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
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her first work of short fiction, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

"[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."— Jonathan Lethem The Guardian

"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

"...[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."— Jenny Hendrix Boston Globe

"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 woman’s midlife upheaval."— Laura Miller Salon

"Starred review. [An] elegant meditation on death and what it means to be alone, even you’re 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 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

"... 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

"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."— Christine Thomas Miami Herald

"Starred review. [A] refreshingly buoyant and unsentimental tale…Millet’s spare but powerful prose…calls to mind the work of J. M. Coetzee."— Jeff Ayres Library Journal

From the Publisher

2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, Short-listed

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