Bee Season: A Novel
by Myla Goldberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Myla GoldbergEdition: Paperback
Published: 2001-05-15
ISBN: 0385498802
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Bee Season: A Novel
Book Review: Approaching God
Summary: 5 Stars
Bee Season / 0-385-49880-2
How many ways can you approach God? Quiet, unassuming Eliza finds him in the spelling of words. Shy, frightened Aaron finds him in the singing and dancing of the Hare Krishnas. Distant, insane Miriam finds him in the colors and patterns of a kaleidoscope. And domineering, authoritarian Saul finds him in the strumming of his guitar in the Jewish temple.
Bee Season is a remarkably compelling work, with a narrative that sucks the reader in immediately. The story jumps around from the different viewpoints and recollections of the four family members, but the jumps are incredibly easy to follow and understand and the end result is that each family member is carefully understood and cared about more than if the novel were just written from one point of view.
The family is a distant one, but functional, and its members do not realize just how close everything is to falling apart. One thread out of place and the family will crumble in on itself - and this thread is provided when the hitherto unremarkable student Eliza suddenly wins the school spelling bee. Saul, househusband and lynchpin of the family, immediately abandons his older, favored child Aaron to focus entirely on young Elly. Aaron, once accustomed to playing guitar and practicing Hebrew with his gentle but authoritarian father, is left to drift aimlessly. While Saul immerses his youngest child in the secrets of the Cabbala in an attempt to get her to see God via hours and hours of daily spelling sessions, Aaron quietly abandons his Jewish heritage and seeks a wide varieties of religions, settling finally on the Hare Krishna, whose members welcome him with the love and understanding he longs to receive from his family. Miriam, the distant breadwinner and mother, slips further into her carefully hidden schizophrenia, and begins compulsively stealing from private homes, rather than at the stores she had previously confined herself to.
As the family crumbles apart, Saul reacts with hostility and anger to his sudden loss of control over his family and lifestyle. In the wake of his wife's eventual incarceration in a mental hospital, he lashes out violently at his son, excoriating him for his new religion and maintaining that Aaron's new religion indentifies him as equally insane as his mother. Elly, the youngest member of the family and now the functional adult, recognizes instinctively that her father must be robbed of the last vestiges of control, in order that he may finally realize that it is the people in his life that are truly important, and not the goals that he has defined for them.
Summary of Bee Season: A Novel
In Myla Goldberg's outstanding first novel, a family is shaken apart by a small but unexpected shift in the prospects of one of its members. When 9-year-old Eliza Naumann, an otherwise indifferent student, takes first prize in her school spelling bee, it is as if rays of light have begun to emanate from her head. Teachers regard her with a new fondness; the studious girls begin to save a place for her at lunch. Even Eliza can sense herself changing. She had "often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see."Eliza's father, Saul, a scholar and cantor, had long since given up expecting sparks of brilliance on her part. While her brother, Aaron, had taken pride in reciting his Bar Mitzvah prayers from memory, she had typically preferred television reruns to homework or reading. This belated evidence of a miraculous talent encourages Saul to reassess his daughter. And after she wins the statewide bee, he begins tutoring her for the national competition, devoting to Eliza the hours he once spent with Aaron. His daughter flowers under his care, eventually coming to look at life "in alphabetical terms." "Consonants are the camels of language," she realizes, "proudly carrying their lingual loads."
Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle and unfaithful.... Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood.When Saul sees the state of transcendence that she effortlessly achieves in competition, he encourages his daughter to explore the mystical states that have eluded him--the influx of God-knowledge (shefa) described by the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Although Saul has little idea what he has set in motion, "even the sound of Abulafia's name sets off music in her head. A-bu-la-fi-a. It's magic, the open sesame that unblocked the path to her father and then to language itself."
Meanwhile, stunned by his father's defection, Aaron begins a troubling religious quest. Eliza's brainy, compulsive mother is also unmoored by her success. The spelling champion's newfound gift for concentration reminds Miriam of herself as a girl, and she feels a pang for not having seen her daughter more clearly before. But Eliza's clumsy response to Miriam's overtures convinces her mother that she has no real ties to her daughter. This final disappointment precipitates her departure into a stunning secret life. The reader is left wondering what would have happened if the Naumanns' spiritual thirsts had not been set in restless motion. A poignant and exceptionally well crafted tale, Bee Season has a slow beginning but a tour-de-force conclusion. --Regina Marler
Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality, Saul inducts her into his hallowed study and lavishes upon her the attention previously reserved for Aaron, who in his displacement embarks upon a lone quest for spiritual fulfillment. When Miriam's secret life triggers a familial explosion, it is Eliza who must order the chaos.
Myla Goldberg's keen eye for detail brings Eliza's journey to three-dimensional life. As she rises from classroom obscurity to the blinding lights and outsized expectations of the National Bee, Eliza's small pains and large joys are finely wrought and deeply felt.
Not merely a coming-of-age story, Goldberg's first novel delicately examines the unraveling fabric of one family. The outcome of this tale is as startling and unconventional as her prose, which wields its metaphors sharply and rings with maturity. The work of a lyrical and gifted storyteller, Bee Season marks the arrival of an extraordinarily talented new writer.
The family romance (or anti-romance) is a much-revisited genre that periodically requires reinvention -- which is precisely what Myla Goldberg's captivating, quirky, and sometimes mysterious first novel, Bee Season, accomplishes. In it, the all-American ritual of the spelling bee becomes the vehicle to expose the emotional fault lines in the life of a suburban Jewish family. Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann discovers an almost mystical facility at spelling ("words hit her at a level of cognition that outpaces conscious thought, resonating somewhere where spelling doesn't need to happen because it already has"), placing her on the path to national competition and thoroughly upsetting the psychic economy of her family. Her autodidact father, Saul, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, delights in the sudden emergence of this gift; her remote (and kleptomaniac) lawyer-mother, Miriam, must suddenly confront the conscious distance she's placed between herself and her previously "slow" daughter; and her older brother, Aaron, deals with his displacement from first place in his father's affections by becoming a Hare Krishna. Bee Season finds the perfect place where the offbeat, the lyrical, and the penetrating meet to create a family novel unlike any other.
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