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Book Reviewed by:
Norah Piehl
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From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.
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?
I
In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He'd nailed the doors shut so they couldn't get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn't happen more often. She thrust her thumbs through the belt loops of her jeans and looked down the dreary main street of their town. I mean, she said, it's something to do.
Cass and Elaine first met in Chemistry class, when Elaine poured iodine on Cass's eczema during an experiment. It was an accident; she'd cried more than Cass did, and insisted on going with her to the nurse. They'd been friends ever since. Every morning Cass called to Elaine's house and they walked to school together. At lunchtime, they rolled up their long ...
The novel concentrates on each of the members of the Barnes family in turn, initially in long narrative sections that could stand alone as substantial short stories, complete with distinctive narrative voices (particularly Imelda's, which reads almost as stream-of-consciousness, with little to no punctuation). The length of The Bee Sting means that Murray has a very large canvas with which to work, enabling him to engage with big issues like sexuality, immigration, childhood trauma, and social class. But this expansiveness also allows him to delve deeply into each character's personality and personal history, giving readers essentially a series of intimate portraits of the Barnes family members...continued
Full Review
(605 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In Paul Murray's novel The Bee Sting, Dickie Barnes is the reluctant owner of a failing Volkswagen dealership. One character provokes Dickie's teenage daughter Cass by telling her that Volkswagen was started by the Nazis, so it's no great loss if the dealership shuts down. And it's true that even though these days Volkswagen might be best known as the developer of iconic vehicles like the Beetle, the Rabbit, and the VW Bus, or as the originator of the 1990s "Fahrvergnügen" advertising campaign, the company did indeed get its start as a project of the German government under the control of the National Socialist Party.
Volkswagen was founded in 1937 as Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, soon renamed ...
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