Money for nothing

A Novel

Lydia Millet

Counterpoint: 244 pp., $24

A boy is so entranced by money that he holds dimes and quarters in his mouth, an act that is partly love,partly a wish for assimilation. In a rare moment of rebellion -- a tactic, really, in a negotiation with his parents -- he interrupts his mother's book club, spewing out coins like a human slot machine. (He gets what he wants: a savings account.)

"How the Dead Dream," Lydia Millet's sixth novel, follows this boy, known as T., into adulthood with an economy of language and a fullness of heart. T. is on track to be a classic cold-hearted capitalist until the vicissitudes of his life lead him to find unexpected solace in animals, the more endangered the better. Eventually, he breaks into zoos at night, once getting so close to the elephants that "he felt their breath, a warm wind of eaten hay." T.'s evolution from capitalist to caretaker functions both as allegory and character study, and works if the reader lends T. his sympathies.

At first, T. might seem hard to like -- he's a child who turns schoolyard bullying into a business, and when he collects for the unfortunate, he keeps the bulk of the take without a twinge of conscience. But he's rendered in such complex, fine detail -- as carefully etched as one of the engravings he studies on the backs of dollar bills -- that he comes alive, irresistibly sympathetic, both deadpan and deep.

"He read old texts with great pleasure, particularly those written by certain stalwart Puritans whose parsimony seemed born of a voluptuous and secret greed. He combed through the texts for signs of this sinful covetousness -- a pornography of spirit, for nothing was more of a guilty pleasure than the greed of those who believed themselves righteous."

With one major real estate success behind him, T. launches an enormous Southern California desert development. One night, driving there in his Mercedes, he hits a coyote and stops without really understanding why. As he tends to the dying animal, he is bewildered by the depth of his emotion: "The fullness, the terrible sympathy!" This intensity fades, but the encounter is his first sign of compassion, a hairline fracture in his entrepreneur's shell.