Stinging sensation

>> Bee Season is so beautiful it hurts

by JULIET WATERS

Bee Season is a book that could easily end up in the wrong hands. The tasteful, simple cover is designed to look like an old family dictionary. The title hints at the kind of sentimental tableau one might read on the back porch with a glass of lemonade. The picture of the author, Myla Goldberg--with her big smile, pointy face and horizontally striped tights--looks like she's just swigged back a shot of pollen.

Readers expecting something cozy and charming will be stung pretty early on by Goldberg's extreme lack of sentimentality. Her dark sense of tragicomedy is only hinted at in the first paragraphs as she describes Eliza Nauman's grade-school classroom, a place especially reserved for the kids at the slippery edge of the bell curve.

"Since being designated three years ago as a student from whom great things should not be expected, she has grown inured to the sun-bleached posters of puppies and kittens hanging from ropes, and trying to climb ladders, and wearing hats that are too big for them above captions like 'Hang in there,' 'If at first you don't succeed...' and 'There's always time to grow...' she has no reason to believe that this, her first spelling bee, will differ from the outcome of any other school event, seemingly designed to confirm, display and amplify her mediocrity."

We have no reason to believe that a novel about a spelling bee will offer such a compelling, suspenseful tale of competition, emotional incest, and bizarre family secrets. Or that Eliza might become the Jon Benet Ramsay of the spelling world. This, however, is not the stuff of tabloids. The death that might take place is a chillingly subtle form of soul murder enacted with the kind of emotional abuse that is virtually undetectable. Years of benign neglect on the part of her parents are followed by an intense self-serving attention that masquerades as love.

Eliza is the second child of self-absorbed Jewish intellectuals: Saul, an ex-hippie pseudo-guru who, for a time in his university years, was a somewhat sleazy resident mystic; and Miriam, an academically brilliant social cripple and closet kleptomaniac. The star of the family is Aaron, the terminally geeky oldest son who seems destined to become a rabbi if he doesn't end up shaving his head and selling flowers at an airport.

Saul senses in Eliza a natural aptitude for mysticism, blossoming from the way in which the letters seem to appear to her in a vision. The attention he has for years invested in Aaron's spiritual education is suddenly diverted into nurturing Eliza's bizarre gift for abstract higher consciousness.

But even without Saul's help, the fifth grader is developing unifying concepts of spiritual philosophy: "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... 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.''

Eliza, however, is unaware how dependent the other family members are on her as the scapegoat consonant of the family. As she succeeds, their lives start to fall apart.

To give almost anything away about the plot would destroy the subtle but powerful way that Goldberg builds suspense. The more the lives of the Naumans start to spiral out of control, the more tightly and beautifully crafted this novel reveals itself to be. If there is a failing, it's that it's almost too impressively thought-out. Emotionally, it can be difficult to bear. Imagine a Jewish-American Anita Brookner adapting the screenplay of Magnolia.

The thrill of Bee Season is in the beautiful composition of the book, but don't expect to be left with any warm, fuzzy feeling.

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg, Doubleday, hc, 275pp, $32.95