Sweet Lamb of Heaven

Maybe our gods are as small as we are or as large, varying with the size of our empathy. Maybe when a man's mind is small his god shrinks to fit.

Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet is an odd, difficult-to-describe book that had me from the opening pages. Part of the plot is easy to describe; after she becomes pregnant, Anna finds that her husband wants nothing to do with either of them so, when her daughter is five, they leave. Her husband Ned decides to make his career in politics and needs his family back for appearance's sake. Anna eventually finds refuge at a seaside motel in the off-season, but their safety is tenuous.

The other aspects of the plot are more difficult. Anna begins hearing a voice after her daughter is born. It goes show more away once her daughter can speak. What keeps her from thinking it's some sort of auditory hallucination is that her husband mentions hearing it, too. Then she finds other people who have had the same experience.

Millet isn't a lyrical author, and while she writes well, it's not her writing or her characters or her plots that make her memorable. Millet is an author of ideas. Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a religious book, but not a theological one; she's exploring the idea of God and what that means to different people and different species. And with an emphasis on ideas, the plot becomes secondary, as does the idea of finding any answers. show less

Anna and her six year old daughter, are hiding out in a seedy, motel in Maine. They are on the run from her husband, a cold, self-obsessed man, running for political office in Alaska. He needs his wife and child, by his side, to bolster his chances, of winning. He is calculating and relentless and is on Anna's trail...
I really liked Millet's last novel, Mermaids in Paradise. A sharp, funny, satire but this one feels a bit half-baked. I like her writing but this domestic drama, doesn't quite hold together. There is a sub-plot with Anna hearing “voices”, but I did not see how that added to the story. Misses the mark...

Lydia Millet has captured something in Sweet Lamb of Heaven, and I feel at the very end of my abilities to say what it is. This Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel captures in frightening detail the horrifying political world we live in today - this example deals with the American version. This novel will haunt you, and stretch your imagination, and scare you, in an Alfred Hitchcock mode. It’s challenging, head-turning stuff. Supremely rewarding.

Anna, a sometime college lecturer in languages and literature, takes her six year-old daughter Lena and flees her emotionally-remote husband. (The husband is so remote, in fact, that midway through the story Anna checks off a long list of characteristics, and decides he is sociopathic. It doesn’t show more take the reader that long to figure it out.) We learn from the outset that after her daughter was born Anna had hallucinations - I don’t say “suffered” because the term doesn’t fit. She hears voices speaking to her. The voice seems versed in a wide range of subjects: “single-cell organisms, hockey scores, feathers on dinosaurs, celebrity suicides, the pattern of Pleistocene extinctions, the fate of the tribe called the Nez Perce; relativity, particle accelerators,” and so on. It speaks to Anna in English, Spanish, and French. Anna also thinks she hears English that sounds like Shakespeare, and Middle English, which she encountered while reading Chaucer.

And it is this breadth of the voice, in subject matter, language, and temporal origin, that is the key for me. It supports Anna’s fellow “listeners,” a group of people who have also had the auditory hallucinations, which we meet at a motel on the rocky coast of Maine - the end of the earth. The one salient opinion to emerge from the motley crew is that the voices have something in common with a common subconscious, a language which is the foundation of all life on earth.

Lay on top of these metaphysical considerations the thread of Anna’s cold, repellant husband. He uses his over-the-top charisma and ingratiating acting ability to start a career in politics. He corners Anna in Maine, coerces her back to Alaska to appear as part of his campaign for state senate, all the while having coopted the “family” agenda of a reactionary political party. After getting her back “on board” for photo ops and meet-and-greets, he sends her emails with each day’s appointments, bullet points of opinions to express if pressed; Anna and her daughter have daily sessions for makeup and clothes.

And thus is the shallowness and venality of modern-day politics exposed to us. Estranged husband Ned despises Anna, but hauls her up before cameras and microphones during his campaign. He threatens her and treats his daughter as though she doesn’t exist - and then the real fun starts. In a few jarring pages, Anna hallucinates something very strange indeed. She watches herself age before her eyes: terrified at the pace of her growing hair and nails, she emerges from her bath to see Lena and a trusted friend still seated on a hotel bed, reading, where she just left them. The sequence abruptly turns to a midsummer festival in Anna’s home town, and she has apparently lost three months, just like that. She has been in an altered state the whole time and cannot remember any of it.

Thus through strong drugs and an outwardly orthodox relationship, does Ned control and attempt to ruin Anna’s life. This Hitchcockian episode illustrates the very real and ruthless impulse of those who would control speech and discourse to their own ends and agendas. Ms. Millet takes it further: the totalitarians would control or even exterminate not only the public policy discussion, but would ruin language of any and all kinds. There is grist here for a much more in-depth treatment, which I promised to try to grind to fine flour at some point in the near future.

Suffice it at current to say that any modern reader interested in communication, politics, sensory perception, or theories of language would be challenged and delighted with this book. It’s also a damn fine read: something sinister’s always lurking near the surface; a group of friends and supporters are a particularly motley crew and we can’t be sure they’re reliable. Anna lives a desperate existence on the margin, and sometimes has reason to doubt her own stability. It seems unlikely that you’ll be as confounded as I was by Sweet Lamb of Heaven. I recommend you go ahead and try to find out.

https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2018/09/sweet-lamb-of-heaven-by-lydia-millet... show less

After her daughter is born, Anna begins hearing voices; for the next year, she struggles to discern the meaning of this unexpected event. At the same time, she finds herself dealing with her unfaithful husband, Ned, who wants nothing to do with their daughter. Finally, when Lena is six, Anna decides to leave and ends up hiding from her estranged husband in a run-down motel on the coast of Maine.

When Ned decides to run for political office, he sets out to reclaim his wife and daughter in order to project the proper image for the voters; his actions take a criminal turn and Anna’s tortured existence assumes nightmarish proportions . . . .

The writing is profound and lyrical, the stories absorbing. The narrative intertwines the show more first-person account of the cat-and-mouse game between Anna and her husband with the more esoteric analysis of the voices, providing for both suspense and thoughtful consideration, but the two don’t always mesh well. While the Anna-Ned-Lena storyline builds to a chilling climax and keeps the pages turning, the intellectual examination of the phenomenon of the voices is likely to disappoint readers as it spins out to a disappointing, unimaginative refutation of intrinsic beliefs. show less

Do I really understand this novel? No. Do I really like this novel despite that? YES!

Is was interesting, thought provoking, and had an extremely well thought out and complex tone. Growing up in Maine made it really easy for me to picture this motel, in its drab state of disrepair next to a cliff and the ocean. It was ethereal in a way I didn't expect.

I don't know what the ultimate takeaway of the story is. It could be a number of things, and I can understand why people are maybe unsatisfied with the lack of conclusion with some aspects, chiefly the support group aspect. This didn't bother me though. The throughline of human's primordial, nonverbal language being lost went a long way with me. If readers are upset that there was no show more definitive answer or proof for that, I think they are missing the point.


As with many great books, the ending is not meant to soothe and provide closure; the journey to arrive there has to be enough. In Sweet Lamb of Heaven, it was. show less

Millet tackles the theme of universal consciousness, or call it our connectedness to the universe, or God and takes it to an extreme. At first I thought I was reading pure literary fiction. Somewhere along the way the novel morphed into the sci-fi genre, but then it returned to literary fiction. Millet cautiously but brilliantly danced on the razor’s edge between the two genres. This novel delved far deeper into the protagonist's character, a woman fleeing her apathetic husband with her daughter in tow, than a sci-fi novel would. But there were certainly elements of the sci-fi genre present.

Here, Millet plumbs deep and describes what’s going on in the protagonist’s head in the second chapter during a get together. This felt like show more literary fiction to me—a woman describing a universal feeling of connectedness:

“It was one of those soft sinkholes of time when separate elements coalesce—we were a blur of sympathy, the air between us pockets of space in one great body, one saltwater being, unplumbed depths where the ancestors came from primeval well of genes…the feeling stretched like a generosity, the gift of oneness.”

The idea of universal consciousness stems from religious beliefs and from the field of psychology, such as Jung’s thesis on the collective unconsicous. It’s later in the novel that Millet expands on this universal feeling of connectedness and takes it just a nudge beyond what we know is credible. She planted some evil into it which made it a cross over novel, enough to move it into the sci-fi realm, but just barely. Millet acknowledges that by saying in Chapter 3, “Maybe this is a ghost story after all.”

Her writing is crisp and flowing. She doesn’t fill her pages with knick knacks, preferring uncluttered language, even though dealing with a complex theme. The book is a page turner. She flees Alaska with her daughter and her self-promoting Senator wannabe husband begins the chase. But more than the cat and mouse game is the beauty with which Millet handles the delicate subjects that touch us all, such as our connectedness to the universe, God, death, and the beauty of privacy of the mind. show less

A very disjointed experience. It's hard to say how I feel about this book because there are aspects of it that really worked for me, but they are hidden amidst a lot of passages that don't. It reads very much like a diary (which makes sense in the context of the story), but because of that I never quite knew what was happening within the plot. There is a certain subplot for example that is left unexplained, and while it should feel eerie and discomforting, I was mostly left confused and discombobulated.

Maybe that was the author's intent, and if so she did her job because that's absolutely how I felt.