Cataclysm Baby
Cataclysm Baby (Matt Bell, Mud Luscious Press 2012, 118 pages)
A Small Doggies book review by Jason Cook of Ampersand Books
Babies born wrong, a world in flames, drowning, drying up, and drifting away – these are the ways the world ends, with terminally hopeful fathers clutching the roles of the past as the future crumbles away. Cataclysm Baby spins these elements around, each chapter presenting a new vision of men trying to hold families together or blow them apart while exhausted wives die or go insane and children are born as insects, as ghosts, as part of a murderous, hostile new world.
Matt Bell’s novel is an abecedarium of apocalypse; the title of every chapter is a trio of names, starting with the same letter – the names of the children who should carry humanity into the future and persevere in the face of a host of environmental disasters.
The children, though, always come out wrong, some covered in hair, some with teeth thirsty for blood, some incapable of survival in a dying world, and some who take part in its death: each one “a sequenced failure.”
In "Oneida, Ophelia, Ornella," the narrator’s three daughters are born ventriloquists, able to speak only in mimicry of the voices of their parents and other survivors of a village slowly succumbing to floods. As the disaster continues, the daughters go missing and people are lured out into the water by the cries of their remaining loved ones, who turn up later safe and dry. In “Domina, Doreen, Dora,” children in a world overrun with insects become insects themselves, chasing away the flies and locusts to protect their parents, only to lay their eggs against the windows of their former homes.
Cataclysm Baby is more than just an exercise in imagining a variety of catastrophes for the sake of seeing how weird mutant children can get; the heart of these stories are the fathers narrating, how they react to their unknowable and sometimes sinister children. While the world flies apart or burns down, these men still try to fulfill some vague notion of fatherhood, some sense of responsibility.
The stories, on the surface, appear very similar, but the approaches, reactions, and results of the fathers are as varied as the apocalypses raging around them. The father of a simple child, tired of supporting a son who can’t help harvest the failing crops, gives him a running start; the parents in “Edgar, Edric, Eduardo” quickly become dependent on a child adapted to a world in which they can’t survive on their own; parents raise sacrificial children so the rest can stay alive or maintain myths or, in some cases, become sacrifices themselves.
What separates Bell’s writing from other apocalypse tales is the deeply-considered metaphor, which is at once obvious but never belabored. The focus is never on the world-shattering pyrotechnics, but stays on the more prosaic concerns of family conflicts and what, if anything, it means to be a father. Even “Quella, Querida, Quintessa,” a story in which children float away from the village, keeps its eye on the new social rituals that emerge from this fantastic, strange world where the elders are left behind while the children float among the clouds.
And then my pulling mother from daughter so that our child might climb the ladder to the platform where she will await her rising.
What truly makes Cataclysm Baby special, however, is the style Bell has adopted, a restrained prose with something of the biblical about its sparseness, the distance between the narrators and others, the anonymity of the actors. The only names are those in the titles; everyone else is known by their role: the mother, the daughter, my sons, our children. Many of the stories are told in a loose list style, much like a man running through events in his mind looking for any kernel of sense, but also like Revelations.
“Know how we once believed our coming children would surprise us. And how we were wrong.
Know how as soon as he can speak our oldest tells us the day and date his first brother will be born…”
from “Prescott, Presley, Preston,” feels like a confession (which the father badly needs to make by the story’s end), but also like a commandment which, along with the featureless characters, gives Cataclysm Baby the feel of prophecy set in stone, or an unchangeable history through which real people have suffered.
This biblical, prophetic flavor to the text bursts through in “Zachary, Zahir, Zedekiah,” an effusion of poetic language that throws restraint to the wind. It is a break from the rest of the book, a surprise, but also the only way Cataclysm Baby could or should end.
“And then ashes to ashes. And then maggots in the ash.
And then for a time no more centuries, no more millenia.
And then for a time no more time.”
Cataclysm Baby is a beautiful book by a writer who rarely makes a mistake, putting heart and meaning back into apocalypses bled dry after too many tellings.
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Cataclysm Baby is currently available for purchase through Mud Luscious Press.
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Learn more about Matt Bell at his website.