AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Watch fish tank hd11/14/2022 ![]() (“Let’s get divorced! said couples everywhere, excited.”) Unlike Williams, though, Millet never lets surrealism darken into delirium, and her misanthropy feels circumstantial, not cosmic. Also like Williams, she has a raunchy, fanged wit, often aimed at human self-delusion. Like Joy Williams, Millet uses fiction to elegize the collapsing biosphere. But what the scriptural correspondences mean-if they mean anything-never resolves. “A Children’s Bible” (2020), for instance, subjects a group of spoiled vacationers to ordeals reminiscent of those in the Old and New Testaments. Her method is to churn up themes, generating a kind of mental weather, as if a book were less a trajectory than an atmosphere: something happens, and then something else happens the cloudy design melts and shifts. Millet, eschewing the arc of the private individual, also forgoes the novel’s traditional shape, in which tensions build to a climax. If both fiction and people are blinkered, self-stunned, perhaps they require a similar intervention. Increasingly, fiction studies the “arc of the private individual,” Millet told another interviewer: “The personal struggles of a self and the ultimate triumph of that self over the obstacles in its path.” But Millet is energized, instead, by how feelings are “intermeshed with abstract thought,” with “our place in the wider landscape.” Why, her work demands, are we afraid to die? What are the ethics of wanting what we want? Millet, who now lives near Tucson, has written more than a dozen books of fiction, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but she works at the Center for Biological Diversity and holds a master’s in environmental policy. The novelist Lydia Millet once told an interviewer that when she first moved to New York, in 1996, she was “amazed” by how people were “relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self.” This myopia-a sort of “inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything”-wasn’t her creed. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |