This book by Lydia Millet was another one I don’t think I had ever heard of before my book club elected to discuss it for our next meeting. It’s short, but pretty disturbing.
I’ve heard parents (especially moms) say they can’t read books or watch movies or TV shows where bad things happen to children because it makes them too anxious. I’m not a parent, and these types of books don’t make me anxious, but I really don’t like them. I think they mostly just make me sad.
So, if you don’t like to hear about bad things happening to children (or gun violence, or torture), consider this your trigger warning.
The book is narrated by Evie, a teenager on summer vacation on the East coast with her little brother, Jack, her parents, and some other families she’s never met before. Apparently the parents were all friends in college and they’ve decided to get together and rent a beach house to have their own kind of reunion.
The parents are utterly useless, spending their vacation drunk and/or high on drugs like marijuana and ecstasy, and they don’t let the fact that their children are around inhibit either their drug use or any of the inappropriate behavior that comes with that drug use. Most of the time, the parents can’t even be bothered to keep track of where their children are, much less take care of them. In Evie’s case, this means she’s basically raising Jack on her own.
The disconnect between the parents and the children is made clear from the very beginning. There’s a physical separation in the way the kids sleep in the attic and won’t let the parents enter the attic, arguing that the parents have free reign over the rest of the house and the children should be allowed one room to themselves.
There’s also an emotional disconnect as demonstrated by the game the kids play amongst themselves to try and hide from the other kids which parents are theirs. Some kids are more successful in this endeavor than others, but it’s still pretty disturbing to think about how desperate these kids are to not even be associated with their own parents, who are pretty content to let the kids go off on their own and do whatever they want.
At one point, the kids take a boat and head off to what they think a deserted island to camp for a few days. Turns out the island is not so deserted because they run into some other kids there. Not everyone gets along with the new additions to their group, but after a few days they all go their separate ways anyway.
News comes that a hurricane is coming their way and the parents are more concerned with making sure the liquor cabinet is fully stocked than anything else. Then they spend most of the storm so high on marijuana and ecstasy that they’re completely oblivious to what’s going on around them.
The hurricane blows a branch off a tree and into the roof of the house, making the kids essentially homeless.
One of the parents had given Jack a copy of a book called A Children’s Bible, which he proceeds to read every night. When he sees the flooding that happens as a result of the storm, he thinks of the story of Noah and the Ark. As an animal lover, he decides it’s his job to rescue all the animals, so he takes in a rabbit, a skunk, and an injured owl, among other things. He refuses to come back inside the house with his sister because the animals can’t be brought into the house. Instead, he chains himself to a tree so Evie can’t make him move.
When the flooding doesn’t go down and they start running out of supplies, the kids realize they should get out of dodge, but the parents are convinced everything will be fine. So the kids take a car, some supplies, and Jack’s rescued animals, and they head out.
They end up on a farm that appears to be largely abandoned. Someone ends up finding the owner, who says they can stay as long as they follow certain rules, including not making too much noise and respecting their elders.
The farm’s caretaker joins them and helps them gather and store supplies. Some local hippies who help travelers along some local hiking trails also join them.
Eventually, one of the moms finds them. Evie had been calling her the fat mom, but it turned out she was pregnant, not fat, and as soon as she finds the kids, she goes into labor. The roads are in such bad shape that they can’t get her to a hospital and an ambulance can’t reach her, so she ends up giving birth in the barn. The baby lives, but the mom bleeds out, and the girl who now has a baby sister has to take over as the baby’s mom. She becomes pretty obsessed with taking care of the kid, and a couple times Evie and the others have to convince the girl to take care of herself for a change while they watch the baby.
They build a funeral pyre for the dead mom and bury her ashes, and then a few weeks later some guys in a truck with a lot of guns come up and take the kids and the hippies hostage. The caretaker is oddly nowhere to be found.
The guys with guns (who are never named) take possession of the farm, the house, and all the food. Then they begin torturing one of the hippies to try and get him or one of the kids to tell them where the rest of the food is stored because they refuse to believe that they’ve already taken all there is.
There had been a little contact between the parents and some of the kids, and one of the kids told the parents they were being held hostage by guys with guns. Since the parents still insist on being useless, some of them arrive to try to take control of the situation, but they didn’t bring anything useful with them, like guns of their own, or law enforcement. They’re naïve enough to think that just “having the law on their side” will be enough to convince the guys with guns to leave.
Instead, what finally does the trick is the owner of the farm sending in some of her own guys with guns to take care of the problem. Jack figures out that she did so because the guys with guns made a lot of noise at night, thereby breaking one of the rules. So even though she’s not useless, she’s another adult who’s more interested in taking care of her own interests than in protecting children.
I should point out that this book is very well written and it’s an excellent allegory about adults shunting off responsibility for the climate disasters they’ve wrought onto the next generation. I just really did not like reading it.