Intro
Yikes, the title makes it sound like this novel is going to be mor-bid. How the Dead Dream is a contemporary novel that takes on issues of extinction and human longing. Extinction and human longing? Seriously, this sounds like it's going to be pretty depressing.
Luckily, a lot of animals come into the picture and help the human characters of this novel relate and make it through to a better day. Yay, animals.
The novel is interesting to animal studies scholars because it dramatizes and aestheticizes biological concepts like extinction. It gives us a chance to see what culture and the arts have to say about these topics. A lot of these theorists think that what culture has to contribute on these issues is just as important as what the scientists are telling us—and that these realms should be involved in more of a conversation. Millet's book allows us to do this.
Quote
And while this mother was tolerant of animals, even curious about them as long as they stayed firmly where they belonged—that is, in paintings, stories, even stained-glass windows, but far from her living room—his father was simply indifferent. His father had little interest in anything that moved, beyond athletes on the small screen… Pets seemed at best an unnecessary burden, at worst a lingering nuisance.
Analysis
Millet's narrator is describing a character's parents' perspective on pets as background for his getting a dog. At first glance this passage might just seem like any ordinary exposition in a novel. But with animal studies' critical lens in mind we can see the meta-fictional and even theoretical implications of this passage.
After all, isn't this mother just like most of us in her view of animals? She thinks they ought to stay where they belong. We might differ about just where they belong—we might agree that they belong in some abstract storehouse for art and culture as she does, or we might think they belong out in the wild, or only in the home, or even in the laboratory.
Millet's novel keeps returning to the question of what kind of meaningful, in-the-flesh experiences we can have with real animals—sounds great to read about dogs, coyotes, and endangered animals… but what would happen if we tried to share a room with them?
By posing this question, the novel suggests that our real and represented encounters with animals cannot be easily distinguished and disentangled from one another. Both touching animals and imagining them comprises what it means to be a human animal sharing a world with non-human animals.