Ghost Lights: A Novel
“[Lydia Millet] takes aim at the metaphysical jugular...her gorgeous narration...exists in some extraordinary place, at once discursive, editorial, and ruminative…. If literature can under the best circumstances transport, then Millet's extraordinary vision brings us in on the float.” (Minna Proctor - Bookforum)“In Lydia Millet's brilliant new novel, a skeptical tax man follows a runaway millionaire to Latin America.Can it be a coincidence that this year — when the issue of taxes has become an abyss that both divides and conquers our national government — we also have two new books about IRS workers by important novelists of ideas? The first, of course, is David Foster Wallace’s posthumously publishedThe Pale King.... The second is Lydia Millet’s new novel,Ghost Lights.......Millet is seldom compared to J.M Coetzee, who seems an obvious and fruitful influence on...Ghost Lights.... Their prose has a similar, lovely stillness, and both portray characters nudged beyond typical human navel-gazing....” (Laura Miller - Salon.com)“Millet is a gifted writer, often dropping droll and sardonic throw-away lines of surprisingly smart humor.” (Kirkus Reviews)“Millet… skillfully interweaves the personal and the political, making Hal’s journey both specific and universal.” (Christine DeZelar-Tiedman - Library Journal)“Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life.” (Tricia Springstubb - Cleveland Plain Dealer)“...surreal, darkly hilarious and profound… With its linguistic and plot pranks and underlying moral complexity,Ghost Lightsrecalls the laconic, Lacanian novels of Paul Auster. Like Auster, Millet presents a disoriented postmodern hero who becomes a willing but only marginally competent detective in a mystery that requires a series of absurd divagations leading to a life-changing or life-threatening existential inquiry.” (Carolyn Cooke - San Francisco Chronicle)“[A] whip-smart, funny novel…. A yarn about marriage, fatherhood, and idealism, its every page idiosyncratically entertaining, amusing, and insightful. Millet proves she might have Jonathan Franzen beat at expertly mixing the political and domestic.” (Martha Steward Whole Living)“At her best [Millet] exhibits the sweep and Pop-Art lyricism of Don DeLillo, the satiric acerbity of Kurt Vonnegut, the everyday-cum-surrealism harmonics of Haruki Murakami, and the muted-moral outrage of Joy Williams… Strange, alternately quirky, and profound… Millet is operating at a high level inGhost Lights, and the book provides a fascinating glimpse of what can happen if the self’s rhythms and certainties are shaken. We should be grateful that such an interesting writer has turned her attention to this rich, terrifying subject.” (Josh Emmons - New  York Times Book Review)