Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible
Continuing my read-along with Anthony Jeselnik’s book club, the June selection was A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet. I had a vague awareness of this author but had never picked up her work until now.
I’m going to put myself in the definite critical minority here (this book was a National Book Award finalist, after all) and say I didn’t much care for the piece. My reaction is a bit the same as it was to The Dept of Speculation, but with that novel there was a lot to appreciate even if I didn’t quite like the story. Here I found myself not even appreciating all that much as I endured what mostly felt like a tedious experience—until the end sequence. More on that in a moment.
Maybe I came to the book while I was in a bad mood. There’s any number of elements in the story that should be right up my alley: a sense of surrealism and satirical dark comedy, apocalyptic foreboding, religious symbolism. It could be that, in general, I dislike stories that can’t really work unless they’re approached strictly as an allegory or fable. I reacted to this novel in much the same way I did Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which also felt like it was going out of its way to be allegorical. This narrative approach must not resonate with me. (I’m pretty sour on both Animal Farm or The Childhood of Jesus, now that I think about it, and those are relentless allegories).
On the more nuts and bolts level, I found myself getting annoyed with the apparent heavy-handedness of the story. The parents are drawn as ridiculous hedonists unable to summon more than a few fleeting moments of responsibility. Are there parents like this? Sure. Is it likely for a gathering of 20+ adults to be like this in a sustained fashion? No way. Millet then makes their ineptitude and shallowness emblematic of society’s refusal to confront climate change—which is too simplistic even for an allegory. The impact of climate change is also rendered as immediately world-altering and society-collapsing for the sake of the allegory, which I struggled to get past. Add in a variety of forced Biblical parallels—Eden, Noah’s Ark, bondage in Egypt, Philistines—and I just found the reading experience increasingly tedious. It also didn’t help that most of the characters remain just names to me and seldom felt like they had much substance. Even now I can’t recall but a few of them.
Then we get the last 50 pages or so. The story worked much better for me here, as we have an intrusion by thuggish stereotypes straight out of any apocalyptic novel (led by someone referred to as “the governor,” which sure comes across as a direct allusion to that other piece of holy scripture, The Walking Dead) and then apparent divine intervention. The final extended sequence of the kids trying to hold a community together while the parents wither out of sight in a sad, perverse version of the Rapture provides the novel with such a strong ending it was almost enough to change my opinion. If a book can be viewed as a gymnastic routine, this is one that had a lot of falls and awkward moments along the way but nevertheless stuck a landing.
In many ways, the book recalls Arcade Fire’s debut album, Funeral, which remains one of my favorite works of art. The sense of children leaving their parents and striking out on their own; the feeling of parental authority fading from the world; the call for children to wake up and the depiction of them as “a million little gods causing rain storms” all felt very redolent in the book’s stronger moments. And I believe those moments will stay with me for a long while, even though I doubt I’ll ever pick up this book again.
