Review by Kevin Brown
Atavists, Lydia Millet’s latest collection of short stories, continues her preoccupation with the climate crisis, the backdrop (or centerpiece) to most of her recent writing. In these interlocking stories, she follows one family and various people connected to them, giving each character one story titled with something ended in -ist, such as “artist,” “mixologist,” or “optimist.” The “atavist” in the title raises the question of whether Millet means to imply that the characters are rediscovering some genetic characteristic after several generations of absence (perhaps a concern with the climate crisis) or are organisms that have characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism (ignoring the climate crisis, as generations of people have done). Or both, of course.
One of the main characters concerned with the climate crisis is Nick, who has attended Stanford to earn a degree in scriptwriting and who has moved back home to live with his parents and sister while he writes his first screenplay. Through various stories, it becomes clear that he is unable to write his fantasy screenplay, and he’s losing interest in LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), which causes him to lose his girlfriend, Chaya. He doesn’t see the point in most of what people do, given that there’s little chance of a foreseeable future. He does, however, find another girlfriend, Liza, who is taking a gap year from college. When her parents suggest volunteering, she finds purpose in helping residents of an assisted living facility understand their technology, which then morphs into helping them simply manage life.
Millet also shows characters who are not quite who they seem, sometimes through a clear contrast between the title of their story and how they behave, but also sometimes through their use or misuse of technology. For example, “Pastoralist” reveals the main character, Les, to be a predatory user of women, finding those he believe will be insecure because of their weight, then staying with them for no more than a few months until he gets bored and moves on to what he would describe as another sheep that needs to be sheared.
In the final story, “Optimist,” Millet makes it clear that she’s not one when it comes to people’s acknowledging the reality of the environmental destruction they have already caused and that only continues to worsen. She does portray characters who care, though, both about the environment and one another, even if they don’t always know what to do with those emotions, which helps elevate these stories beyond simply drawing attention to the climate crisis to a portrayal of our day-to-day lives.
Atavists by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, April 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
