ATAVISTS

A group of characters in Los Angeles face climate crisis and existential angst in 14 interconnected short stories.

Two families stand at the center of Millet’s lovely, keening tales: Buzz, Amy, and their children Liza and Nick; and single mother Helen with daughters Mia and Shelley. They are well-educated, middle-class, liberal Americans, appalled by the state of their country and, in the case of the parents, bemused by their children. The younger generation “seemed to be void of ideology. Beyond naming and shaming each other for perceived identity bias,” comments Trudy, another character who turns up in several stories. This isn’t entirely true of Liza, who impulsively married a “DACA kid,” Luis, while still in high school, or Nick, a Stanford grad enraged by Americans’ complacency in the face of the “five-alarm emergency” of climate catastrophe and impending global extinction. “What we need,” he tells his therapist, “is a worldwide revolution. Yesterday.” Nonetheless, he’s stocking shelves in a big-box store and bartending in a gay bar, and his attitude of “what can I do?” is shared by most of Millet’s wonderfully human, believably flawed characters. A few creeps turn up—there’s one in “Pastoralist,” about a man who preys on vulnerable women, and another in “Cultist,” where Shelley’s smug boyfriend, Jake, spouts “pieces of pat received wisdom from business school” to her amused mother and the horrified Nick, who has become Mia’s boyfriend over the course of the stories. But generally, the author is gentle with confused, well-meaning people immobilized by the scope of the apocalypse they see looming. As she did in such novels as Dinosaurs (2022) and A Children’s Bible (2020), Millet blends a blunt assessment of our refusal to deal with the ecological catastrophes we have created and a tender portrait of human beings with all their foibles.

Sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking.