Lydia Millet, with a masters degree in environmental policy, staff writer for non-profit Center for Biological Diversity since 1999, in Atavists: Stories, paint a fast-moving, heart breaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm. Atavists follows a group of families, couples and loners in their collisions, confessions and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big box stores, gastropubs, college campuses and medieval role-playing festivals.

The various “-ists” who people these linked stories- from futurists to insurrectionists  to cosmetologists – include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account, a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn, a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life, a couple who surveil the neighbours after finding obscene notes in their mailbox, a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism, and a suburban ex-marathoner father obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his garden.

Fourteen linked stories, liberals living in LA, highlight characters identified as “-ists”  an artist, fetishist, mixologist, et cetera. La Elizabeth Strout – when the characters’ worlds intersect and the reader realises how they are connected.

The stories primarily concern two families, Buzz, an ex- marathoner at loose ends for a new hobby, his wife Amy and their children Liza and Nick, and Helen, a widow who paints celebrity portraits and her daughters Shelley and Mia. Mia, Liz’s best friend since kinder garden”, ends up dating Nick, who graduated with honours from Stanford, but works at a big box store and then a gay bar while pretending to write a screenplay.

Liza marries her boyfriend Luis, a dreamer, as a high-school senior so he can get citizenship.

Nick is frustrated by complacency about climate and mass extinction. Mia is searching for her bliss on a gap year, volunteers at a retirement home, breaking rules to help the residents maintain their dignity. Shelly, an agent’s assistant, is the most mercenary of the bunch.

“What if major talent agencies like yours tried to transform the collective?” Helen asks Shelley. “The collective doesn’t have an agent, Mom”, she replies back.

One of Amy’s friends, Trudy, a professor, obsesses about an old friend’s performative posting on social media, a bodybuilder uses dating apps to demean women, a gay couple in the neighbourhood targeted with homophobic letters hope the perpetrators aren’t of colour, a cosmetologist mourns her nine-year-old cousin who died of Covid. Trudy accuses a colleague of plagiarism for not citing a quote in a paper, he tries to retaliate by combing through her social for racism, finding only a post deemed worthy of a content warning. Nick despairs about his screenplay : The sound of fiddling while Rome burned” by reflecting the absurdities of how we live now.

Atavists by Lydia Millet, WW Norton £19.99/$27.99, 240 pages.