Meet Gil, the protector

“Birds were the descendants of the dinosaurs,” Gil thinks during the walk  that takes him from his expensive New York apartment to a new home in Arizona. It’s more than a walk; it’s a pilgrimage, a journey with a finite beginning and end, a closed loop of travel and migration. It takes him five months to make it to the home he’s bought sight unseen. On his way through the desert, he begins to see birds and the natural world they inhabit with a hard-bought clarity. “Without the last of the dinosaurs,” he thinks—without the creatures that survived an apocalypse—“the sky would be empty.”

Gil is the protagonist in Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs, and as he settles into his new home, we learn about his own encounters with what feels like an apocalypse. The early loss of his parents, combined with the recent wreckage of a brutally unkind romantic relationship, leaves Gil feeling adrift in the world, unsure of how and where he belongs. Gil is also incredibly wealthy, the inheritor of family riches from his oil baron grandfather. “When you have a lot of money,” he says, “you never pay for anything. You never feel the cost. . . . Never a choice or a sacrifice, unless you give up your time.”

And that is precisely what Gil gives: his time as a volunteer, as a neighbor, and as a friend with a listening ear. He signs up as a “friendly man” escort at a local domestic violence shelter, where he takes single moms grocery shopping and keeps an eye out for their unhinged spouses. He opens his door to his neighbors, a family whose son, Tom, becomes a kind of son to Gil himself, confiding in him about schoolyard bullies and skateboarding adventures. He is without pretense, more comfortable eating in diners on his trek to Arizona than in the swanky hotels of New York. He helps others because he feels guilty about his wealth, but he also does it instinctively, like the mother hawk he watches from his window, caring for her young. Gil is the opposite of toxic masculinity—aware of his privilege, but also aware of how important it is for people to feel cared for, even if he struggles with being cared for himself.