Lydia Millet's fiction mixes the fantastic with sharp humor, philosophical digression, and an aching concern for the future of humanity — and all other species. Her latest book, How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint, 2007), follows T., a land developer and natural-born capitalist, who discovers his humanity in the company of nearly extinct animals. Millet spoke to Boldtype's Rob Tocalino about the messianic, the maternal, and what animals can teach us.

Boldtype: You've said in a previous interview that all your favorite characters have "bold and uproarious flaws." What is T.'s major flaw — and does it have something to do with his foreshortened first name?

Lydia Millet: I like my characters to exhibit seemingly extreme distortions of vision: myopia, hyperopia, most any -opia you can think of. I have a fondness for the purblind and the tunnel-visioned. T. isn't the most obviously handicapped horse in the stable, but certainly he suffers from tunnel vision, and maybe, as you guessed, a certain lack of healthy self-doubt.

BT: You seem to have a fascination with the messianic: Dean Decetes in Everyone's Pretty, Robert J. Oppenheimer in Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and now, even if only in his own mind, T. in How the Dead Dream. Do you think we need saving, or do we just need to believe we can be saved?

LM: Of course we need saving. Our problem is thinking the saving's not our own job; that someone else is going to do it for us. Call it the messiah, or just call it the dream date — we're a race of princesses pining for the prince that never comes. Hopeful children forever.

BT: The maternal is particularly strong in Dream. To what degree does being a mother influence your outlook on our ability to save ourselves? And where do you draw the line on princess talk around the house?

LM: It's true that having my daughter made me more desperate for all of us; desperate for a future, maybe. It's harder to be removed and cynical, I think, once you value other lives more than your own. Princess talk: I wish I had the power to ban it. I get so sick of royalty. But of course that would only deepen the adoration. As I write this, my daughter Nola, who's almost four, is wearing a pink cone on her head with buttons I sewed on for jewels. What are you gonna do?

BT: T. develops a fascination with animals on the brink of extinction, yet realizes near the end of the book that "they can never be known in every detail and they never should be." Are the mysteries of existence what make living worthwhile?

LM: Not knowing is crucial. Not knowing, but wanting to know.

BT: Do you have animals? Were you able to spend solitary time with rare animals while researching the book?

LM: I have a pug dog and some tropical fish. And I did visit rare animals for the book, but not alone. Never alone. You can't be close to captive animals alone, really, short of doing what T. does in the book and violating the compact. Maybe there's an occasional fleeting moment at a zoo where you stand outside an exhibit and stare in and no one passes by you — maybe there's that. An arrested kind of moment in which you think for a second that it's just the animal and you. But you feel the artificiality of that moment, the frozen tension of it.

BT: Dream is reportedly the first book of a trilogy. What's next?

LM: The second book, called Ghost Lights, takes up where Dream leaves off, a few weeks later in the narrative chronology. It follows a minor character from the first book, a middle-aged IRS agent named Hal, who goes looking for T. down in the tropics after T. disappears.

BT: There's a heavy vein of tragedy in Dream, yet the book doesn't leave one feeling despondent. Am I heartless if I felt almost hopeful at the end?

LM: So much of what's foretold now by scientists, in terms of, say, extinction and climate change, comes at us like a wall of despair. We stand there facing the wall with nothing to do but throw up our hands. I wanted the trajectory of this character's story, T.'s story, to evoke a less despairing response that has to do with the richness and excitement of animal life — the wild, imaginative heritage that animals have given to culture and art and religion; the recognition that the future of human civilization is deeply entwined with the future of species that are swiftly vanishing.

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