Mud Luscious Press

118 pgs/$12

Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby has been a tremendously difficult book for me to review. I’ve read it twice now and still find myself at a loss for words, though, admittedly, it’s a loss in an extremely good sense of the term. [N.B. I typically don’t reread books I really enjoy immediately after finishing them, but it seemed important — nigh wholly necessary — for Bell’s latest.]

I’m not even sure how to begin describing this novel(la). Twenty-six beleaguered fathers  of animal-like children — arranged alphabetically from A to Z — tell a story for every chapter. The title of every chapter is a triumvirate of names that begin with the same letter (e.g. “Abelard, Abraham, Absalom” — the names of the narrators’ progeny —  their “sequenced failures” — who might lead humanity into the future, somehow carrying on in the face of more impending cataclysms.

The book’s most significant overarching theme is one of raising children in an après-cataclysm world. Bell’s concept alone is mind-boggling on so many levels, i.e. how does a parent teach his/her child to hope, to believe, to simply see the good in things despite the ubiquitous badness of their world? Or is it perhaps intrinsic in all of us to seek the light at the end of a seemingly interminable tunnel? Cataclysm Baby does a truly fantastic job of addressing all of these questions — and many more yet unasked — without doing so directly or formulaically (aside from the aforementioned alphabetizing of the children’s names).

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