"A Children's Bible" by Lydia Millet

 

Travel to the not-too-distant future and witness the calamities befall a group of families in Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. The families - parents and children - have assembled at a rented coastal mansion for Millet’s frightening parable in which children are forced to supplant their parents in an apparent dress rehearsal for the End Times. She includes natural disasters which make modern-day services impossible; lawless behavior by gangs of armed men; the righteous natural world pushing back against the ruination of the planet in seeming outrage.
 

Millet includes a touch of the supernatural when the owner of the farm to which the children eventually escape and are holed up: a young boy has fallen into a pit and suffered what might be a compound fracture. The farm’s owner, a no-nonsense woman accompanied in her helicopter by a SWAT team, apparently cures the boy and he’s no worse for the wear. This perhaps lays the groundwork for the episode a little later in the narrative where all the parents simply disappear, apparently having lost their will to live because the children are so self-sufficient.

This book takes up serious issues: the exhausted planet, the broken culture, the teetering infrastructure. Whether it does these issues justice, and whether it’s possible to do all these issues justice in so short a work, is fully open to question. The hurricane sequence is the best in the book. The noise, the dark, the violence of nature, the fragility of man-made structures - all these are so vivid and immediate that I cringed for everyone’s safety. The children have surprising moments of worldly wisdom among all the complaining and desultory disrespect.

And here is the center of the narrative. The younger generation, teens mostly, going into junior and senior year of high school (plus a few younger siblings), energetically revile the assembled parents. It’s clear from the start that the teens are and will be on their own, and to their credit this holds true, and they do a creditable job … except for the key event of their rescue at the farm. The parents play a central role in that, and it’s very difficult for me to accept the way they simply wander off forever.

Readers interested in Millet, and you very well should be, please take up Millet’s 2016 novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven.