Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Purpose of Family

At least since the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray, the family has been portrayed as the corrupter of those who are its hapless constituents: spouses fight for superiority or escape; ambitious fathers and mothers impose their ambition and snobbery on children who might have turned out better in other circumstances; siblings prosecute relentless rivalries; everyone is driven by the imperatives of family membership. Parental duty and earnestness are parodied and filial loyalty is mocked mercilessly. Families are termed 'dysfunctional' because it's members are certifiably neurotic.

Bee Season turns the tables on this traditional slander. Its four characters - Mother, Father, Son, and Younger Daughter - come into the family, not so much psychically damaged as incomplete and certainly neurotic. Each strives for completeness in his or her own way, assisting or inhibiting the others along the way. But it is in and through the family that all recognise both their inadequacies and the effect of their strivings on the others. Families, in other words, are therapeutic. Families mitigate the neuroses of individual members.

Father, for example, is a theological scholar who feels himself a failure for never having experienced the spiritual transcendence he seeks. Daughter is a prodigy at spelling who wants Father's attention and some social recognition. Adolescent Son tries to recapture an infantile feeling of the divine presence. Mother acts out her inadequacies in petty thievery. While the condition of the family is the arena in which they operate, none of these 'neuroses' has its origin in the family itself.

Despite their apparently diverse, and uniquely personal, objectives, each member of the family is secretly pursuing the same goal of completion. And it is the gravitational field of the family, it is difficult to find a word other than love for this field, which gives them the strength and confidence to do this. Their forays into the world, sometimes bizarre, always end with a return to the touchstone of family life, including the routine weirdness of each other. Each in their own way is 'excessive' but their excess is simply accepted by the others, not encouraged.

Eventually, secrets become public knowledge. And in the mirror of the family, everyone develops into his or her own person. They leave it. But this is not a failure of the family; it is its success. Not dysfunction, then, but precisely its function: to reveal what has been hidden and thrust it into the world. And the family persists in an entirely new form. An intriguing fiction that avoids cliche and provokes some interesting thought, therefore.

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