Bee Season: A Novel

Bee Season: A Novel

Doubleday, 274 pp., $22.95

At the beginning of Bee Season, the Naumanns are an ordinary family. Saul, the father, is a Jewish cantor who spends a lot of time in his study and considers himself to be a respected head of the household; Miriam, the mother, is a successful attorney who keeps the house clean; Aaron, the son, is intelligent and nerdy, and he wants to be a rabbi someday; Eliza, the daughter, is the disappointment of the family because she is not "gifted" like her brother and prefers to spend her afternoons watching reruns. The problems the characters face seem to be the ordinary conflicts of many families: competition, work, and expectations. By the end of the novel, however, the picture has been shattered. Each person's internal struggles prove stronger than the synthetic family unit.

Strangely, the pivotal occurrence in the Naumann life is a spelling bee. Eliza, the daughter, wins the elementary school spelling bee, then the district bee, the state bee, and finally, attends the national bee. That the daughter is not as ordinary as her parents once thought completely upends the shallow balance of their lives. The picture of the Naumann family breaking apart is very funny. By the end of the novel, the mother is a kleptomaniac committed to a hospital, the son has become a Hare Krishna, and the daughter has become a mystic of the kind prophesied by 12th-century prophet Abraham Abulafia, practicing meditation and seeking God. The father's fall is more humble: He is dethroned by all of his family, something the reader could see coming from the start of the novel.

Although anticipated, it is the struggle between the father and his children that is the most emotionally interesting, since Saul is a deep-thinking man who acts like a "Cheerleader Mom" without seeing his own faults. Some of Eliza's struggles to discover her mystic talents become dry, as much of the theory and subsequent trances are written in great detail from the mind of a child. The struggles between Aaron and Saul become tiring, because Aaron's break is complete before the struggles end on paper. In contrast, the mother's transformation seems to occur too abruptly. Her psyche is odd and not well-revealed. Still, the complete turnaround from normality to completely baffling reality is strange and delightful.