Dinosaurs

After a devastating breakup, a wealthy man named Gil leaves New York City for Phoenix, Arizona. Rather than fly, he walks from his loft in Manhattan's Flatiron District, plotting a route south through Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas before turning west through New Mexico. The journey takes nearly five months. He has sold his apartment and bought a house in Phoenix sight unseen, an older two-story place he thinks of as "the castle."

Gil's wealth comes from his grandfather's oil and gas fortune. His parents died in a car crash when he was small, and a severe grandmother raised him in Boston until she too died when he was about 10. Rotating guardians saw him through to adulthood. At 18, trustees revealed his inheritance. He once resolved to give it all away but was talked out of it by his money manager, Hadley, and then by a woman named Lane, who told him he would be an idiot to surrender his wealth. He and Lane stayed together for roughly 15 years.

Shortly after Gil settles in, a family of four moves into the glass-walled house next door. The specialty tinting on the glass has faded, leaving the open-plan interior fully visible. Ardis, an elegant blond psychotherapist, brings Gil a peach pie and tells him to look where he wants. Her husband, Ted, a Persian-American who works in infrastructure funding, bonds with Gil over bourbon. Their children are Clem, a nearly 15-year-old who misses her old friends in Colorado, and Tom, a lonely 10-year-old. Ardis asks Gil to play ball with Tom, and over the summer Gil becomes the boy's half babysitter, half friend. He also begins volunteering at a domestic-violence shelter as part of a pilot program for male volunteers.

Gil's only close friends are Vic, a kindly Catholic public-school teacher, and Van Alsten, a brash, foul-mouthed former Navy officer from old money whose wife, Connie, pushed him to volunteer. Gil met both over a decade earlier at a refugee center in New York, and the three became inseparable.

Flashbacks reveal Gil's history with Lane. She was competitive, brilliant, and cutting, never apologizing after cruel words. She broke up with him twice. The first time, he fled to a farming project in the Ecuadorian rainforest; months later she asked him back. The second time, after 15 years together, she moved out while he was at work, leaving only a note: "I met someone." She blocked his number and never spoke to him again. The someone was a famous cyclist she had likely met through her job as a senior editor at a magazine focused on extreme sports and outdoor activities.

When Tom starts school, his posture changes. He drags his feet and retreats to his bedroom. At a housewarming party, Tom confesses to Gil that a boy named Brad has been jabbing straightened paper clips into the back of his neck on the school bus. Tom has not told his parents because Gil once casually said that tattling was "beneath his dignity," a remark Gil now deeply regrets. Gil confronts Brad directly, then tells Ardis, who resolves to handle the situation by speaking to Brad's mother.

Van Alsten donates a kidney to Connie, who needs a transplant. The surgery succeeds for Connie, but Van Alsten's remaining kidney stops working and other organs follow. He falls into a medically induced coma from which he will not emerge. Gil flies to New York and sits beside his friend's bed.

On impulse, Gil calls Lane and they meet at a restaurant. Lane admits she "dealt with it poorly." Gil asks whether she already knew he had money when they first met. She concedes she did. He asks when she truly loved him. She struggles, then admits it may have been only the first six months. Gil feels the last atoms of attachment fall away. When the hospital takes Van Alsten off life support, Gil is in the room. Van Alsten wears his favorite Yale T-shirt; Vic's rosary beads are draped over his fingers.

Back in Phoenix, Ardis's friend Sarah, a surgeon whom Ardis introduced to Gil at an aquarium outing, begins texting him. Gil, freer of Lane now, agrees to meet. Over drinks, he reveals he walked from New York to Phoenix, explaining that he wanted the change to cost him something, since having money means never feeling the cost of anything. On New Year's Eve, he and Sarah sleep together: "It felt like being alive. Only more."

Through his lawyer, a man named Dag contacts Gil. Dag drove the car that killed Gil's parents while intoxicated decades earlier. He is old, sick with lupus, and living in a men's home in Baltimore. He asks Gil for money. Gil is torn but arranges a weekly stipend in exchange for Dag never contacting him again. Later, Dag describes the accident in an email: He swerved to avoid a cat, his truck struck a NO PARKING sign, and the sign hit Gil's parents on the sidewalk. Gil had always imagined a simple collision. Now the image haunts him.

Gil discovers birds being shot in the wash, the dry riverbed behind his property, including a protected Harris's hawk he has been watching. He patrols at night with night-vision goggles but cannot find the shooter. The shelter suspends its male volunteer program, and Gil loses that outlet. He and Sarah begin discussing adoption.

On Halloween, Brad trick-or-treats at Gil's door with his father Gary behind him. Brad whispers desperately, asking Gil not to reveal what happened on the bus. Gil notices Brad flinching around Gary and follows them into the dark, whispering to Brad that he can come to Gil if he ever needs help. Gil and Sarah later travel to New York for Van Alsten's memorial, which doubles as the dedication of a basketball court Connie has built in Harlem.

Ted confides in Gil that Ardis had an affair with a counselor she met at a conference. She has ended it. Ted, who himself had an affair early in their marriage, must now practice the same forgiveness Ardis once showed him. On election night, walking through the wash to join a gathering at the glass house, Gil overhears Ardis confessing to Sarah that she has feelings for Gil, feelings the affair was meant to help her forget. Sarah argues forcefully that telling anyone would be a "torpedo" aimed at the family. Ardis yields.

Trying to retreat undetected, Gil backs into a jumping cholla cactus, and dozens of barbed spines lodge in his body. Stumbling through the wash in pain, he nearly collides with Gary, who is carrying a gun and night-vision gear. Gil demands Gary stop shooting the birds and takes a calculated risk, threatening to report what Gary does to his son. Gary shrinks away. Gil staggers to the glass house, where Sarah extracts the spines and Ted administers painkillers.

The novel closes with Gil dozing on the couch, bandaged and surrounded by the family. He sees a shadow version of himself inside the castle, alone, watching this well-lit house from emptiness, as he once did. But now he is inside, among them. He reflects that being alone is a closed loop and that you must untie the knot and let everything in. Separateness, he thinks, was always the illusion. His final thought, drifting toward sleep: "You had no beginning. And you would never end."