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While moths divebombed into our cups and monsoon lightning sparked over the Tucson Mountains, she reminisced about the years before the hotel was purchased by its current owners, when she used to break in and explore the grounds. (She wasn’t sure whether I would prefer Pinot or Malbec.) Technically the hotel did not allow outside visitors, but she is not one to be deterred by a rule as silly as that. “You can call it God, you can call it nature, you can call it whatever, but nature through time, that is as close as you can ever come to God.”Īn hour after I arrived at my hotel, which was hidden among the cactuses on the edge of Saguaro National Park, Millet drove over with two bottles of red wine. “The animal that is nature, and that whole world of plant and fungi, that’s deep time, that’s evolution,” Millet said. Protecting them, in life and art, is a way of protecting our connection to the most mysterious cosmic forces - of getting closer to (or at least becoming aware of) what lies outside the self. Animals are something else, entirely other. Millet says those impulses inevitably lead back to the quagmires of self-projection, narcissism, fantasies of ego. In some novels, sex or desire is the key to all meaning.

But for Millet, animals are more than props in a human drama she’s interested in them for their own sake. How we treat animals always reveals something about our capacities for cruelty and compassion, and one arc of “Dinosaurs” concerns how Gil takes responsibility for the creatures - human and nonhuman - around him. In the confrontation that ensues, the shooter scoffs, “They’re not your birds.” When dead quail and raptors start appearing on Gil’s property, he buys SWAT gear and night-vision goggles to catch the person gunning them down. (One side of their house is glass, so Gil can see right inside.) He becomes especially involved with their son, whom he tries to protect from a neighborhood bully. This fall, Millet will publish her 12th novel, “Dinosaurs,” a quiet, penetrating character study of a middle-aged New Yorker named Gil who, devastated by a breakup, buys a house in Phoenix, sight unseen walks across the country to get there and becomes enmeshed with the family who lives next door. It’s an incident that would fit right into one of her novels or short stories, which, despite being wildly various in tone, often involve some absurd and/or tragic meeting of the animal and the human. “It’s the thing for which I’ve been atoning all these years.” She called it her “original frog sin.” She was speaking in that ironic tone that suggests extreme earnestness. “I sometimes feel much of my life was determined in that moment,” Millet said when we met this summer in Tucson, Ariz., where she has lived for more than 20 years. The toad had been alive, and then it was dead. Looking back now, she can’t explain why she did it. It was a Fowler’s toad, Anaxyrus fowleri, one of those humpy little spotted guys who live up and down the East Coast. Millet was out in the yard at her cousins’ house, spied a toad, raised her sandaled foot and squished it to death. I don’t mean she tripped and the toad was underfoot.

When the writer Lydia Millet was in grade school, she went on a trip to visit her cousins and stepped on a toad.

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