Lark Benobi's Reviews > A Children’s Bible

The first time I tried to read The Children's Bible I didn't understand it at all. I was more or less baffled. I read the tone as cynical, and the language as unnecessarily brittle. I put the book down. I missed the subtle strangeness of these children in the novel, extraordinary children, ones who experience and chronicle the crumbling of civilization. Since this first, failed attempt at reading this novel, which happened about two years ago, I've read Lydia Millet's latest novel, Dinosaurs, which helped me understand Millet’s language. And even more significantly I've read a lot of Joy Williams, whom I understand was Millet’s teacher and mentor. Williams helped me unlock the goodness of The Children's Bible. Williams and Millet speak a related dialect of literary English and now they have taught me this language. It feels as if an entirely rich way of saying and understanding the world has been opened to me. This is a gem of a book.

Fiction is a conversation between writer and reader. Reading a novel is all about give and take and sometimes if you're lucky it resolves into a shared conversation between two people who may never meet. I'm using "shared conversation" to mean a vocabulary of shared experience between writer and reader that informs this deep language between them as they shape meanings together. When I don't like a book, when a book disgruntles me, it's more often than not because it's written in a language I don't yet understand.