How the dead dream - Lydia Millet

An only child in a typical middle-American family, T is unusual only in his interest in, and talent for, making money. As his peers go through teen crises, T accumulates, and turns himself into a successful businessman.

But T's material life begins to change after he adopts a dog, meets a girl, and takes his mother in after she splits up with his father. But when events conspire to leave T isolated again he starts to lose faith in people and civilisation and turns to nature instead, developing a strange and powerful obsession with endangered animals...