"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."
"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."
"[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...."
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.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.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."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.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.
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.)
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
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.
