A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

Before the storm we'd caught sight of the parents' screens sometimes, snagged their devices when we needed a quick fix. Gotten flashes of TV through a doorway. But these days we mostly had what was in front of us, the cottage and the barn and long grass in the fields. Long and short, tussocks and bare patches. Topography. We had the wood of the walls and fences, the metal of the parked cars with their near-empty gas tanks.

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?

We'd had so many pictures. Pictures just everywhere, every hour, minute, or second.

But now they were foreign. Now we saw everything in three dimensions.

A group of teens and near-teens have gathered with their parents at a beach house on Long Island. They exist aloof from their parents, who embarrass them with their drinking and drug use, their sexual neediness and general carelessness. They are so detached from them that the teens play a game: who will be the last of them to have their parents "identified" by the others, and thus claimed by them? (How, I wonder, do you end up with a group of adult friends whose teenage kids don't know whose parents are whose?) Meanwhile, a storm is coming, a monster created by climate change that promises to unleash an apocalypse on the country. The teens, fed up with their parents' cluelessness, escape to safety on their own, fleeing to an abandoned farmhouse in Westchester County.

There's a powerful dynamic at the heart of A Children's Bible: the affective gap between generations, created by climate change. The increasing precarity of the world has sundered the trust that children ought to have in their parents, and while it's nothing new for each generation to distrust their elders, a hippie-like confidence in the future is no longer possible. Millet's choice to make the teens sober cynics and the parents hedonists--an inversion of our usual expectations for stories about generational clashes--captures something true and sad about the world in the climate change era. The teens, and the book, are a little too smug about this difference sometimes, but it works.

I'm sorry to say I didn't like almost every other thing in this book. I didn't buy the voice of the protagonist Evie or her friends, which often felt false to me, like an old person trying to talk like a young one. ("True dat.") I didn't like that the book became a kind of thriller movie, when a roving militia kidnaps the teens and the helpful adults who have gathered at the farm in search of food, and I didn't understand the bizarre deus ex machina that resolves the siege. And I especially didn't like the character of Evie's little brother Jack, who is inspired by his Children's Bible--hence the title of the book--to save two of each animal, Noah-like, and who becomes convinced that he has "cracked the code" of the Bible: God is Nature and Jesus is science. If we only put our trust in science/Jesus, we will be saved, Jack insists. Now, he's nine, but it's clear we're supposed to see him as one of those babes out of whose mouths truth emerges. I don't think "science is Jesus" is an idea that reflects well on science or Jesus.

We're going to have to figure out what the new world we have created demands of us, artistically. (Art, Evie concludes, is the "holy spirit" in the Trinity that includes Nature and Science. Blech.) We're going to stumble into that new world, and stumble into the new art. A Children's Bible offers one very good, very chilling contribution: a powerful symbolic representation of the way we have betrayed our future and our children, unable to pull ourselves away from the party.