My scattershot Covid-19 reading had just led me to an
opinion piece in The New Republic
about the rich having run off to escape the virus in complexes far away
from cities, and how they’ll stay gated and protected afterwards, when my newly-spawned
ebook reading led me to A Children’s
Bible, by Lydia Millet, where some rich kids from a yacht tell some
not-so-rich kids on a beach about their parents’ complexes off in Oregon and
Washington state, where they’ll be safe during the chaos of the end of the
world.
There’s no virus (yet) in this novel, but there’s extreme
weather, pollution, and general toxicity. The rich kids feel insulated from it
all, partly by their wealth, yes, but also by their seize-the-day, devil-may-care
attitude: “…the yacht kids didn’t care about skin cancer. If they lived long
enough to get a bunch of melanomas, they figured, they’d bust out the champagne.”
But the book is not about them. It’s a about a group of
children and teens who are sharing a summer vacation house with all their parents.
I was reading it when we had days and days of rain, while, in the book, parents
and children are preparing for a major storm, of near Noah’s-Ark-like proportions.
Indeed, that parallel is intentional. A sweet boy, Jack, has been given a
children’s version of the bible and, having been raised in a climate of
atheism, is reading those stories for the first time…but making viable
connections to the world he is living in. His sister, the narrator, is Evie, like
Eve of the Garden of Eden. Another sweet boy, Shel, who is deaf, handcuffs himself
to a treehouse. I had just read a poem in a Zoom event about a woman who lives
in a redwood tree for two years to save it from loggers. In this novel, the
children try to save the animals, Noah-style, from flooding from the storm.
In the aftermath, certain events align readily with my
Covid-19 filter: “The parents are getting sick….Fever and chills. Headaches.”
Then the parents text the children to say not to come back right now, it might
be contagious. These teens are disgruntled with the parents, who are
always drunk and who have abandoned the world, ruining it. But here, the
narrator begins to awaken to the possibility of their love: “I marveled: the
parents, caught in a selfless gesture. I almost wanted to thank them.”
Later she remembers not picking up after herself, leaving
snack bags in the family car. “It hadn’t occurred to me to pick it up. I always
waited for my parents to take care of it. Once we had let them do everything
for us—assumed they would. Then came the day we wouldn’t let them.”
It reminds of a song by The Weepies, “Can’t Go Back Now.”
Yesterday
when you were young
Everything
you needed done was done for you
Now you do
it on your own
But you find
you’re all alone
What can you
do?
But while The Weepies move past their nostalgia for
helplessness, and “Walk on, walk on, walk on / ‘Cause you can’t go back now,”
the narrator of A Children’s Bible
resists shared responsibility for slick blame and continues, “Still later we
found out that they hadn’t done everything at all. They’d left out the
important part. And it was known as: the future.”
A Children’s Bible
carries some of the righteous rage of Greta Thunberg. Yes, the children can be
angry with their mostly self-absorbed parents. I understand young people’s
anger and sorrow about the world they will inherit from previous generations
that were wrapped up in materialism and themselves, allowing global warming to
continue, ignoring climate change and activism on behalf of the planet. But not
all parents or older people of today ignore climate issues. Many are recyclers
who don’t put poisons on their lawns and do grow native plants, etc. And, in
the current coronavirus crisis, it is sometimes young people who are selfishly
ignoring precautions, thinking themselves invincible, as young people often do,
and not wearing masks to protect others, congregating in houses, parks,
beaches, parking lots, apartments for beer parties, just like they did before,
until some of them get sick, and it sinks in.
Avoiding responsibility and playing the blame game are
unlikely to fix anything or lead to lasting change. But suffering may well
teach Evie what she needs to know to be able to “walk on, walk on, walk on….”
And I can easily forgive her her petulance, thanks to her moments of insight: “Why are we always complaining? We
get to be alive.”
Here’s the New York Times review of A Children’s Bible.
And here’s another review of mine, in Escape Into Life, of Mothershell, byAndrea Potos, also read through a Covid-19 filter. And here's the charming, childlike, official music video for "Can't Go Back Now" on YouTube.
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