Young T. hoards a stash under his pillow and dreams of clever, dubious ploys to accrue more funds. He bilks parents and neighbors under the guise of collecting for United Way, YMCA, Boy Scouts. At school, T. establishes a blackmail ring, hiring bullies to threaten his friend so he can extort protection money from him.
We flash forward to college in a small North Carolina town where T. flourishes in his fraternity and secret stock-exchange investments. He is reserved but popular with women, who find him a dignified counterpoint to his comrades. After graduation in 1986, he zips into a successful land development career. By the age of 22, he has a Santa Monica office, two middle-aged assistants, and membership in an exclusive racquet club where he hopes to make lucrative business contacts.
Loner T. casts a gimlet eye on fellow humans. "What people valued and professed to value were quite different objects. . . . When they said they wanted passion, they meant the feeling of novelty; instead of what was beautiful, they wanted what was affirmed; instead of a challenge, an easy victory that others believed to be hard-won."
This very interior novel prizes philosophical speculation over dramatic narration. Millet is more drawn to posing ethical and environmental quandaries than to creating dynamic scenes or nuanced characters. Before publishing her first novel, "Omnivores," in 1996, she studied environmental policy and worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council. In this idea-driven novel, minimal action is understandable since the protagonist lives in his head.
T.'s consciousness irrevocably shifts one night when he hits a coyote on the highway. His sympathy, sorrow, and wonder over the animal's abrupt death eventually lead him to unexpected places.
Millet's humor ranges from dry irony to over-the-top satire to wistful amusement. As T.'s mother recovers from a stroke, she confesses: "I died and went to another place. . . . the International House of Pancakes." Ever after, she suffers from a phobia about IHOPs. Her fervent Catholic concern for T.'s immortal soul focuses on steering him away, not from hell, but from pancake houses.
