Lydia Millet, _A Children's Bible_

 A CHILDREN'S BIBLE reminded me of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm (1994). In Moody's novel, set in the 1970s, some suburban parents get together in someone's house for drinking, drugging, and partner-swapping, leaving their high school age and younger kids to look after themselves. The natural disaster named in the title arrives in the night, downing power lines and  the parents' derelictions of duty especially salient.

In Millet's novel, some well-off parents rent a palatial home in the countryside for a long vacation of drinking, drugging, and partner-swapping, leaving their high school age and younger kids to look after themselves. A hurricane arrives, disrupting power supplies and communication systems, creating circumstances (including a fatality) that make the parents' dereliction of duties especially salient.

I thought Millet's novel was actually more interesting, though, for a few reasons. One, we get the edgily witty and consistently on-point voice of first person narrator Eve.  Two, the kids actually get organized and improvise a functioning collective, leaving the parents to their own hedonist devices. Three, there are some well-paced, thriller-adjacent episodes (e.g., the arrival of a trio of armed marauders) that left me with the impression that a film adaptation of the novel could be brilliant.

And--crucially--four, the whole novel could stand as a parable for the older generation's obtuseness and sloth in responding to the climate crisis, a lapse for which the younger generation will end up paying the highest costs.

I've wanted to read Millet since I saw her in a pandemic-era zoom-cast with Tom McCarthy and Joshua Cohen, talking about William Gaddis. McCarthy and Cohen, both erudite and articulate, got into trying to out-articulate and out-erudite each other, and Millet just seemed to be thinking, hoo, boy, what have I gotten myself into? Just her facial expression as McCarthy and Cohen did their grad-seminar thing gave me the idea that she would have a knack for satire--and so she does.