A Children's Bible

The Bible’s allegorical sagas abound with familial conflict, and Millet pointedly reproduces this dynamic in A Children’s Bible as well. Because Jesus stated that his claims of divinity would be the cause of many familial divisions, Jack interprets Jesus as a “symbol” for environmental science; thus, the narrative implies that it is only the belief in environmental science that can save humankind. In Millet’s novel, the crux of the teen characters’ rage against their parents centers on the older generation’s indifference to the environment and to their children’s salvation. As Evie asserts, “Once we let them do everything for us—assumed they would. […] 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” (171). The shallowness of her parents’ priorities was first impressed on her at the age of seven, when she saw protestors in the street and her parents brushed off her questions so as not to be late for reservation at a trendy restaurant. At this point, Evie’s refusal to hold hands with them marks her broader refusal to be guided by their willful blindness and selfish values.

Evie’s fellow teens at the “great house” are unanimous in their disgust for their parents, who are cast as the Judases in Millet’s quasi-biblical parable. Their contempt for them has only increased during the summer getaway, when they have been forced to watch their parents at play—a spectacle analogous to the fiddling of Nero while Rome burns. The parents’ reckless disregard for their children’s future manifests in their breezy inattention during the vacation and its catastrophic aftermath, when they send teens up to repair the house’s crumbling roof during a wind and lightning storm and forget about their younger children for days at a time. To be sure, the children mostly welcome this inattention, which allows them to carry out passive-aggressive “punitive measures,” such as drooling in their parents’ drinks and contaminating their food. Their contempt is such that most of them try to conceal their parents’ identities from the other children throughout the long summer: an easier task than it sounds, since their parents are well accustomed to keeping them at arm’s length. Even the super-rich “yacht kids,” who pay regular obeisance to their parents, show signs of a generational rift and describe their obsequious behavior as maintaining “diplomatic relations”: a calculated investment in an uncertain future that perhaps only the rich will live to see.

For Evie, the most bitter pill to swallow is that her parents are both well-educated liberals; her mother is a feminist studies professor, and her father is an upscale artist whose salacious sculptural works eroticize left-wing causes. Evie feels that their intellectual background makes them too well-informed to be able to justify their indifference toward the environment. Late in the novel, when Evie and Jack finally confront them about their inaction on global warming, the parents feebly respond, “We don’t have that much power” (193), prompting the gentle, big-hearted Jack to finally become as disillusioned as his sister and pronounce, “You’re my father. But you’re a liar” (201). Earlier, Jack equated science with Jesus, on the basis that a belief in science can be the savior of humanity. However, Millet’s subtext implies that the belief in Jesus tore families apart because some people would be saved while others would not. The novel also suggests that the difference with global warming is that science can only save humanity if everyone believes in it and acts as one.