Bee Season (book rant)

Since my yin and I arrived here in North Carolina, it has been either rainy or foggy, or threatening to rain or fog, almost every single day. This weather has cut into our hiking, our plans to shoot my yin's yoga video, and most of all our overall level of drive and ambition. Living in South Florida for the past five years, I've become accustomed to a certain amount of sunshine (300+ days/year or so), and I had forgotten how damp and gloomy the Blue Ridge Mountains can be.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the weather has allowed us time to catch up on our reading, and I just finished:

which my yin picked up at a used bookstore in Eugene six weeks ago. Our respective literary tastes only occasionally coincide, especially given that my taste in books typically ranges from the almost to the totally unreadable, but this was one of those exceptionally happy instances where her appreciation for humor and my snobbery coincided.

This is also beside the point.

The point is that Myla Goldberg's book (her debut, nonetheless) is simultaneously intelligent and easy to read, comical and profound. It details the tale of a Jewish nuclear family – mother, father, daughter, and son – as their youngest child Eliza, a thoroughly lackluster student, proves to be a spelling prodigy in her school's bee.

Over the course of the novel, each of the family members prove to be on a quest for God-realization, though only the father Saul and the son Aaron seem to be doing so self-consciously. Saul is a hazzan (cantor) in his synagogue, a Kabbalahist, and a one-time hippie. His relationship with his kleptomaniac-lawyer wife is best summed up by this clever passage near the start of the novel:

"She sees in Saul the househusband who will enable her parental ambitions without disabling her autonomy. In Miriam, Saul sees the means to a book-lined study and a lifestyle conducive to mystical advancement. They are both absolutely certain these things equal love." (22)

Aaron, on the other hand, suffers through the novel in the shadow of his father, and his actions vacillate between mimicry (as a child) and rebellion (as an adolescent). While the generational tension between them is rote, it works nonetheless, largely due to the parallel between their religious pursuits and the irony that it is these ambitions that ultimately create more distance between them. This was one of my favorite things about the novel because it illustrated how two people – both sincere, both loving, both in search of similar goals – can still find themselves in conflict.

Finally, there is Eliza who, if not quite the novel's protagonist, is certainly the character that drives forward the plot. Her spelling ability is preternatural, extending beyond the powers of mere skill or memorization and into the realm of essence and being:

"Paging through the dictionary is like looking through a microscope. Every word breaks down into parts with unique properties—prefix, suffix, root. Eliza gleans not only the natural laws that govern the letters but their individual behaviors. R, M, and D are strong, unbending and faithful. The sometimes silent B and G and the slippery Kalyani follow strident codes of conduct. Even the redoubtable H, which can make P sound like F and turn ROOM into RHEUM, obeys etymology. Consonants are the camels of language, 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. E can sound like I or U. –IBLE and –ABLE are impossible to discern. There is no combination the vowels haven’t tried, exhaustive and incestuous in their couplings. E will as soon pair with A, I, or U, leading the dance or being led. Eliza prefers the vowels’ unpredictability and, of all the vowels, favors Y. Y defies categorization, the only letter than can be two things at one. Before the bee, Eliza had been a consonant, slow and unsurprising. With her bee success, she has entered vowelhood. Eliza begins to look at life in alphabetical terms. School is consonantal in its unchanging schedule. God, full of possibilities, is a vowel. Death: the ultimate consonant." (49-50)

Recognizing the true potential in Eliza's gift, Saul shifts his attention from Aaron to her, and the second half of the book is largely a tale of their developing relationship. Although touching, it was also a little unsettling. I couldn't help but feel sorry for Eliza because in some ways her father is using her. Saul sees in her the ability the lacking himself, the ability to achieve perfect union with an object (dhyana) which opens up the doorway to the deepest reservoirs of spiritual truth.

Implicit in his actions is the conflict between moral concerns (responsibility to one's family) and spiritual ambition (the desire for Enlightenment). Each of the characters wrestles with this in their own way, and in the end it is only Eliza that realizes both goals. The final pages of the novel present an open-ended solution to the dilemma, and in the days since I finished reading it I have only come to appreciate it more and more.