The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?
Review: This mammoth hunk of a novel explores a family that is coming undone. Dickie's car business is going under, and he is ignoring the situation entirely. His wife Imelda is filled with rage as she slowly sells off her valuables online, rails at her husband, and ignores her children. Their teenage daughter Cass has taken to binge drinking and desperately seeking to stay in the good graces of her capricious best friend. And their son PJ is overlooked by everyone in the family and suffering the family breakdown in silence.
The structure of this book functioned so well. It is presented in alternating sections, each from the perspective of a different family member. Murray does an excellent job of placing the reader fully in the head of each character, each of which has own their biases, opinions, and secrets that they're keeping from the others. After the first four long sections, the alternating chapters get shorter and shorter and function as staccato-like beats, pushing the novel relentlessly on to its conclusion.
It has always seemed to me that novels are either about the way humans connect or the way they fail to. This one falls very much in the second category. Everyone in this novel is misunderstood and isolated from the others. None of them confide in the other. This is not a happy, close family. As the novel unfolds, we learn more about the history, particularly the history of how Imelda and Dickie ended up together, and much of the unease in the family begins to make sense.
This had some really lovely turns of phrase. Such as when Cass describes her best friend Elaine, who she sees as the epitome of grace and style, by saying, "Even when she was clipping her toenails, she looked like she was eating a peach" (4). Or when PJ remembers going into his parents' room at night as a child by saying, "They seemed so much larger in sleep, bloated out in their bed like great slumbering sea beasts, walruses or whales. You could just tuck yourself in under a fin, and it felt like the world and its monsters had disappeared" (125). Murray also did a wonderful job writing from the perspective of teenagers and getting in their particular headspace and worries, which of course differ greatly from adults. This felt very realistic to me.
Now, on to the downsides. This was way too long. Way too long! There was no need for this to be well over 600 pages long. Some of the characters the family interacts with just felt a bit too larger than life for me as well. Virtually all four of the main characters have these dark, intense interactions with others - abuse, blackmail, attempted abduction. The villains of the plot felt larger than life. And there is such a sinister underbelly to all of this! Sex and sexual desire are painted as dark and dangerous over and over in this book, with dangerous consequences.
And the ending! The ending of this book made me so mad! It concludes ambiguously but implying that something very dark and tragic is about to occur. I was so angry to read so many hundreds of pages and have it end that way!
Stars: 3.5
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