6/52: Nearing the finale of 'The Bee Sting'
I made it through the punctuation-less chapters…😅
If you want to be a better writer the wisdom of the literary crowd is that you must read. There was a time I considered myself to be a professional reader and an amateur critic. That was, of course, until I started wanting to consider myself a professional writer in which I realized how shoddy my critiques were of the actual craft and decided I just needed to rethink and restart the whole literary career of my dreams.
The older I get I notice that my reading habits have changed drastically. Whereas ten years ago I could get through a book a week, if not more, now I’m lucky if I finish a book in one month. It could be any number of things: the fact that I am indeed writing more, a new phase of my social life that’s not centered around books, or that the desire simply isn’t there.
I’m leaning towards the latter because even ten years ago, my desire informed everything else in my life. I was intentional about socializing around books, I made the time in the mornings, afternoons, and nights to read. I was in a bookstore or library at least once a week. Authors were my rockstars. I knew every debut, every local literary event, and I was tickled every time I made a connection with literary professionals. And now, if I can even keep up with the Tuesday releases, my attention span is so abridged that I’m likely to pick up the book and have DNF’d it by the weekend.
But every once in a while, a book will remind me why I loved reading in the first place. And the book this time is The Bee Sting. Allow me to share brief thoughts on the novel as I near the final pages and why I think it’s kept my attention along the way.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
This is a 640+ page book. This is important because one, I normally feel intimidated by anything over 500 pages, but it was recommended by a friend who raved about it being a page-turning experience. And two, I was traveling back home to the States when I got it. Now, when I travel, I do not check in luggage. I have a real minimalist approach to getting in and out of the airport with ease and my arms swinging. So, while standing in the Strand with my friend and weighing (literally) the more pocket friendly titles I was leaning towards, imagine my own surprise when her one review of the book made me put the other books back and carry this mammoth of a read back home where it barely fit in my backpack. And you know what? It was worth it.
I didn’t connect with the story right away. The novel begins from the perspective of Cass, the teenage daughter in the Barnes family, a nuclear Irish family on the brink of financial ruin. She’s in her senior year of high school and exhibiting most of the stereotypes of teenage angst and rebellion. This first chapter sets up the inciting incident flawlessly in that this family, for all intents and purposes, are the Joneses and have until recently been the picture perfect image of being big fish in a little pond. Through Cass, there’s a sense of connecting to the disaster of the family’s impending financial crisis through her desire to leave, coming so close, and the chance that it might all be taken away. However, the moment it felt like something interesting enough for me was by ‘Wolf’s Lair’. PJ, Cass’ 12yo brother, was the character I connected with, whether it was because I just wanted to reach in and give him a hug or because his need as a character was a bit more, for lack of a better word, pressing and physically identifiable. The stakes were immediately raised because this family’s financial crisis put PJ’s safety in jeopardy and his poor feet in the crossfires of his parents’ neglect.
Then, there’s a whole section without punctuation. Nearly 200 pages of ‘The Widow Bride’ in which, aside from the occasional exclamation or question mark, we learn the backstory of how Imelda and Dickie came to be through one long continuous sentence. As you’re reading, you’ll know when a new sentence begins because it’s capitalized, and there are the clear dialogue indicators of he said and she said. Aside from that I’m not sure what the point of this technique is only that after the initial, “Oops, the proofreader made a mistake…wait a minute…oh this is on purpose” pause in the reading, it made me more present and active in the reading. Imelda’s backstory forced me to read on each word and not just read through them. I haven’t sat with the thought long enough yet, nor have I finished the novel to know for sure, but there’s a sense of the melding of desires and needs of these characters that at some parts I could, if I wasn’t paying close enough attention to detail, misattribute certain lines to other characters. There was also the sense of this chapter taking place in the past and the way our history can sometimes feel like one run-on memory instead of the individual events that lead to the present moment.
There’s a moment in anything that becomes routine, an activity that we’re jaded by, when something novel happens and reinvigorates us to show greater attention to what it is that we’re doing. This punctuation-less section did that for me. I also like the way The Washington Post’s Ron Charles puts it by saying, “that omitting punctuation feels like just a minor concession for greater speed, like Olympic swimmers shaving their legs.” And maybe that was all it was, a tactic to speed us through Imelda’s past.
Have you read The Bee Sting? What effect did the punctuation-less chapters have on your reading experience?
Then we’re with Dickie, and this is where I am now. I’m in the midst of the climax in which all of the questions are being answered. Namely, what caused this family’s financial crisis? The foreboding chapters, learning Dickie’s backstory, his relationship to his family prior to Imelda, with Imelda, and his relationship to himself have all setup this finale with such precision that I’m looking forward to seeing what becomes of this family and how one man’s entire life reverberates through the lives of his family members who depend on him being the man of his household.
If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate it. I hadn’t considered doing book reviews again but this book has been top of mind this week. While this post was a bit rambling, maybe I’ll do more and get back into the swing of things with reading and sharing my two cents. It’ll be great to have another reason to keep up my reading habit this year.
If you’ve read The Bee Sting, please share your thoughts below. I’m hoping to finish it this weekend. And if you have any other book recommendations, please leave them in the comments too and why you recommend the book!
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