ATAVISTS: Stories, by Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is a prolific writer who has won big accolades, and yet somehow I’ve never read her work. So there’s no way for me to contextualize her latest collection of stories, “Atavists,” and say the things reviewers often do about a book being a departure or the apotheosis of a lifetime spent perseverating on a theme. I can, however, acknowledge why Millet has been so praised: She knows how to put a story together. How to pace drama and consummate tension, when to turn up the volume and when to leave us alone with what she’s put in motion.
“Motion” is a good word for how this collection of stories operates; it meanders through the lives of various characters who are related to or know one another, and the result is an ecosystem that satirizes left-wing culture in the aftermath of Covid.
Most of these stories do not stand on their own — they aren’t meant to — which puts a lot of pressure on their cumulative power to stir in readers both the dread and joy of being alive (this being, IMO, the bar that fiction needs to clear to be great). “Atavists” succeeds on the dread, less so on the joy, which perhaps speaks to just how grim it feels to be a liberal in this country today. Not because we’ve lost power but because we’ve lost our way. In this collection, we liberals are mostly ridiculous, feckless, insipid and sometimes just sad.
The title of the book suggests Millet is exploring character traits that are primordial (as in essential) or anachronistic (as in ill-fitting). Both interpretations seem viable for the 14 people we meet here, each one an “ist” — the tourist, artist, cosmetologist, etc. — as they wrangle with first-world problems that belie a society in collapse and disarray.
Consider the story “Futurist,” in which an academic rightly accuses another of plagiarizing one line in a paper he wrote 12 years earlier. The accused retaliates by combing through the accuser’s social media for transgressions: “You had to play a trump card, in the culture wars. And in the current climate, that card was racism.” He finds an old post on which he could “stake out a racism claim for sure,” though his effort results only in her posting a retroactive “Content Warning.”
There is something so small and ugly about all this. Millet is really toeing the line between piercing satire and cynicism. But what’s wrong with cynicism as a coping strategy for mass extinction and ascendant tyranny? That is the question Millet takes up in one of the more affecting stories in the collection, “Therapist,” in which a therapist is uncomfortably persuaded by a client — a young, white, privileged male who finds that the world’s “compulsion to normalize” the despoiling of the planet, of humanity, is “the real pathology.” The therapist wonders if he’s right, and if by helping her clients cope with the “new normal,” she’s “delivering therapeutic euthanasia.” But then she puts him on an S.S.R.I., he gets a nice girlfriend and his mood improves.
Ugh.
This young man, in a different piece, notes that even though he’s only ever wanted to tell stories, today “stories seemed more and more useless. The sound of fiddling while Rome burned.” Which is a sentiment art has railed against since the dawn of art, because if not artists saving us from ourselves, then who? “Atavists” concedes ground to the disillusioned among us. I can see why — there’s so much to feel terrible about these days. And yet there’s still goodness out there, right? Not just the sort of goodness a middle-aged man deploys to mitigate his own sense of obsolescence (as does the “Optimist,” who builds a tiny house on his property to take in Afghan refugees who never come), but the kind of goodness that vanquishes doom, or at least helps delay it. If nothing else, “Atavists” reminds me that we need to try a hell of a lot harder.
ATAVISTS: Stories | By Lydia Millet | Norton | 256 pp. | $27.99
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