The Great Dying: Happiness Comes on Day Five

Hawaii, like an aging model, is still gorgeous--just sometimes in a fragile, wasted way. My parents were here a long time ago; they came on their honeymoon, back in the Old World times. They bought a hotel-and-airfare package to Honolulu. They went scuba diving in the coral reefs and touched real rays and even one dolphin, they said. Of course that's not an option anymore, but you can snorkel all you like in fiberglass reefs stocked with colorful farmed parrotfish and now and then a robot shark. Lydia Millet is an American novelist and conservationist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as a Guggenheim fellow. Her newest novel for young readers, The Bodies of the Ancients, comes out in January.