Review by New York Times Review
AT a glance, 2011 seems to have been a banner year for the Internal Revenue Service in fiction. It began with "The Pale King," David Foster Wallace's orphaned novel about employees at an Illinois branch of the organization. Now comes Lydia Millet's "Ghost Lights," in which an I.R.S. agent goes looking for his wife's missing boss in a Central American jungle. If Philip Roth puts out the story of a retired tax collector's amour fou with a young libertarian by January, we might look for fireworks over the Treasury Department. What, if anything, does all this literary attention mean? That the Tea Party controls every aspect of the national conversation? That fiction has run out of interesting subjects? That taxes really are as inescapable as death? Possibly, although a closer look should reassure us, because it reveals that in Wallace the animating (sic) theme is actually boredom, and in Millet the hero's occupation is incidental to the book's primary question: whether recognizing that your life has become a sleepwalk allows you then to wake up. The hero of "Ghost Lights" is named Hal (the connections with Wallace end here, or once it's noted that Hal lives in Southern California, as Wallace did). He's married, in his early 50s, and the father of a 20-something daughter. He would be happy, except that his wife is cheating on him and his daughter is paraplegic as the result of an accident for which he blames himself. Also, he has for some time been in limbo, bored by his colleagues, by Los Angeles and by himself. At a dinner party one night his wife, Susan, announces her plan to hire a search-and-rescue team to find her boss, T., the protagonist of Millet's 2008 novel, "How the Dead Dream." T. recently went down to Belize to inspect one of his properties, where he mysteriously disappeared. Drunkenly, stung by the glimpse he caught of Susan and her lover that afternoon, Hal volunteers for the job. He's a career office worker and unqualified to find or save anyone lost in a foreign country, but he wants to respond to the adultery forcefully, manfully, and he waves off his wife's faint objections. And so the novel's action moves south, into the murky geography and politics of Central America in the early 1990s. The aftershocks of nearby civil wars, post-colonial politics and environmental degradation are still being felt, and it's grim: "Here and there a bedraggled brown palm tree struggled to look exotic. Forests must have been felled, for sometimes he caught sight of a clump of shiny-leafed bushes and trees in brief straggles of green against the backdrop of dirt and rust, with stumps around them that looked like they'd been hacked at with machetes." After checking into the hotel where T. had stayed, Hal prepares for an upriver hunt that will take him far from civilization. Upriver. Far from civilization. For the past century, writers have assumed a big risk in sending someone from the developed world into a remote jungle. They've faced comparisons with "Heart of Darkness," and the question of whether to embrace it ("Apocalypse Now"), appropriate it (Ann Patchett's "State of Wonder") or subvert it ("Things Fall Apart"). There is a fourth option, to act as if it's not there, which Millet wisely chooses. Besides a drive-by quote ("Mistah Kurtz, he dead"), she ignores the nihilism portrayed in Conrad's novella and concentrates instead on the emotional impairment of Hal. She is less interested in exposing mankind's savage core than in exploring one man's growing sense that he is a failure at his most important roles: as a father, husband and adult. Like his job at the I.R.S., Hal's journey to a far-off, alien place is only a backdrop for the larger drama of self-critique playing out in his head. If done well, diagnosing the misspent life can be revelatory and heartbreaking, and give ballast to otherwise ordinary stories. Without it, Shakespeare's Henry plays would be little more than strident nationalism (in fact Hal owes more to that prince than to the Hal in "Infinite Jest"), "The Remains of the Day" a long lesson in butlering and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" a simple Russian example of pre-Babbittry. If done poorly, however, it can be heavy-handed and manipulative, and produce cardboard buffoons like Ebenezer Scrooge. The good news is that "Ghost Lights" belongs to the revelatory-heartbreaking camp. It powerfully examines how self-acceptance and self-castigation coexist in the same person, and how easily one attitude can displace the other. "Before his venture into this small, subtropical and foreign country, he had never thought of himself as a wimp," Millet writes of Hal. "Yet it seemed he was often in discomfort since he got here, uncomfortable, exhausted or alarmed. He had turned out to be a hothouse flower - a hothouse flower from the first world that wilted in the third. An American hothouse flower, adapted only to the United States. And within the U.S. only to Southern California, or more restricted still - adapted to the unchanging mildness of West L.A., where the worst weather you encountered was gray." Because in people, as in weather, unchanging mildness is deadly, Hal regrets his inflexibility - the world is a protean place, after all - and concludes that he is essentially useless, "a widget among men." INTERESTINGLY, this and other epiphanies Hal has are wrong. The result of all his hard self-scrutiny is that he swaps one set of misconceptions about himself for another, as in a moment after the Belizean police take away one of his friends. "Standing there, watching the taillights disappear and holding the phone, he felt this had happened to him over and over. He never jumped out windows, never moved suddenly, with a jolt. The lights faded as he stood still and looked at them. He did not leap, did not give chase. It always seemed unfeasible and rash." But his very presence in Belize is the result of a sudden move, a jolt. Here and elsewhere his self-discovery is shown to be complicated and error-prone and endlessly revisable - as it is for the rest of us. If you're unfamiliar with Millet's work, six prior novels and a story collection, be advised that it is strange, alternately quirky and profound. At her best she exhibits the sweep and Pop Art lyricism of Don DeLillo, the satiric acerbity of Kurt Vonnegut, the everyday-cum-surreal harmonics of Haruki Murakami and the muted moral outrage of Joy Williams. Much of "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart," her 2005 novel about three Manhattan Project physicists transported to the 21st century, would blend seamlessly into the comet tail of "Underworld." At times, though, her work can slip into vague philosophizing or, worse, a cruel and facile wit. "Love in Infant Monkeys," a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, is full of rewardingly unexpected and satisfying short stories, but its opener, "Sexing the Pheasant," is a condescending portrait of Madonna making lame notes to herself on a bird hunt with Guy Ritchie, an unworthy entry in the collection. Happily, Millet is operating at a high level in "Ghost Lights," and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen when the self's rhythms and certainties are shaken. We should be grateful that such an interesting writer has turned her attention to this rich, terrifying subject - and that April 15 is still many, many months away. 'He had turned out to be ... a hothouse flower from the first world that wilted in the third.' Josh Emmons is the author of the novels "The Loss of Leon Meed" and "Prescription for a Superior Existence." He teaches at Monmouth University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 27, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The always piquant and disquieting Millet follows her stellar story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys (2009), winner of the PEN USA Award, with a riveting continuation of her haunting novel, How the Dead Dream (2008). At the end of that elegiac tale, T., a prodigy turned wealthy real-estate developer, disappears in Belize. Now Susan, T.'s next-in-command, is panicking. Her husband, Hal, an IRS employee deep in a cave of worries about their grown daughter, Casey, who is in a wheelchair for life after an accident, hasn't shown much concern for his wife's missing employer. But after he discovers that Susan is having an affair and that Casey is lying about her work, he conceals his pain and anger and, much to his family's surprise, heads to Belize to search for T. There this straitlaced federal office worker runs amok. He drinks too much, falls under the spell of a golden, athletic German family, and feels weak, useless, and strangely porous. In this land of ecotourism, terrible poverty, and clandestine military horrors, Hal is confronted by a corrupt and violent society and nature's pitiless rule. Millet is darkly comic and neatly lacerating in this fast-moving, psychologically intricate tale, a stunning and devastating late twentieth-century variation on Conrad's Heart of Darkness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
By his own account, Hal has "become a typical domestic drone, a man wrapped up in the details of his own life and only his own." His IRS job seems redundant, underscoring that Hal is a drab, routine, sad man. His adult daughter is in a wheelchair, and Hal mourns her mobility often. His wife is having an affair, a development that feels unnecessarily exaggerated, as if a stale, mid-life marriage in the wake of their daughter's accident wouldn't have been fodder enough for self-reflection. In an attempt to rattle the circumstances of his existence, Hal volunteers to track down his wife's missing boss (T., of Millet's earlier novel How the Dead Dream), last seen in the jungles of Belize. Most of the book recounts Hal's interior thoughts in prose that lacks the lyricism and beauty Millet is known for. When recalling a gorgeous German woman Hal flirted with at a hotel, we're told, "He liked Gretel. She was nice." As the clues of the disappearance emerge, suspense builds, but Hal never breaks through his emotional distance. Though this passiveness might be at the root of his awkward, battered character, the result keeps the reader at a distance as well. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Hal, a mild-mannered IRS agent, goes to Belize ostensibly in search of his wife's missing employer, a real estate developer who's also the protagonist of Millet's How the Dead Dream. In reality, this out-of-character mission is Hal's excuse to escape perceived betrayals by his wife and daughter. Almost in spite of himself, he enlists the help of a vacationing German couple, as he grows to understand his own responsibility for his family relationships and his place in the world. Like John Updike's Rabbit, Hal finds his odyssey taking unexpected twists and turns, as his wry and somewhat detached narrative voice makes astute observations about marriage, parenthood, and the state of the world. VERDICT Millet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the recent Love in Infant Monkeys, skillfully interweaves the personal and the political, making Hal's journey both specific and universal, even when you're never sure where the story is going next. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/11/11.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How the Dead Dream, 2009, etc.) gone missing on the Monkey River. Thomas Stern, who prefers to be called T, was in Belize on business. Now he's been out of touch for weeks. Susan, dedicated assistant to the young mogul, is worried, as is Casey, her paraplegic daughter. Hal Lindley, husband and father, cares little. Hal thinks mostly about Casey's happiness, at least when he isn't plagued by angst over the accident that paralyzed her. Drifting and remote, Hal considers himself as "comfortable in the background." He's soon launched out of his ennui when he discovers shaky evidence Susan is having an affair with Robert, her office's paralegal. As Hal fumbles for proof, Susan decides to hire an investigator to find T. Hal volunteers, suggesting his profession as an IRS agent provides the experience to trace a person's whereabouts. Susan is shocked and confused. Casey, platonically devoted to T, thinks her father heroic. In Belize, Hal languishes, missing the "the security of known formulations and structures." Fleeing the circumstances of his cuckolding, Hal isn't especially eager to find T. Then he meets a vacationing German couple, Hans and Gretel, who push him into action. Hans, in fact, has military contacts and uses them to arrange a Coast Guard search party. Millet is a gifted writer, often dropping droll and sardonic throw-away lines of surprisingly insightful humor. The narrative moves smartly, and the dialogue is believable, as is Hal's existential internal monologue. Flailing about attempting to find T, Hal becomes a sympathetic protagonist. While Susan is not deeply imagined, Millet's narrative of Hal breaking free of an emotional cage is strikingly well done. Millet also deserves recognition for her perceptive treatment of Casey's disability and how it resonates in the family and in the world. Literary fiction with a deep vein of wry social commentary.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
