Oh So Confused

Leo Lasdun examines Lydia Millet’s “Atavists.”

By Leo LasdunMay 9, 2025

• Fiction

LYDIA MILLET’S NEW SHORT story collection, Atavists, plays variations on the big post-pandemic questions: We’re more connected than ever, so why do I feel so alone? Everything is doomed, so what’s the point of doing anything? Our triumphant moments are undermined by some looming chimera of political, ecological, and interpersonal disaster. Our miseries are woven together in a hideous tapestry with those of our neighbors, our co-workers, our Instagram mutuals. In Atavists, Millet examines the stitching.

The stories are invasive: people’s personal chambers, digital and corporeal, are blown open, their sore spots and feral machinations exposed. A woman infiltrates her abusive ex-boyfriend’s wedding. A man and his son-in-law enter a cold war involving geriatric porn and the family computer. A cosmetologist grieves her cousin, dead of COVID-19, during a waxing session. All this tension, which Millet renders keenly and readably, is built and released in the face of immense and existential forces of undoing—Millet casts climate disaster as an annihilating shadow over her players. The stories are also interconnected: the gay couple down the street, mentioned casually in one story about a mother and daughter, might be the main characters in the next vignette, and so on.

Atavists is both buoyed and, sometimes, torpedoed by Millet’s seeming inability to be anything but placidly optimistic. The characters (with the exception of one cartoonishly malicious womanizer) are all essentially well-meaning; even the cynical business school striver in “Cultist” gets a redemptive touch, as we’re immediately told he’s probably “on the spectrum.” There’s a hopeful idea of life as a kind of continuous evolution, rather than a slow, degrading calcification. Things can still happen to you when you’re 40. When you’re 50. In the mid-2010s, Netflix was producing series after series about people, mostly millennials, trying to figure it all out in various cities, and being oh so confused (Judd Apatow’s Love [2016–18] and Joe Swanberg’s Easy [2016–19] come to mind); Atavists is digestible in the same way. The final story in the collection is even called “Optimist,” and it’s difficult to tell if this is meant to ironically provoke or to signify an upbeat coda to an otherwise somber compendium. Either way, “Optimist” is indistinguishable in tone from the stories that precede it.

Millet’s bright-sidedness boosts the collection’s entertainment factor, which is not to be underrated. But it also makes the questions she’s asking, which we’re meant to take seriously, appear limp and somewhat trivial. One of the collection’s recurring characters is a depressed young man, a recent graduate of Stanford, who struggles to find meaning and motivation in the face of a collapsing country and world. In “Dramatist,” we see him LARPing, working at a big-box store, and pretending to write a screenplay. In the words of his sister’s friend, “so tragic.” In “Mixologist,” he grows disillusioned with his love life and hobbies while he discovers the futility of human aspiration versus global disaster—as he puts it, “Wanting to look like winners. Beneath the falling sky.” One might hope, at least narratively, for this young man to snap, perhaps committing some noble act of ecoterrorism. Instead, we get access, via another story about his analyst, to his therapy musings about feeling helpless, which are basically mundane. The fact of his figuring it all out is intended to represent meaningful drama. Millet tries to conjure seismic revelations from the everyday but is unable to imagine that these revelations might consist of anything other than trite subversion. Should we feign bemusement or surprise when a Zoomer actually finds the old people at the nursing home cool? When she’s totally refreshed by how “tired of separateness” they are?

Offsetting the pat diorama of life’s confusions is Millet’s sense of humor, which is dry if not always calibrated. One story, “Artist,” opens with a bit about “Hillary Clinton sucking the bone marrow from infants as part of a liberal cabal, while also molesting them.” Political neuroses around things like sex and race are mocked to varying effect: in “Futurist,” for example, a professor, accused of plagiarism, tries to find reciprocal dirt on his accusing colleague, musing that “in the card deck of identity crimes, being a copycat was maybe a 4 or 5. Then sexism, say a 7 or 8. […] Atop them all sat race. It was the ace. The ace of race.” In “Terrorist,” when the aforementioned gay couple discover that the child of their Ethiopian neighbors is placing offensive notes in their mailbox, their first concern is whether or not they can “safely accuse a kid from Africa of being a homophobe.” The send-up of liberal pieties can be funny, and Millet is deft with the snappy one-liner, but it’s not exactly new territory. Like many of the collection’s other elements, the humor might’ve seemed incisive circa 2016. (Or even earlier—one joke, in which a Prius is referred to as “practically a vagina,” is suspiciously reminiscent of a moment in 2010’s The Other Guys, when Mark Wahlberg says of Will Ferrell’s Prius: “I feel like we’re literally driving around in a vagina.”) At this point, though, Millet’s comedy is neither offensive enough to tantalize nor timely enough to be particularly funny. Instead, it feels meek and a bit forced, like muttered remarks from someone who is a tad nervous at a hip party.

The central problem that Millet (and other writers covering the same subject matter) encounters is that she’s trying to illustrate a set of extremely modern dilemmas and maladies from the refuge of what is a rather traditional narrative mode. It’s incongruent, and extremely difficult to do effectively. Millet’s writing (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2010) is conversational, and she sometimes slips into a confused rhythm of clipped, notational sentences (“Stole a quick glance at her.” “Googled Natalya Kovalchuk.”). Outside of this, the stories are presented conventionally, in clean, polished prose. Again, it’s entertaining, but it’s hard to glean anything submerged and therefore interesting about the loneliness-connection dichotomy, or about existential dread, from this kind of writing. Millet is circling around a ubiquitous feeling of fracture: our senses of time and distance have been abused and exploded into hyper-discrete and incalculable values. It’s a mood, a feeling, that deserves a fully charged voice, and prose that’s at least a little bit out there.

A counterexample might be found in another recent collection: Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024). Tulathimutte covers similar subject matter and asks questions much like Millet’s (and Rejection is also written as a group of interconnected short stories), but his material feels wonderfully, almost violently immediate. He’s a younger writer, but that’s not the operative difference. In Rejection, the characters are authentically miserable and pathetic: Tulathimutte isn’t handcuffed to optimism like Millet. Doom and desperation don’t feel sanitized or gestural—they’re imposed or inflicted on us, glaring out from bleak reproductions of group chats and forum posts. There’s an almost Joycean assertion of consciousness—or a handful of consciousnesses—in Rejection that allows entrance into a deeper hell, beyond the newsy miasma of Atavists. Tulathimutte’s incels and psychotic tech-cultists are unrelenting and irredeemable—Millet’s are shrouded in a televisionary veil of bland sagacity.