Magnificence: A Novel

by Lydia Millet

Overview

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 husband’s death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle’s 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 menagerie—including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women—joins her in residence.

In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion’s 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393346855
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/11/2013
Series:	How the Dead Dream Series , #3
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	839,330
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

This is Lydia Millet’s third story collection. Her first, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; her second, Fight No More (2018), won an American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award.

Editorial Reviews

"...[W]arm, moving, funny, earnest, hopeful, honest, and engaged in a way at odds with current literary fashion…Millet’s lush prose has you in her thrall from the start."

Boston Globe - Jenny Hendrix

"Millet is simply an incredible writer. Her prose displays the exceedingly rare combination of philosophical introspection with poetic grace and flourish."

Daily Beast - Nicholas Mancusi

"Millet’s 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

"There’s much to explore in Magnificence, which is ambitious, often funny and deliciously provocative. One needn’t 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 Millet’s writing and imagination."

Miami Herald - Christine Thomas

"[A] novel of ideas or philosophy, disguised as a portrait of one woman’s midlife upheaval."

Salon - Laura Miller

"[Magnificence is] elegant, darkly comic…with 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."

The Guardian - Jonathan Lethem

"Starred review. Millet brings her searching, bitterly funny, ecologically attuned trilogy of Los Angeles–based 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

The heroine of Lydia Millet's Magnificence, Susan Lindley, has just inherited a house from a vaguely remembered great-uncle who died a few months earlier. Set among nearly twenty acres of overgrown gardens, the property is a vast, untended 1920s mansion, located in one of the richest neighborhoods in Pasadena, California. Even more remarkable than the estate's size are its contents: it's crammed with room after room of molting taxidermy specimens of every size and shape. There are legions of mounted deer heads, cheetahs frozen in mid- leap, parliaments of stuffed owls, timber wolves in glass cabinets, minks on the sideboard. One bedroom shelters a diorama of rainforest creatures, while others contain tableaux of Himalayan ruminants or Arctic foxes. In the dim library, there's an ossified jamboree of bears.

Susan is justifiably unnerved by the house's contents when she leaves the modest Santa Monica home where she's lived for many years and moves in, vowing to get rid of all the animals and redecorate from bottom to top. Yet almost immediately she finds herself delighting in the stuffed curiosities, and wondering how they got there. Unlikely as it seems, the old house with its tattered menagerie represents a chance for her to metamorphose from an ordinary and very troubled forty-eight-year-old woman into "a queen, the private, unseen monarch of a kingdom of dust and faded velvet and the great horns of beasts."

Those troubles of Susan's are both old and new, as Millet's fans will recognize, since Magnificence is the final novel in a trilogy that began with How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights. (It can easily be read on its own, but is much enhanced by the two previous books.) Her daughter is a depressed paraplegic in her early twenties who's been working as a phone sex operator. Susan's boss, a property developer turned eco-warrior, is dismantling his real-estate business, signaling a probable end to her secretarial job. The most grievous of her misfortunes is the most recent: her husband, a mild-mannered IRS agent named Hal, had been travelling in Belize when he was stabbed to death during a random street robbery. Blindsided by this sudden tragedy, Susan is also considerably guilt-ridden, because Hal had discovered evidence before he left for Belize that she had been coping with the stress of her daughter's disability by pursuing sexual flings with near-strangers.

As dramatic as all this sounds, the things that happen in Millet's trilogy are never the main events. In each of the three books, Millet makes sure that the protagonist's thought process, not the action, dominates the narrative space. (Respectively, those streams of consciousness belong to T., Susan's boss, in How the Dead Dream; her husband, Hal, in Ghost Lights; and Susan herself in Magnificence.) These long-running interior monologues, coolly composed in the third person, unspool as the characters try (and mostly fail) to make sense of their outlandish circumstances. Their rhythms are remarkably true to life and punctuated with dark humor. Susan, for instance, grappling with her guilt over the incidental way in which her adulterous behavior propelled Hal to take his fatal trip to Belize, privately refers to herself as "the murderer": "the murderer poured a cup of coffee," she narrates silently; "the murderer went to sleep." And a page later: "The murderer inherited a house full of deer."

A heroine more haunted than the creepy mansion she moves into is a spectacular subject, and Millet does not waste the opportunity. Because she's an elliptical rather than a revelatory writer, Millet provides only indirect access to Susan's grief over Hal, which shows up quite realistically in the form of distracting housekeeping projects rather than in frank emotional outpourings. Susan plunges into the monumental task of restoring the estate and its deteriorating contents, becoming more and more invested in her claim. With near-obsessive resolve, she fends off a couple of nosy cousins who question her legal entitlement to the property. At the same time, she offers hospitality to an assortment of needy acquaintances who seek refuge, as she does, in the house's museum-like recesses.

Millet endows the mansion with a deliciously surreal presence, its spaces expanding and contracting as if in a dream, its design as playfully sinister as the mise-en-scène of Psycho or The Shining or Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. And how cleverly Millet lends credibility to her ghost house, surrounding it with meticulously accurate Los Angeles details: the squawking flocks of wild parrots zigzagging overhead; the students from the nearby Art Center design college who come to help organize the mounted specimens; the precise time — almost forty minutes — it takes to drive on empty freeways at two in the morning from Pasadena to Santa Monica.

What to make of all those exotic animals, once wild, now moribund and warehoused in a manic collector's dream home? Millet, who has a master's degree in environmental policy from Duke, is never shy about her preoccupation with the shrinking dimensions of the natural world. The role of the extinct specimens here is to highlight how little we know about their bygone grandeur — and how limited, in Millet's view, is human understanding in general. "There was something she should be learning about them," Susan tells herself as she prowls among the animals at night, "but she didn't know what." It's their mystery that lends this book its magnificence, making it the most powerful in the trilogy and superior also to novels with more strident eco- political messages. Millet will only offer hints of the secrets here, in this elegantly disquieting novel with the baleful message that "you lived your life in a small part of the world, with only the faintest inkling of what was everywhere else."

Donna Rifkind's reviews appear frequently in The Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times. She has also been a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006, she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviewer: Donna Rifkind

Bad things happen in the surreal landscape of Lydia Millet's Los Angeles…But despite the smog, the traffic and the hideous, soul-killing office parks, you couldn't call this L.A. noir. It's as colorful as the flock of parrots that inexplicably flies through Millet's suburbs. Amid all the misery, a certain innate good nature—and a desire to survive—shine through. A three-legged dog that stumps through the novel could serve as a mascot for Millet's grim but grinning vision: tail wagging, the maimed dog just keeps on keepin' on.
—Lisa Zeidner

The New York Times Book Review

Suddenly alone after the death of her husband, Susan Lindley is unmoored in Millet’s elegant meditation on death and what it means to be alone, even when you’re not, in this companion piece to How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights. When Susan’s boss, T., goes missing in a Central American jungle, her husband, Hal, flies down to find him, a “generous” gesture that Susan sees as an “excuse to get away from her” after an “unpleasant discovery, namely her having sex with a co-worker on the floor of her office.” But when T. appears alone at the airport, bearing news that Hal has died in a mugging, Susan takes her husband’s death as “the punishment for her lifestyle.” Susan’s prickly, paraplegic adult daughter, Casey, who recently traded college for phone sex work, slips into a grief that “seemed to be shifting to melancholy,” which doesn’t help Susan assuage her guilty conscience; nor does the closeness of the relationship that begins to bud between Casey and T. But into the mourning comes an unexpected ray of light: Susan’s great uncle, whom she only vaguely remembers, wills her an enormous Pasadena estate overrun with taxidermy. Every room is filled with all manner of exotic beasts, divided into “themes.” Surprising everyone, including herself, Susan moves in and the taxidermy menagerie becomes a comfort, a way to bring order to a chaotic world, particularly when angry relatives come calling. A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story beyond that tired tale of a grieving widow struggling to move on, instead exploring grief and love as though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing in deep and scooping out the innermost layers. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Death and damage hover over the tenth work of fiction by Pulitzer Prize finalist Millet (Love in Infant Monkeys), yet it's a refreshingly buoyant and unsentimental tale. After her husband's death, Susan Lindley seeks a new direction, which she finds unexpectedly in an inherited mansion full of taxidermied animals. Into that house she eventually welcomes an assortment of people also in need of repair, including an unhappily married man and an elderly woman who needs to be needed. Beyond the activities of this menagerie is a plot about the psychic healing of Susan's daughter, confined to a wheelchair years before as the result of a car accident. The characters all find a kind of salvation, but in very convincing ways. The story develops naturally, an ironic contrast to the artificiality of the preserved animals, and the novel becomes a lyrical meditation on what it takes to survive and evolve. VERDICT Recommended for fans of How the Dead Dream and Ghost Lights, the first two books in this trilogy. Millet's spare but powerful prose also calls to mind the work of J.M. Coetzee. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/12.]—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

Library Journal

Millet's conclusion of the trilogy that includes How the Dead Dream (2008) and Ghost Lights (2011) draws a detailed map of the healing process of an adulterous wife who suddenly finds herself a widow. Susan's husband, Hal, goes to Belize in search of Susan's employer ,T., a real estate tycoon who has gone missing. (Spoiler alert: Readers of the earlier novels who don't want to know what happens to T. or Hal, stop reading now.) Hal's quest is successful: T. returns to Los Angeles. But he's alone, because Hal has been fatally knifed in a mugging. Susan is both grief- and guilt-stricken. She genuinely loved Hal but has been seeking sex with other men ever since a car accident left their daughter, Casey, a paraplegic. She believes Hal went to Belize largely to recover after discovering her infidelity. Millet's early chapters insightfully delve into Susan's internal anguish as she tries to come to grips with the seismic change in her life caused by Hal's death. Her intense maternal love for Casey, who refuses the role of noble victim, is as prickly and complicated as her mourning; her capacity for experiencing extremes of selflessness and selfishness within a heartbeat is refreshingly human and recognizable. Plot machinations get a little creaky, though once Susan sells her house and coincidentally inherits a mansion full of stuffed animals from a great-uncle she barely remembers. Bringing the mansion back to life and figuring out the secret of her uncle's legacy take over Susan's life. 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