Monthly Archives: December 2023

December 29, 2023 · 12:01 am

Golden Gate by Amy Chua

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“Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.”
“Oh, Issy—why do you say that?”
“Because it talks to me.”
“What talks to you?”
“Evil.”
“Iris talks to you, and evil talks to you?”
“Yes.”
“Are they the same?”

Part of me wanted to shut her up—if there’s one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a rich girl who felt unlucky in life. But another part knew that what she was saying was factually true. Her family was a train wreck, almost as bad as my mine except rich. Meanwhile, a third part of me couldn’t help noticing her long lashes and her lips—she had what they call a rosebud mouth, a perfect version of it. “I may have misjudged you, miss. If I did, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t soften on me,” she said.
“If it was a hundred in the shade, I wouldn’t soften on you, miss.”
“Good. Because I’m bad, Detective. I do terrible things. And if you soften on me, I’ll do them to you.”

There are six primary (fictional) females driving the story in The Golden Gate, with Detective Al Sullivan functioning as the hub to which they all connect and around whom they all spin. There might have been a seventh, but Iris Stafford plunged down a laundry chute in 1930 at age seven, under mysterious circumstances, and appears now mostly in memories, dark visions, and dreams. Her sister, Isabella, all grown up in 1944, is a knockout, as was their mother, Sadie. The Stafford girls have two first cousins. Cassie Bainbridge is an expert hunter, (think Artemis) and a frightening wonder to behold when butchering large game. Nicole is fascinated by the far left, maybe dangerously so. Then there is Genevieve Bainbridge, grandmother to Iris and Isabella, Cassie and Nicole, mother to Sadie and John (who does not much figure in any of this.)

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Professor Amy Chua – image from AboveTheLaw.com

Genevieve is 62 when we meet her, through a deposition she is writing for the DA. There are eleven parts to this document, sub-chapters, spread throughout the book. It is through these that we learn of the events circa and before 1930. But take her words with a shaker of salt. This Bainbridge is an unreliable narrator. She is faced with a very tough situation. The DA has made clear his belief that one of her three granddaughters is guilty of murder, and he is squeezing her to finger the guilty party, lest all three suffer consequences. The events of the novel take place primarily in two times, 1930, when Iris dies, and 1944, the today of the tale.

Detective Sullivan is having drinks with a young woman in the hotel bar, when he is summoned by hotel management, about a report of gunshots in one of the rooms. Walter Wilkinson, an industrialist running for president, has acquired a new bit of decoration in his room, a bullet hole above his bed. He offers a tale about a Russian Communist assassin, is relocated to another room, and goes about his night, as does Sullivan. Until a call comes in several hours later. The renowned Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, CA, need some assistance dealing with a newly deceased guest. Mr. Wilkinson had clearly had a pretty tough night.

A crew of detectives is called in. Guests, employees and everyone in the vicinity are identified and interviewed, and clues begin to emerge. Timelines and whereabouts are established. Who saw whom emerge from what room, or walk down which hall, at what time, dressed how, gender, ethnicity, age, and so on. The usual procedural digging offers up a list of folks who may have had it in for WW, for a wide range of issues, some personal, some professional.

Complications appear like shadows at dusk. Was it the same shooter both times? And what about the unusual way in which his body was left? Witnesses can be unreliable. You cannot believe everything people tell you. Can you believe anything? In fact, there is a sufficient number of the questionably balanced in this novel that the place could be known as much for its head cases as for its headlands. The constant lying and misdirection offer up enough twists to make this read feel like a very tasty bowl of rotini. And it is indeed very tasty.

There are two levels at play, the payload, a take on the time and place, and the mystery…well, mysteries. We are eager to learn not only what happened to candidate Wilkinson including wondering if he had it coming) but to Iris Stafford. Did she really fall down a laundry chute to her death? Or was there some dark force at play responsible for killing a seven-year-old child? Chua does a great job of keeping us guessing, and there is plenty to guess about. I figured out one element about halfway through, but there were many others I did not see coming at all. There are surprises aplenty.

So, who killed WW (who is loosely based on Wendell Wilkie)? Who was that cowled person seen leaving the scene of the crime? Some people were seen entering and leaving the victim’s room, including an Asian woman and someone answering to the description of the three cousins. Interestingly, Wilkinson had a connection with Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Speaking of which, Chua peppers her novel with actual historical figures. The First Lady of China did, in fact, live in Berkeley during the period of the novel. Her reason for being there is not known. Chua offers one possible explanation. August Vollmer is a name you are unlikely to know, but he was a seminal figure in the evolution of policing. He served as police chief in Berkeley for a time, and is lightly incorporated into the tale, as Al’s mentor, among other things.

Place is of paramount importance in good detective tales, and Chua further satisfies the historical need by telling us about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, offering some of her characters a role in its opening. She also writes about the boom-town growth of the area during World War II, when it replaced Pearl Harbor as the premier shipbuilding location in the states, producing an astounding number of vessels for the war, and in so doing, attracting workers from around the country. Some were more welcome than others, as one might expect. There are union issues, housing shortages, poverty, racism, political intrigue, sexual shenanigans, tong gangs, and appearances by two noteworthy ahead-of-their-time accomplished female professionals.

Bigotry was shameless and rampant, with Mexicans forcibly “repatriated” by the hundreds of thousands, the Chinese Exclusion Act still in place, and hostile derision openly directed at “Okies,” a term then referring to poor white migrants from the Dust Bowl. In the 1940s came the Japanese internment, when full-fledged American citizens were literally caged off. For the first time, Blacks came to the Bay Area in significant numbers, pouring in from the American South in search of jobs, only to find themselves subjected to vicious prejudice, excluded by labor unions, denied entry into restaurants, theaters and hotels, and barred from living in white neighborhoods. Throughout this period, numerous other ethnic groups—such as Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, and Jews—occupied a subordinate position too, not yet considered fully white. – from the Author’s Note

Chua builds this into her characters.

I chose to make Detective Sullivan a light-skinned mixed-race man in part because Berkeley’s police force in the 1940s included almost no women or minorities, but also because I wanted to explore the phenomenon of racial “passing.” Sullivan is part Mexican, part Nebraskan, and part Jewish on his Mexican side…But Sullivan can pass as white and chooses to go by Al Sullivan rather than Alejo Gutiérrez for reasons he has not fully admitted to himself. – from the Author’s Note

In fact, there is enough passing here to make one wonder if Berkeley streets are constructed of all left lanes. In addition to Al, noted above, Japanese characters pass for Chinese. Gay characters pass for straight. One does what one must to survive in a hostile environment. Pathological liars pass for honest citizens. Crazy people pass for sane, and rich kids pass for revolutionaries. But another way to look at some of this is as reinvention. Sometimes you need to change how you present yourself to the world, change how the world sees you, in order to become your truest self.

Al is a good guy, conflicted about his decision to conceal his heritage. In addition to his detective work, Al must handle a family problem. His half-sister does not function well in the world, has issues with substances and decision-making. Somehow, she produced an amazing kid. Miriam is eleven going on thirty, from having to cope with so much. She could use some more schooling, but is uber bright, and she loves her uncle Al, who is put into the position of having to take care of her during of her mom’s absences. The love between these two glows like a lighthouse beacon glaring through thick bay fog. Some of the most wonderful scenes in the book are those between Al and Miriam.

While it is not a large element, there is also occasional humor.

I hate to say it of a fellow Berkeley officer, but Dicky O’Gar was so thick he couldn’t tell which way an elevator was going if you gave him two guesses.

The events take place in the Berkeley Hills, for the most part. So, near to, while not exactly one of, the ground-zeros for hard-boiled detective yarns. There is some nifty noir-ish patois, (the second quote at the top of this review offers an excellent example) but I would not call this a noir novel, per se. While there is plenty of darkness and grim reality, there is enough optimism to float it out of that sub-genre.

Gripes are few. I found the explanation of one of the deaths that occurs less than satisfying. There is a taste of a fantasy element, revolving around the continued presence in the Claremont of the late Iris Stafford. While it adds atmosphere, it suggests more than it actually delivers.

Bottom line is that The Golden Gate is a first-rate entertainment, with fun, quirky, interesting fictional supporting characters, an introduction to some actual historical people of note, an insightful look at a vibrant place in an exciting time, a primary character to care about, and mysteries to keep your gray cells sparking. What’s not to like?

I put my collar up, pulled my hat brim down, and set off through the drizzle, wondering how much I’d been played in the last seventy-two hours and by how many different women.

Review posted – 12/29/23

Publication date – 9/19/23

I received an ARE of The Golden Gate from Minotaur Books in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating an ePub as well.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Chua’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Wikipedia

Amy Lynn Chua (born October 26, 1962), also known as “the Tiger Mom“, is an American corporate lawyer, legal scholar, and writer. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School with an expertise in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization.[5] She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to teaching, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Chua is also known for her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In 2011, she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, one of The Atlantic’s Brave Thinkers, and one of Foreign Policy‘s Global Thinkers.

The Golden Gate is her first novel.

Interviews
—–Washington Post – Amy Chua says her hard-boiled detective also is a bit of a ‘tiger mom’ By Sophia Nguyen
—–USNews – ‘Tiger Mom’ Amy Chua Writes First Novel, ‘The Golden Gate’

Item of Interest from the author
—–Macmillan – Discussion Questions

Items of Interest
—–Wiki on August Vollmer, mentioned in Chapter 3, and throughout
—–Wiki on The Mann Act – mentioned in Chapter 14.4
—–Wiki on The Golden Gate Bridge

The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman

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in every fairy tale girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

people in love were such fools, they made up excuses, they wound up doing as they pleased no matter how much good advice they been given.

The Invisible Hour is a twice-told tale of a mother and a daughter.

Ivy Jacobs’ Beacon Hill family did not exactly treat it as a crimson-letter day when the sixteen-year-old informed her parents that she was pregnant by a feckless Harvard sophomore. Despite her tender years, Ivy wanted to see the pregnancy through and keep the baby. Decisions and plans were made, none of them involving input from Ivy. The newborn would be put up for adoption. Ivy bails, getting as far away as she can, which turns out to be a sort-of commune in western Massachusetts.

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Alice Hoffman – image from Penguin Random House – shot by Alyssa Peek

Mia Jacob is the daughter Ivy bore. We meet her at 15. Living in the place to which her mother had fled, The Community. More of a cult really, an authoritarian farm where the leader’s will is law. Joel Davis took Ivy in, married her soon after she’d arrived, so is Mia’s step-father. But child-rearing is communal here, so parenting is not what you or I would recognize. You will recognize the cult-leader, control-freak personality Joel wears like the headgear sported by the QAnon Shaman. Vanity is supposedly being punished, but it is accomplishment, growth, intelligence and independence that are the targets. He likes his followers unquestioning and compliant.

Ivy has stolen parenting moments over the years, so has had a hand in helping Mia find her true self, a young woman who is curious about the world, eager to learn, to investigate, to explore, to read. Discovery of her criminal reading marks her for punishment. When we meet Mia she is, as her mother was, a teen about to flee her oppressive environment.

Although we learn about and spend time with both women, it is Mia who is our primary focus. In a dark time, she considers suicide, but, fortuitously, reads a book that saves her, changing her life, giving her hope, The Scarlet Letter.

We follow her coming of age, assisted by her mother and an understanding librarian in the town where The Community sells their produce.

Her passion for Hawthorne is such that she finds in it a magical power. Alice Hoffman loves her some fairy tales, so it will come as no great shock that one fine day Mia finds herself transported back to the 19th century, and into the presence of her literary love object. Complications ensue. In those, however, we get a sense of Hawthorne, his personality, his material conditions, his family and friends, and his writing challenges. Nice looking fellah, too, to go with that oversized talent.

There is some wonderful imagery woven into the novel. The notion of invisibility is large among these. There are times in which it might be useful to go unseen, as in when one is doing something for which one might be punished, or which are simply secret. On the other hand, it is not so wonderful to be unseen in normal human interactions. Like “Yo, dude, human here. Whaddaya? Blind?” There is some literal invisibility as well.

Apples are a core element as well. There is a particular breed of apple grown in the area, which is no Eden. They seem less associated with The Fall than with a push. Joel uses leaves of that apple tree as a threat. One could certainly see his actions as serpentine. Mia even decides never to eat apples, given the associations she has for them with The Community. Howdaya like dem apples? Johnny Appleseed comes in for some attention, with plantings of his effort bearing local fruit.

The woods as a magical place gets a visit or two. Indeed, magical things go on there. Strange people and buildings appear. There is even one “Once upon a time” in the book. The Woods is where Mia goes to escape.

Much of the tension in the book centers around women taking control of their own lives. This happens in various ways. There is the usual disobedience one would expect, with the most daring taking the greatest risks. Reading figures large in this, as subservience is sustained under the lash of forced-ignorance. Reading is the gateway drug to independent thinking, and dreaming of better. Some women even learn herbal medicine, to see to their needs. The comparisons of the modern day with the repressive Puritan world depicted in The Scarlet Letter are clearly drawn. Plus ça change…

I think it’s a bad idea to write for the moment because the moment passes so quickly. The other thing about time is that what’s right and what’s good and what’s accepted suddenly becomes not. I thought about that with the way women were treated in “The Scarlet Letter,” the way that the Puritans blamed women, and they believed in original sin and that women were responsible for that because of Eve. It all changed, but then it changes back. And then it changes again. A lot of the things that women are coping with right now are not that different, really. The judgment against women. – from the Salon interview

There is a garden in town where all the plants are red. It may feel familiar to frequent readers of Hoffman.

This new book [The Invisible Hour] actually takes place in a town where I wrote a book of connecting stories about called The Red Garden, so it’s the same place. It’s just a novel that takes place in that town. – from the Salon interview

I consider myself an Alice Hoffman fan. While I have not read all her books, I have certainly read more than a couple. Any reader of her books knows that there are certain things one can expect. Among other things, there will be an engaging lead, facing difficult choices, and there will usually be bits, at least, of magic, often of a fairy tale sort. So, one cannot really gripe about a time-travel element pushing things too far, particularly when done in the service of giving us a closer look at a literary icon. My sole gripe is that I felt that the baddie was given too much magical license to pursue his dark ends.

Otherwise, despite it’s title, The Invisible Hours very much deserves to be seen. It offers not only an uplifting, engaging tale of empowerment, but an homage to one of the greats of American literature, and long-form praise of the power, the importance, the necessity of reading. I am sure we can all see the value in that.

“Q: Did you set out to write a novel so deeply rooted in women’s empowerment? How did it evolve to include time travel?”

“A: I started to think about The Scarlet Letter and how modern-day issues for women are not that foreign from issues in that time period. I’m not certain I realized when I first read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great novel what the deeper meaning of his heroine’s situation is—she has no say over her body or her choices and yet, she does make her own choices. It’s a very brave book.
I’ve always wanted to time travel and been drawn to books about time travel. I think during the time of Covid, when I was writing this, more than ever I want it to be in another time period.” – from A Conversation with Alice Hoffman, an appendix in the book

Review posted – 12/22/23

Publication date – 8/15/23

This review is cross-posted on my site, Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram and FB pages
Profile

Other Hoffman books I have reviewed:
—–1999 – Local Girls
—–2003 – Green Angel
—–2004 – Blackbird House
—–2005 – The Ice Queen
—–2011 – The Red Garden
—–2011 – The Dovekeepers
—–2017 – Faithful
—–2017 – The Rules of Magic
—–2019 – The World That We Knew

Interviews
—–Salon – “I want to believe”: Alice Hoffman is always seeking magic, practical and otherwise by Alison Stine
—–Shondaland – Alice Hoffman Talks Her Latest Novel, ‘The Invisible Hour’ by Sandra Ebejer
—–Harvard Review – An Interview with Alice Hoffman by Christina Thompson

Song
—–Agnes Obel – Brother Sparrow – relevance to the chapter title

Item of Interest from the author
—–Salon – Alice Hoffman: Five amazing tips to help you write your novel

Items of Interest
—–Wiki on Nathaniel Hawthorne
—–Wiki on Johnny Appleseed, mentioned multiple times
—–Gutenberg – full text of The Scarlet Letter
—–Good Will Hunting – Howdaya like dem apples?
—–Wiki on the QAnon Shaman

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

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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.

For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the water

The Barnes family is having their problems. It is 2014 in small-town Ireland. We follow Dickie, Imelda, his wife, PJ, their son, and Cass, a high school senior, through a range of travails. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opens with, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Guess which category the Barnes family fits into.

PJ is almost a teen, so will have a lot of growing-up to do, but he is faced already with challenges that are plenty daunting. Coping with bullies at school is no fun, if a particularly usual checklist item in coming-of-age stories. But he is also beset by the thug teen child of one of his father’s customers, who feels his family has been cheated by Dickie. Beatings happen, and more are promised if he does not pay up. And these are the lesser of the challenges he faces. On the upside, he likes spending time hanging out with his father, working on a project in the woods behind their house.

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Paul Murray – image from the Hindustan Times – shot by Lee Pelligrini

Cass has teen-angst aplenty, coping with her social status, her newly-ripening sexuality and her attraction to a promiscuous friend. She is trying to define who she is. (which is not exactly a wonderful person when we meet her.) A part of that is seeing herself as separate from her family. She would definitely not want to be associated with those people. She is particularly hostile to her father, blaming him for the demise of the family business, and the collateral social impact that is having on her. She is not a stunner like her mother, which does not help. The prospect of heading off to college in Dublin offers a concrete escape route, the sooner the better. She is besties, I guess, with Elaine, who is as amoral and unfeeling as she is beautiful.

Imelda came from a working-class family. Rough around the edges would be a kind description. But she was born a knockout. It was always going to be her ticket out. She falls in love with the town’s football superstar, Frank. They are to be wed. Frank stands to inherit a successful family business, and should be able to provide nicely for her. Problem is a literal crash and burn, and buh-bye Frank. She winds up marrying Frank’s older, smarter, but not-golden-boyish brother, Dickie.

Dickie had the brains for college, and attended, for a few years, until an unfortunate event derailed his collegiate career and he headed home. He may have been the smarter of the brothers, but Frank had the gift of salesmanship, and was a better fit to take over the car dealership. But when Frank dies, it falls to Dickie to step in. He manages, but it is not work he exactly loves.

These days, he is spending time in the woods behind their home, building a defense against Armageddon, spurred on by a troll-like employee who exhales conspiracy theories and seems to be looking forward to the coming end-times. He has a lot of time on his hands. The car-dealership is in the crapper. Along with plenty of other businesses, suffering not only from a global economic downturn, but massive flooding in the town. Dickie’s father, Maurice, retired, but still the owner, swoops in to try to fix things, blaming Dickie for the difficulties. Dickie is not entirely faultless here. But there are serious complications with him.

We follow these four for over six hundred pages, getting to know them intimately. We learn their secrets, see them change, see them cope with relentless stressors, see them grow, or not. This is the greatest power of the novel. Each is faced with decisions, moral choices, that define their character, that define their changes, maybe their failures. If that were all, it would be an outstanding piece of work, but Murray offers a very rich palette of content as well, raising it to another level.

There are many notions that run throughout The Bee Sting’s considerable girth. Space has been reserved to handle them all. The core, of course, is family. Not exactly the most functional, the Barnses. Parents who have been raised to hide their emotions have no natural ability to make a happy home.

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…

On top of which, secrets abound. They are all trying to find a way out, except for PJ, who is mostly interested in seeing things returned to the way they were before the dealership miseries began, and radiated outward. Murray shows how dysfunction and damage can carry forward from one generation to the next, the brutality of Imelda’s family, the emotional absence of Dickie’s. But all has not been destroyed.

When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…

Family connection is important, mostly in the desire of most to sever it. Dickie was desperate as a young man to get away, get an education, do something other than sell cars for the rest of his life. Imelda came from a toxic family (not all of them) and also struggles with her connection to the family she is in, for current-day part of the story. Cass wants out, ASAP. Tethers are cut, but some are also sewn. The tension between these struggles is fuel for the story.

Murray looks at the impact of the environment on peoples’ lives. The story is set at the tail end of the recession from the Celtic Tiger boom that had preceded. The economic environment was still pretty tough and we see how this impacts the family.

It will come as no shock that a major, unusual, flood impacts Dickie’s already sinking business, with talk of liquidation, that a water leak in the Barnes house carries omens, and that Imelda dreams of being washed away, as she is forced to cope with losing the luxury level lifestyle to which she thinks her incredible beauty entitles her. Cass’s collegiate prospects and social standing are endangered. Other players in the story are challenged as well. PJ is fast out-growing all his clothing, but does not want to be a burden on the now-struggling family, so keeps quiet and castigates his feet for growing too much. There is a stream involving the presence of gray squirrels in Ireland. They are an invasive species, as of a century back, and carry a disease that is fatal to the native red squirrels. Are they the only locals in danger of being wiped out?

Another stream is the notion of returning, coming back from the dead, in particular.

Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.

Imelda keeps looking for the ghost of Frank to show up at her wedding to Dickie. Dickie is definitely not the same after returning from Dublin. Same for Cass and PJ. Other characters, a maid, a mechanic, a patriarch, return as well, with mixed results.

…is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?

Bees get a bit of attention, if a bit less than expected. The bee sting of the title is inflicted on Imelda, on her way to her wedding to Dickie. Her face was in no condition to be seen, so every wedding picture of her is through her veil. There is another passage about the mating habits of bees. It does not end well for the males.

…the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.

The impact of stinging on the stinger is also considered.

There is even a bit of magic as Imelda’s Aunt Rose has a particular gift, sees things that others cannot, says sooths, a family thing, but not one that Imelda has ever manifested.

Murray writes in differing styles. Most of the book is presented as third-person omniscient, describing the actions and peering inside to reveal the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Standard stuff. The final section, The Age of Loneliness, is written in the second person. We alternately assume the POV of the main characters, as each races toward the stunning climax. Imelda gets a breathless, minimally formatted structure. There is a sample in the second quote at the top of this review.

I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. – from the. Hindustani Times interview

It would not be a Paul Murray novel if you did not come away from the reading without a few more laugh lines in your face. He takes the most liberty with this in the teens’ sections, the most reminiscent of the grand, rude humor of Skippy Dies to be found here. For example

Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?

or

Behind him, another boy, not as tall but slightly droopier, had started kissing Elaine. It was distracting; it seemed like she could hear it even over the metal, a squelching noise like walking on frogspawn.

or

It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.

You get the idea. Love this stuff.

So what’s not to like? Nothing, nothing at all. This is a wonderful, engaging, risk-taking, funny, moving, horrifying, engaging, biting, human triumph of a novel. You may feel stung by elements in this great tale, but you will come away with a literary trove of honey.

Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview

Review posted – 12/8/23

Publication date – 8/15/23

The Bee Sting was short-listed for the Booker Prize

I received an ARE of The Bee Sting from FSG in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on my site, Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Paul Murray pages on Wikipedia and Goodreads

Interviews
—–Hindustani Times – Paul Murray – “Climate change is something I worry about all the time” by Saudamini Jain – READ THIS ONE
—– The Guardian – Paul Murray: ‘I just dumped all my sadness into the book’ by Killian Fox
—–The Booker Prizes – A Q&A with Booker Prize 2023 shortlisted author Paul Murray – video – 4:08

My review of an earlier book by Murray
—–Skippy Dies – one of the best books EVER!

Items of Interest from the author
—–New York Magazine – 3/15/23 – Who is Still Inside the Metaverse?
—–The Guardian – Paul Murray: ‘How the banks got rich off poor people would be a painful read without comedy’ on The Mark and the Void
—–Boston College Libraries – Fall 2022 – How to Write a Novel – video – 1:20:05 – Paul from 7:45 – On the book from 18:25 – well, sort of – Largely about why it took so long between novels – and his experience with screenwriting – Wicked funny, too.
—–Outlook India – Excerpt