THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

I found this book to be absorbing at times and aggravating at times.  The Barnes family is a fairly affluent family until they fall on hard times.  Then family secrets start to emerge, and each family member struggles with a different problem that they, for whatever reason, refuse to share with the very people who could help them.  Dickie, the father/husband, is running his father’s car dealership, and some would say he is running it into the ground, as customers discover that someone in his shop is stealing their catalytic converters.  Cass, the daughter, plans to attend Trinity College but doesn’t act like it with her excessive drinking.  PJ, the son, is being bullied and shaken down for money he doesn’t have.  Finally, we have Imelda, the beautiful wife/mother, who comes from poverty and an abusive father.  Each family member’s story is heartbreaking in its own way, and Imelda’s rather lengthy story just about drove me crazy, since it has zero punctuation marks.  These are just not the kind of people I would normally want to spend 600+ pages with, as they felt a little too real, and not in a good way.  However, except for Imelda’s sections, which actually I finally became more or less accustomed to, this book is very readable, although it is, I think, overly and unnecessarily long.  The author keeps the reader guessing about a lot of things, and that uncertainty propels the individual storylines ultimately toward a convergence.  This was not a book that I was eager to get back to, but it was a book that I couldn’t stop thinking about.