basically, due to testosterone. You could see it in them, roiling under the surface. The few exceptions proved the rule, and the smart men were big enough to admit it. For instance, steroids made you more of a man, chemically, and alsonot a coincidencemade you insane. Shed read that autism was thought by scientists to be an exaggerated form of maleness. So there was that. The latent madness and retardation of men was compounded by the fact that most of them didnt get to kill their own prey anymore, stalk living things and slay them in a savage bloodletting.

The men, even when they didnt know it, were frustrated by this. They were unfit to live in civilized society.

Of course, women were also subject to hormonal madnessfamously so. The estrogen or whatever, so-called premenstrual syndrome: the chemicals that, in excess, made them into caricatures of women. Hysteria, for instance, as Freud had called it. Neurosis. That time of the month. Of course Freud had been largely discredited. He had been a philosopher more than a scientist and Americans did not trust philosophers. Far from it. Also he did cocaine.

Still: no question, the fairer sex was more changeable than the unfair one. In practice this meant that the womens madness sometimes receded. But with the men it was constant. When it came to insanity, women were indecisive while men never let up. Oddly the chronic insanity of men was often referred to as stability; the men, being permanent sociopaths, got credit for consistency. Whereas the women, being mere part-time neurotics, were typecast as flighty. Essentially, the female bouts of sanity were used as weapons against them. Sociopaths v. neurotics. It was a nontrivial distinction since many men took the thing a bit too far, frankly, becoming serial killers, wife beaters, dirty cops, or boy soldiers in roving gangs; war criminals, tyrants, and demagogues.

Not so much the women.

In one sense, though, she didnt blame the men. That would be blaming the victim. They were hobbled by their repressed rage and Asperger syndrome, variations on which were lavishly spread throughout the male population, but so what? Far from blaming them she had always loved them, loved them for their sad flaws. The men were tragic heroes. To be a tragic hero, all that was needed was manhood.

She loved them. Yes she did.

Casey was driving her to the airport, down La Cienega at rush hour. There was a comfortable silence between them. Susan gazed out the window at traffic. The traffic was full of men, most of whom were tragic. The tragic men sat in their cars, driving. Some played with radio dials, others picked their noses while staring glassily at nothing. In many cases, completely unaware of their tragic identity. Women were also driving, of courseher own daughter, for one; Casey enjoyed driving and drove with speed and a certain measure of abandonand yet these women, including Casey who was in a wheelchair, were less tragic per se than the men. The women might be unfortunatetake Casey, for instancebut few of them were Ophelia. No, when it came to tragedy the men had slyly cornered the market.

Driving gave Casey a feeling of mastery she didnt have in the chair, since she was higher up when she drove. In the drivers seat she was on the same plane with everyone else: the playing field was level. She was excited now, drumming her fingers on the wheel. Susan felt exhilarated herself. Her husband and her employer, both returning from the tropics. It was a homecoming, a heroes welcome. Though come to think of it, the hero role, like tragedy, was unfairly, readily available to men. When she herself stepped off an airplane, no one would ever shriek in joy, jump up and down and hurl themselves into her arms.

Neither she nor Casey usually smoked but impulsively they had bummed Marlboro Reds off a burly biker at a bar, a guy covered in colorful tattoos with eagles feathering his biceps. The only reason they hadnt progressed to hard liquor, in a further festive gesture, was that the hour wasnt advanced. If Susan drank before sunset she tended to nod off. Her middle age began to show.

They would wait, Casey had said, and have their drinks with Hal and T. They would meet the two men at the airport and take them out to celebrate.

Maybe move into the right lane? she asked Casey.

Oh yeah? Huh. Whos driving?

You are.

Exactly.

Itd be smoother sailing, though. Look!

Mother?

OK, OK.

Relax. Its not so bad. We could be on the 405.

Anyway: she would tell him whatever he wanted to know, he had the right to such knowledge, but all in all it would be far better for him if he never asked.

Of course she would never describe the exact dimensions of her affection to him. Those microscopic inclinations were a best-kept secretout of protectiveness for the other, more than anythinga secret she kept to herself, as everyone guarded their shameful, shrugged-in shadings of instinct. No one told the smallest increments of their feelings to their dearly beloveds. No one revealed the minute singularitiesthe slack of an ass, say, how it could cause disgust. The response was involuntary.

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