![]() ![]() A group of families convenes for the summer in a manse built by robber barons. Millet wanted to honor “the anger of people who don’t yet run the world as they begin to bear witness to the effects of our negligence.” The book, narrated by Evie-think Greta Thunberg by way of “South Park”-melds an activist’s outrage with a teen-ager’s weapons-grade contempt for adults. “A Children’s Bible,” which was short-listed for the National Book Award, was forged in wrath. Once my molecules had dispersed, I would be here forever. That, in a turn of a second, no matter what, we can act on an impulse.” Evie, a character lounging Zen-like on the beach, might beg to differ: “If you could be nothing,” she muses, “you could also be everything. Does it come from unfettering or relinquishing the ego? One character defines liberty as doing whatever you want, speaking of “that dream we all have. (The apocalypse, is the answer.) Throughout, there’s a restless probing of the nature of freedom. ![]() ![]() “A Children’s Bible” asks what today’s parents are leaving their offspring. In “Magnificence,” from 2012, a widow inherits a grand run-down house, its rooms crammed with dusty animal specimens. (Mercifully, some of them are also on the self-effacing side: the protagonist of “Ghost Lights,” from 2011, reflects that “if he allowed for the margin of error created by social niceties, he would have to guess he was average-looking.”) For Millet, scant justice is to be found in existing distributions of beauty, wealth, and power, a situation that only inflames the question of what to do with one’s ill-gotten gains. Her adult characters tend to be comfortable, and on the attractive side. She applies specific pressure to the problem of inheritance, and to the entwinement of privilege with responsibility. Millet’s philosophical fixations include whether things are earned or simply given, as grace. She’s a conservationist: her prose attends to “maples from Norway, mulberries from Asia, Siberian elm.” A reader will be smuggled facts about coral reefs, or learn the word “gymnosperm.” “Five hundred thirty million years ago,” one character says, “we find the first known footprints on dry land.” (“Let’s get divorced! said couples everywhere, excited.”) Unlike Williams, though, Millet never lets surrealism darken into delirium, and her misanthropy feels circumstantial, not cosmic. Also like Williams, she has a raunchy, fanged wit, often aimed at human self-delusion. Like Joy Williams, Millet uses fiction to elegize the collapsing biosphere. But what the scriptural correspondences mean-if they mean anything-never resolves. “A Children’s Bible” (2020), for instance, subjects a group of spoiled vacationers to ordeals reminiscent of those in the Old and New Testaments. ![]() Her method is to churn up themes, generating a kind of mental weather, as if a book were less a trajectory than an atmosphere: something happens, and then something else happens the cloudy design melts and shifts. Millet, eschewing the arc of the private individual, also forgoes the novel’s traditional shape, in which tensions build to a climax. If both fiction and people are blinkered, self-stunned, perhaps they require a similar intervention. Increasingly, fiction studies the “arc of the private individual,” Millet told another interviewer: “The personal struggles of a self and the ultimate triumph of that self over the obstacles in its path.” But Millet is energized, instead, by how feelings are “intermeshed with abstract thought,” with “our place in the wider landscape.” Why, her work demands, are we afraid to die? What are the ethics of wanting what we want? Millet, who now lives near Tucson, has written more than a dozen books of fiction, one of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but she works at the Center for Biological Diversity and holds a master’s in environmental policy. The novelist Lydia Millet once told an interviewer that when she first moved to New York, in 1996, she was “amazed” by how people were “relentlessly interested in exclusively the human self.” This myopia-a sort of “inarticulate, ambient smugness about everything”-wasn’t her creed. ![]()
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