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I’m going to talk about a book. Seems pointless, I realize.
I’ve always treasured that fiction can afford the reader an escape. That’s why I picked up A Children’s Bible, the new novel by Lydia Millet—my own desire to slip out of a reality in which I’m juggling childcare and work and the larger uncertainty of this period of quarantine. (Well that, and, if I’m honest: I thought the jacket was beautiful.)
Millet’s novel is about a group of college friends on holiday together. “The great house had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months,” she writes. The adults are incidental: This is a story about their children, a collective of teens and little ones, let loose in the wild while their parents drink and screw and unwind.
Soon, a storm blows in, and it’s more than a mere interruption of this summer idyll. What ensues looks a lot like apocalypse. At first, the kids are glued to their phones. “Riots, they said. Looting. States of emergency. The president had promised some money.” Beyond stocking up the bar and fretting about groceries, the adults don’t do much. (Goes without saying, maybe, but Millet is eerily prescient.) When rains breach the rooms, the dads attempt to patch the windows. The children—a wizened and not-exactly-childlike cohort—depart. They find refuge at a nearby farmhouse and build something like a commune.
There, technology is mostly forgotten. Survival is more important. The television, the computer, the phone—the screen—is but illusion.
We had the corners of buildings and the slope of the hills, the line of the treetops. The more time passed, the more any flat image began to seem odd and less than real. Uncanny delicate surfaces. Had we always had them?
A Children’s Bible is a dark fable about climate change, not exactly an escapist experience. But it is a total one, a book that’s easy to enter fully (and not quite as easy to exit; you might have bad dreams). There are moments of real fright, all the more effective when the reader remembers how uncertain our climate future is. Millet’s writing is spare but textured. There’s genuine feeling here, and humor, too.
One of the more effective gags in the book is that the children—a kind of chorus, though there’s a primary narrator—do not know which adults are whose parents. They wish it that way, denying kinship to these useless dads and hapless moms as Peter did to Christ. It’s an indictment of every adult in the world, on behalf of the kids who will inherit the planet we broke. I wouldn’t want to know us, either.
I loved the imagination of this book, the way it gracefully—as the title implies—tackles the divine. There’s a logic in how the story unfolds, though summary would make it sound deranged (and spoil the pleasures of Millet’s unpredictable plot). There are readers who will not have the stomach for such a novel in this dire moment; there are, though, those who will relish how the text seems to comprehend the tumult of the real world, and distills that into fiction. I found it a brutal read but appreciated its unexpected optimism. When you think about time not as a measure of man’s life but of geology, everything looks different. “The clouds the moon,” the book concludes. “The dirt the rocks the water and the wind. We call that hope, you see.” It’s not much, but I’ll take it. |
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While I consider it essential, I acknowledge that the novel can seem frivolous in a moment when citizens are taking to the streets, righteously angry about the epidemic of police violence against black Americans—never mind the associated indifference of the state to its people during the pandemic and the collapse of the labor force.
It is hard to simply keep abreast of the news, let alone read anything that helps contextualize or illuminate what is unfolding. But I’ve been trying. Here’s what I’d recommend.
Wesley Morris is such a thoughtful and insightful writer; he looked at the videos I’ve been avoiding watching and saw them for what they are: “The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones.”
The artist Jammie Holmes created banners emblazoned with George Floyd’s final words, then sent them into the sky. It’s simple but elegant idea, less provocation than sanctification.
I liked this conversation between Rebecca Traister and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. “A lot of negative language gets used against black people, describing what whites often believe is true about us: that language includes ‘lazy,’ ‘criminal,’ and ‘rioting.’ It’s all negative language used far too often in a description of black people by folks who fundamentally don’t see black people the same way they see whites and others.”
I enjoyed this examination of the purpose of the various syllabi that pop up all over the internet, aiming to turn the news into teachable moments. |
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| In my last newsletter, I enthused about Gary Indiana—then a few days later, he published this big review of Blake Gopnik’s new biography of Andy Warhol, which I found characteristically stylish and smart. |
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| Read this long profile of Maxine Hong Kingston; then, if you have not already, do yourself a favor and read her work. |
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| Text Message is a twice-monthly column in newsletter form. Subscribe. Tell your friends. Drop me a line, at ralam@tnr.com. Stay healthy; stay home!
—Rumaan Alam, Contributing Editor |
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