A Children’s Bible, Leave the World Behind, and inter-generational responsibility

Just by total coincidence, the last two novels I read have been about the end of society. Or maybe it’s not so remarkable a coincidence, given that this particular eventuality has loomed larger in most of our minds lately. The timing seems serendipitous to us, the readers, but both of these books were composed pre-pandemic, of course. So their writers benefited from a synchronicity of world events and publication dates. That, or there are no real coincidences.

In Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, the societal collapse takes the form of environmental catastrophe, the massive storm near the beginning setting into motion a chain of events in which modern human systems break down, and older, tribal survival modes return. Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind is more of a literary thriller which earns its suspense by mostly withholding the exact nature of the disaster, but it appears to be at the same level of epoch-ending chaos. In both stories, families are holed up in rented vacation homes as the apocalypse descends around them. (I swear I did not choose these together on purpose!)

A Children’s Bible gave me everything I could hope for in a novel. Smart, pithy sentences (the book is narrated by a very world-wise teenager named Eve), well-paced action, interesting characters with fun dialogue, all the rest. But the book reaches deeper even beyond these considerable strengths to form a rich, resonant root system of allegory and fable.

There’s Eve’s name, of course, and her younger brother Jack, who reads a children’s version of the Bible obsessively as the world around him falls apart. Jack’s ardent dedication to saving animals from the human-created environmental disaster takes its place in the larger allegory between climate change and the story of the flood. But Millet is too smart to simply bang us over the head with this parallel. Not only is the parallel pointed out already by the characters in the book, signifying that Millet considers it not so precious that it must be kept from the reader, but the story of A Children’s Bible goes on much longer than Noah’s, into other Bible stories (there are amusing allusions to Cain and Abel and the burning bush), and even beyond them. Throughout, there is enough room between the two worlds of story that they can both share the allegorical ground, and allow the reader to fill in the rest of the space themselves.

The real dilemma of A Children’s Bible is that there is no divine presence or wise figure to lead the children through disaster. There’s only a group of parents who do little more than down cocktails and offer vague, grossly inadequate solutions to the mounting problems. It’s clear pretty much from the beginning that the children are essentially on their own. They even have a game of keeping it secret whose parents are whose, denying their connection to them.

The generational conflict is the fulcrum of the story; the enemy is not so much the destruction of Earth, but the parents’ inability to do anything. Because who caused the destruction in the first place? The same people who now sit in the middle of the mess they wrought, scheduling their days around drinking times, worried the catastrophe means they might run out of Bulleit bourbon.

Millet’s use of the collective first-person and collective group identity in general is extremely skillful. Each group is an archetype: the Old and the New. The division underpins the allegorical dimension of the novel; individuals are defined largely by their group, yet maintain distinct personalities.

Leave the World Behind doesn’t emphasize generational conflict as much, but it’s certainly present. There are only two sets of parents holed up in a vacation house during the apocalypse, instead of a large group, but these parents could easily fit in with the parents in A Children’s Bible. They drink a lot (never have two books given me such an awareness of the widespread use of alcohol as a marker of emotional immaturity), and generally don’t seem to know very much.

In Leave the World Behind, the point seems to be that, if and when disaster strikes, the vast majority of us (or at least adults) will have no idea what to do. Unnerved by news of a widespread power outage, the father in the story drives from his secluded vacation spot in the middle of nowhere to find some answers, and immediately gets lost. Like, immediately. His character is so unsympathetic that I almost got annoyed; it seemed too easy to dismiss him. The wife, similarly, is narcissistic and insecure, and seems incapable of anything except the most basic functions of parenting (or maybe not, if the story runs its course). Alam’s story seems to imply that the children might turn out the same way, but there is a possibility that they will avoid this fate (and that’s all I’ll say, to avoid spoiling anything).

In A Children’s Bible, the parents are dismissed – by the stand-in for the reader, Eve, and the rest of the young people. Their contempt for their parents is palpable on nearly every page. In one conversation they explicitly ask the parents: why didn’t you do anything? It’s the exact same thing Greta Thunberg angrily demands on the world stage. In the novel, the moment feels almost too on-the-nose, descending from the heights of symbolism into literal representation; it makes me wonder if other young people are asking their parents this question so directly, or whether they just don’t bother. The young people in A Children’s Bible alternate between dismissing the parents and feeling angry or disappointed in them.

I have spent a non-negligible amount of time considering these questions myself. What does the older generation owe the younger generation? What is reasonable to expect from our parents? By the end of A Children’s Bible, Eve ends up concluding the same thing I did: you cannot blame the parents for behaving in the ways they were adapted for. “They’d functioned passably in a limited domain. Specifically adapted to life in their own small niches,” says Eve. “When their habitats collapsed they had no familiar terrain. No map. No equipment. No tools.” This is the same picture of reality that I came to myself, though not nearly at such a young age as Eve. It reminded me of the song “Going Nowhere,” which was sung so memorably by Lena Zavaroni and written by Neil Sedaka, with the lyrics:

And they’re asked to hold the world together
Make it happen
Give it children
Who in turn are turning on to going nowhere
And all the strength they’d ever need to help them
Has been wasted
Remains hidden
In the confusion of going nowhere

The parents’ generation learned to thrive in a consumerist environment, and taught their children how to adapt to a middle-class existence based on the idea of wealth as worth (Millet’s characters fret about money at the most inappropriate, ridiculous times). This “nowhere” of the ideal materialistic life took all their energy to accomplish, and still it results mostly in confusion and need for escape.

But these days, I find it increasingly nonsensical to blame anyone, even a large group of people with so much of the political power, for our current predicament. Humans adapt to the circumstances we were raised in. The fact is that the current change in circumstances might be faster than what our species can adapt to. Is that anyone’s fault? It feels less stressful for me, anyway, to view it as something that is simply happening, like every other natural process.

The dangers and problems of thousands of generations were the same: get enough to eat, gather wealth to ensure survival, avoid disease and poverty, etc. Those were challenge enough for us for the vast majority of our history. In the last few decades, the demands of the environment have shifted to require us to think globally, as a species, not as tribes. We find ourselves having to strategize on the macro level, having to understand massive, inter-connected chains of cause-and-effect, and having to adapt our behavior to these large, nearly incomprehensible systems. This means we have to share knowledge, think about indirect effects of our actions, and even consider impacts several places down the chain of cause-and-effect. How can we transition to this kind of thinking in the space of one generation? It’s a huge order. It’s not impossible, and certainly there were people in the previous generations who were ready for it, but apparently extremely unlikely for a species to adapt this quickly.

If the parents were able to defend themselves, they might argue that you can’t set down the rules of the game for a generation of people and then, after they’ve been following them for fifty or sixty years, suddenly say that they should have been doing this other thing the whole time. I’m not saying this is good, or bodes well for our species, but it just seems to be the fact staring us in the face. Ultimately, all the adults in A Children’s Bible fail to function in the new world left after environmental catastrophe. They learned to serve their function in the post-war consumer boom, and now that that world has fallen apart, there’s simply nothing for them to do, no way to develop themselves in this new world order.

All of this is wrapped up in A Children’s Bible as part of the story, organically you might say; there is no repetitive, critical preaching, as I felt there was in Leave the World Behind. It does seem fairly obvious to me, at this point, to show that most of us would be high and dry if all-out disaster befell us; haven’t we learned that well enough by the end of 2020? Certainly, it’s worth pointing out past failures to avoid repeating them, but dwelling on blame and anger begins a cycle of self-serving contempt that saps our energy.
If we can accept without judgment that humans adapt to certain systems and don’t do well when those systems break down, we can start to rethink those systems together. We see this beginning to happen at the end of A Children’s Bible, which moves on from its judgment of the previous generation to the problems at hand in the present, and the future.