I just finished reading Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which left me with what James Joyce called a riot of emotions when I reached the final word. Primary among those emotions was fury, followed closely by outrage, bewilderment, disbelief, and then, a bit later, grudging acceptance of a conclusion I did not want to see. Murray, like his contemporary Claire Keegan, has to be one of the greatest living writers of fiction in English. I adored his Skippy Dies, and I suppose that my happy memories of that novel set me up for more expectations of wry humor, occasional slapstick, and a conclusion that wraps everything into a satisfying farewell. The Bee Sting is quite different. Katy Waldman in The New Yorker describes Bee Sting as structurally similar to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and that's not a bad analogy: a dysfunctional family, shifting points of view among the four members, long passages of interior monologue and, in one case, no punctuation, though the lack of punctuation presents little impediment to the reading, thanks to Murray's skill with sentence structure and capitalization. In retrospect I have to wonder whether my anger was the result of my own dashed expectations, not the way the author chose to finish his book.
But, ending aside, I have serious concerns about some of the blatant contrivances Murray uses to get his plot to unfold as he wants it to. The Barnes family, consisting of Dickie (the father), Imelda (the mother), Cass (the daughter), and PJ (the younger brother) is struggling at the beginning of the novel. A global financial downturn has hurt business at Dickie’s two automobile dealerships; Cass is undergoing the typical trials of being a 15-year-old teenaged girl; PJ, age 12, is being bullied at school; and Imelda, who was passionately in love with Dickie’s late brother, Frank, is intensely frustrated by her husband’s refusal to ask his wealthy father for financial assistance. In other words, we’re starting where a typical comedy begins: with the characters troubled and unhappy. By the end, we expect their fortunes to rise and for their condition to be happily improved. But Murray, a master of confounding our expectations, traces the downfall of the Barnes family as their lives grow worse and worse. By the end, Murray’s hand is for me just a bit too evident in setting up a convergence of all the characters and all the plot lines during a Biblical-level deluge in a forest primeval. I would make the same charge about his characterization of Dickie, whose behavior often strikes me as improbable. Some of his sections in the middle of the book sag with Dickie’s exasperating, implausible choices. Still, everyone in the Barnes family becomes a vivid, highly sympathetic character (even Dickie). I was turning the pages at a feverish pace during the last hundred pages. The writer is an artist of the first rank, but I do wish that his editor had pushed harder for trimming and tightening and for rethinking some of the behaviors of his primary adult male character.
In late October I took the train to New York to meet my friends Kathy and Adam from Chicago, where we went as a trio to see the revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, directed by the brilliant Maria Friedman, who finally, forty years after the show debuted as a notorious Broadway flop, found the secret of making the show work. The story, moving backward in time, depicts the dissolution of a friendship shared by Mary (a novelist who becomes a bitter alcoholic), Charlie (a playwright and one-time collaborator with the third member of the group), and Franklin, a gifted composer who sells out his art for the sake of money. Past productions presented the show as the story of this trio. Friedman’s epiphany was to focus it on Franklin alone. The play becomes his bitter memory of how his promising career began and how it, his marriages, and his friendships came to ruin.
There were multiple pleasures in the production. First of all, the three principal actors (Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe, and Jonathan Groff) were all perfect in roles that demanded a lot physically as well as emotionally and artistically. The three have made the rounds of talk shows and have thus demonstrated to the world their personal chemistry. But they are all quite adept at delivering those Sondheim melodies with those intricate Sondheim lyrics. Sondheim is, after all, the genius here in this backward-moving show. He has written reprises to appear in the before the actual musical number comes up; he has written a clever pastiche of a review song typical of what we would experience in a 1960’s-era Greenwich Village cabaret; he has given us a stirring ode to friendship and a wry, very hummable song about how he doesn’t write hummable tunes and an ironic anthem to close the action just as the characters are at their youngest, most idealistic, most purely joyful selves. Sondheim delivered the songs, and he was well served by the entire cast. I offer a particular salute to Daniel Radcliffe, who could, if he wished, retire and spend his life milking his fame as Harry Potter but who instead challenges himself with eight shows a week of live theater. Good for you, Mr. Radcliffe, and kudos to your spotlight-sharers Mr. Groff and Ms. Mendez for good measure.