Paul Murray's The Bee Sting Buzzes Incessantly with Sorrow

Paul Murray's novel "The Bee Sting" hones in on the Barnes family in rural Ireland. Dad, Dickie runs the family's floundering car dealership, daughter Cass is finishing her senior year of high school in a downward drunken spiral, precocious younger brother PJ spouts trivial scientific facts, and mom is the queen bee and town beauty Imelda. These facts are only a mere foundation of this disturbing and comical fictitious family. The family flits around each other while being more drawn outside their own hive. Each character is given a full blown examination. All four are intoxicating in their own way, wrought with their own poor decisions making and obsessions. Murray's skillful depictions give the reader a keen sense of their afflictions. While engrossing, the reader becomes ensnared and beholden to all the drama brewing towards its tempest, payback karma. Along for the ride, we learn Dickie's and Imelda's back stories which raise their tormented heads. "The past hung in the present like smoke in the air, like vapor trails, fading out slowly." Dickie grew up in a wealthy family with a much beloved younger brother Frank.  Dickie's days at Trinity come back to haunt him. His malleability makes you want to shake your head (or his) in frustration. He spends his time and resources with his handyman, a survivalist at war with the world building a bunker. Imelda grew up in poverty, the only girl in a household of brutish men. Imelda was rescued from her hellish household by an elderly spinster with mystical powers. She was betrothed to Frank before her marriage to Dickie. Cass' consuming fixation on her frenemy Eileen is pathetic and self-destructive. Lastly, innocent PJ is left untended to fend for himself. He misguidedly thinks he's found salvation in a friend online.  As distressing and convoluted as this portends, there's plenty to cheer in the darkly humorous observations that illuminate the insanity of life in all its mutations. Dickie realized "You couldn't protect the people you loved - that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering." Overall I found the novel a trial of endurance. The buzzing plot is festooned in a malaise of lugubriousness that deviates into a myriad of mazes that churn incessantly.  Reading Murray's encumbered novel was a "a kind of Purgatory, a weird, interstitial space between one world and the next, filled with peripheral figures from the past, the kind of marginal acquaintances that turn up in dreams."