Magnificence
By Lydia Millet
The last in the trio of books featuring T., a development tycoon who, in the last book, found a change of
heart in the jungle of Belize. That novel was told from the point of view of Hal, the husband of T.'s secretaries, Susan, who agrees to go find T. as a way to escape his discovery that his wife was having an affair. It ends with him bleeding on the sidewalk after being stabbed during a robbery. Will he make it?
No, he will not. And so this book is written from the point of view of Susan, his wife. Turns out, she'd been having lots of affairs. While Hal responded to the accident that left his daughter, Casey, paralyzed by fretting over her, Susan responded with adultery. Hal's death put her in a tailspin. She is, she decides, a murderer; Hal never would have gone to Belize if he hadn't found her out. She is lost, and listless.
Until, one day, she receives a call from a lawyer. Her great uncle has died, and left her a large estate in Pasadena. There is no money, but a trust has been set up to pay for it's upkeep. When she arrives, it is larger than the even imagined. And, strangely, stuffed with taxidermy; heads are everywhere.
She does some research, and finds that her uncle loved to hunt, and, in fact, headed a hunting organization. With little else to do, she throws herself into the house, reorganizing the stuffed animals based on plans of famous natural history museums. It too will be a museum, she decides. There is a chance I am wrong, but it seems to me that her uncle's hunting in some ways matched Susan's infidelities; she, too, was seeking trophies of a kind, and Hal's death has her organizing them in her head.
There is not much of a propulsive plot in this book. A minor conflict arises in the form of Susan's cousins, who are jealous of her inheritance and sue to overturn the uncle's will. It seems obvious from the reader's point of view that she will prevail, but there is tension nevertheless. In addition, this threat spurs Susan to learn even more about the house, and a new mystery arises. The original plans contained a large basement, yet Susan has seen no evidence of it.
A search leads her to a manhole. It doesn't belong to the city. A backhoe is hired to remove the lid, and when Susan descends into the cavern it uncovers, she finds even more animals. At first, it just seems like overflow from the main "collection". But there are strange dates, and then she connects the dots: they are all extinct. There is even a room dedicated to a dodo skeleton. And then, farther on, a different room. It's contents? The remains of humans who were the last of their tribes.
What does it all mean? I don't know, but it speaks to human's odd relationship to endangered species. We are fascinated by them, hyper focused on their potential demise to the point, perhaps, of ignoring the animals right nearby, who, if we aren't careful, will also end up on the list.
I've really enjoyed delving into Millet. I hope she writes another book.
