A Children's Bible
By Lydia Millet
Another recommendation from the Anthony Jeselnik book club.
It starts off dreamily: "Once we lived in a summer country." The "we" here is a group of several families vacationing in a mansion built by a robber baron by the sea. The kids, including the narrator, Evie, have free run of the place and are turning more and more feral by the moment. But soon cracks appear in the Edenic vision.
The kids aren't given freedom -- they're neglected. The parents, who never have names, engage in a pattern of "hair of the dog", "drink and conversation", dinner, and then boozing for real. They disgust the kids, most of whom seem to be in their late teens with the exception of Evie's brother, Jack and a friend (whose name I forget but who only speaks through signs). Then more cracks. The troupe of kids decide to camp out on the beach for the night. There, they meet the scions of an Uber wealthy family sailing their yacht up the coast. They smoke weed and party -- but also talk about survival compounds. The book feels contemporary, but it's either a few decades in the future or a bit of an alternate reality. Are there "preppers" out there? Sure. But they are fringe elements at the moment.
And then the thing falls apart. A storm hits. Jack and his companion, who have recently been given "A Children's Bible" take on the role of modern-day Noah's and gather any and all animals they can. They store them in a tree house, where they ride out the storm. The parents don't notice. Instead, they take Ecstasy and have an orgy. The teens clamor to the tree house. The storm is bad; it ruins the house and, it seems, the surrounding countryside.
One day, a man named Burl appears. He's been paddling for days, and is glad to find respite. When the waters recede, he joins the teens in an effort to escape to one of the family's Rye, NY, compound. They don't make it, instead holing up on a different compound somewhere in Pennsylvania. For a moment, it seems like they have found another, truer Eden, one bereft of their bothersome parents. But cracks appear again, this time in the form of an armed, roving gang drunk with power and motivated to horde as much food as they can. Things are, after all, bad out there.
In the end, the kids are fine. The parents, though, they somehow disappear into the ether.
It is, it seems, a metaphor for the impending climate crisis. The older generation, which may or may not include me, parties on as the earth falls apart, giving into their hedonistic tendencies while leaving the inevitable destruction to their kids.
I really liked this book. The description above sounds intense, but there were moments of levity and humor. It was, in a way, absurdist. One of the blurbs on the back compared Millet to Vonnegut, and I think it's an apt comparison. I'd never heard of her, and I've decided to dig deeper and check out some of her other novels.
