Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible is a believable climate fable

Four years ago, the novelist Amitav Ghosh wondered in his nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable why literary fiction has largely failed to address ecological catastrophe. “If the urgency of a subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness,” he argued, “then, considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over.” Tracing the history of the modern novel, Ghosh saw that by the mid-20th century, literary culture expected serious novels to center the human and to tell stories that were believable. Novels had to be plausible and focused on the everyday details of individual emotional lives. Climate disasters were too unbelievable to enter into literary fiction, and so such disasters and their aftermath were largely consigned to genre fiction.

But such events have begun to feel all too believable. This week I was hunkered down in my home in Durham, North Carolina, stocked with weeks worth of canned goods and pasta, avoiding a new virus whose outbreak some have linked to human abuse of the earth. A steady rain fell outside, a flood warning flashed on my phone, and I read about two dams breaking in Michigan, threatening a release of toxic buildup at a Dow chemical plant.

When I picked up Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, its story felt about 15 minutes away from becoming reality. In this fable of climate change and generational divides, an intense hurricane hits the East Coast, where a group of families is summering together. In the aftermath of the hurricane, they forge polluted waters, fight new diseases, and find a safe home to hunker down in while they contend for scarce resources.