A review by benplatt
A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

4.0

A Children's Bible is up-front about its allegorical nature. The title alone clues the reader into the fact that Millet isn't trying to present a work of literary fiction or realism, but rather a book that attempts to create a set of symbols that work together to say something about the current ecological crisis that we are all living through. What Millet doesn't reveal is how much this book is about the failures of allegory, at least ones that depend on traditional modes of storytelling and even traditional symbols (like the Bible), to capture the reality of climate crisis. The novel begins biblically with abstract descriptions of the lake these families are staying at and a cavalcade of names belonging to teens so precocious they are only bearable in the context of this allegory and that are impossible to keep track of until you're at least 75% of the way through the book. But the biblical allegory that Millet promised beings to fray at the seams almost as soon as the story begins; Biblical allusions and symbols are scattered throughout the text, but never in a clean-cut way and out of order with the Bible's own narrative progression. The Biblical frame never coheres into a fully fleshed out allegory, never points to some way through the crisis that is depicted in the novel. Instead, like the children of the book who are forced to make their own way without the guidance of their frustratingly impotent parents, the reader has to ask how much good our traditional stories and ways of thinking about the world can do in navigating the world to come. It's an interesting experiment that mostly works, even if this conclusion and the plot of the novel are less propulsive and compelling than one might hope for from a novel with such a potentially scathing premise.