Readers Group Diary July

A readers group from London give us their thoughts on Bee Season by Myla Goldberg (Flamingo £6.99)

A brief history of the reading group

A collection of friends, and friends of friends. When the group started no-one knew everybody in the group although obviously that has changed over time. It is an all-female group. We did have a man who joined for a few sessions but a number of members felt this caused an imbalance. We were kind of expecting him to "represent" the male view and of course he couldn't do this, he could only represent his own view. It was decided that we either had to recruit more men or uninvite him. In the end we decided we didn't want the group to get too big by inviting several men so it seemed easier to stick as all women. Members are Alice, Alison, Bridie, Cathy, Clare, Fiona, Helen, Kate and sometimes Louisa - who didn't make it to this meeting.

Some of the books we have read already:

Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
A Girl's Guide to Hunting & Fishing - Melissa Bank
Regeneration - Pat Barker
Midnight in the Garden in Good and Evil - John Berendt
Armadillo - William Boyd
Jack Maggs - Peter Carey
Disgrace - J M Coetzee
Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane
Gates of Ivory - Margaret Drabble
Daniel Deronda - George Elliot
Seventh Heaven ? Alice Hoffman
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz
Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
Beloved - Toni Morrision
Larry's Party - Carol Shields
The Pilot's Wife - Anita Shreeve
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
The Way I Found Her - Rose Tremain
A Patchwork Planet - Anne Tyler

How the group works

We try to meet once a month, although this sometimes slips to six weeks. The evening is hosted by various individuals in turn. Wine and nibbles, tea/coffee and biscuits are provided by the host and there is lots of gossip and chatter as everyone arrives. Then the evening begins.

We generally start off by everyone giving a quick summary of how they felt about the book and then launch into a general discussion. The summary stage, however, isn't without interruption - if someone feels moved to raise an issue they do.

We've now been meeting for a few years, but one of the interesting things is that the views on the books continue to surprise. People who you anticipate will feel one way about a book will come out with completely the opposite point of view. Evenings that work best tend to be the ones where there is a range of views about the book. On the odd occasion when we have all loved or hated the same book the discussion seems to flounder much earlier.

The choosing of this book was prompted by members of the group hearing reviews on Radio 4.

The book

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
This is a first novel by an American and has (according to the cover) been a best seller in the US.

The plot

The book centres on the Naumann family Saul, Miriam and their children Aaron and Eliza. Saul, a former hippie, is a guitar-playing rabbi and Miriam is an uptight accountant. She cleans at odd hours in a very intense fashion. Aaron is the favoured son treated to guitar playing sessions and treatise on rabbinical law in Saul's study. Eliza feels outside the magic circle until the day she wins a spelling bee at school. She feels so inhibited and excluded that she cannot interrupt her father in his study that she just pushes the note saying that she has won the school bee and this means that she is through to the next round.

Saul's study being a mess of papers he doesn't see or acknowledge the letter. The day of the regional bee arrives and Eliza is at a loss to k now what to do. She persuades her brother to take her to the bee - and she wins. Aaron tackles his father about ignoring the letter and - all of a sudden following on from Eliza's success Saul takes her up, ignoring Aaron and concentrating on spelling lessons. Aaron feels this as a huge loss in his life as he saw himself following his father's footsteps. He feels the gap in both an emotional and a spiritual sense and goes in search of the missing bits. He tries the Christian religions but finds these ultimately unsatisfactory. Feeling lonely and depressed he meets Chali in a park and is befriended. It transpires that he is member of the Hare Krishna movement. Aaron is also undergoing the first stirrings of sex and trying to reconcile his feelings about that.

Saul has a plan for Eliza, he helps her study her spelling but at the back of his head he wants her to work her way towards shefa, a mystical, transcendent Jewish religious experience. He doesn't tell her what he is thinking but she is aware that he is keeping his true aims from her. Saul takes Eliza away for the next round of the competition leaving Miriam and Aaron at home, which is odd for all concerned. Eliza eventually misspells a word at the bee and is knocked out but Saul continues to help guide her and teach her about letters and words and permutations of letters.

In the meantime Miriam is becoming odder and odder and we discover that she is a kleptomaniac - and her desire for the perfect object is leading her into deeper and deeper trouble - she graduates from stealing from shops to breaking in and taking things from peoples' houses. She realises that s he is losing her grip and one of the ways she tries to deal with "grounding" herself is by having almost brutal sex with Saul - with her using him as an object.

Eliza is getting closer and closer to a kind of mystical experience with her spelling and the shape of words and starts sneaking peeks at some of her father's sacred texts and realises that she may be able to achieve something he wished for but was not capable of.

Aaron is spending more and more time with the Hare Krishnas and begins to feel more at ease with himself and at home there than he does with his own family. He is rowing continually with his father and discord abounds at home.

Miriam is eventually caught stealing, and she reveals that she has been keeping everything she has stolen in a lock-up. She has carefully positioned it all like a work of art. She is taken into hospital rather than jailed and the family is being torn apart. Eliza finally reaches her transcendent state and Aaron and her father try to patch things up but fail. The book ends with Eliza entering the following year's bee and she is instantly knocked out for a misspelling.

The discussion

Alice hadn't read the book and sat slumped in a corner ingesting mini naan breads and making cups of tea for the rest of us!!! Another member hadn't quite finished the book. Everyone said they mostly like the book although several people had difficulty with the ending, which was discussed more fully later.

The general consensus was that it was a dark book, although there were passages of entertaining light relief. One of the things that Cathy particularly liked was how it started off in a very domestic situation in a very ordinary way but gradually drew you in until you couldn't escape - and that because it had all been so gradual that it took you with it and it was all very believable.

Several people owned up to the fact that they knew very little about Jewish philosophical and religious teachings and wondered how accurate a representation they were. This led to a general discussion about the part that religion played in people's upbringing and whether this made any difference to the way they read the book. Alison, who came from a non-believing household, found some of the excesses of Saul, Eliza and Aaron hard to stomach whereas others could see how Aaron got swept along with his wanting. The three people who were most unfazed by the religiosity of it all were two people who had been brought up Catholic and one high Anglican.

Alison raised the issue that it was interesting for us to see the Hare Krishna movement portrayed in a positive light. Aaron really does feel at home there, he does make true friends which he had singularly been unable to do. He was able to feel "free" in a way he couldn't outside t his situation. This was in contrast to the common perception that it was akin to brainwashing and verging on a cult.

But it was felt that the whole family suffered from similar problems they all were isolated and searching for something to fill some kind of internal hole. All desperate to communicate but all flailing around in a morass.

Cathy put it like this; "It is about dysfunctional, lonely people, all isolated from each other, although father and daughter ironically develop an affinity with each other based on language, but it struck me, not to communicate, but as a rather dry, academic thing, to analyse. Of course Eliza uses it to escape reality and reach a different spiritual plane."

Clare pointed out the real human need in all of them, which somehow they all failed to meet. They singularly fail to connect.

Poignancy was a recurring theme, from Aaron's vision of God being the wing lights of an aeroplane to Miriam's kaleidoscope and the shirt for the competition.

Bridie liked the way that very occasionally you saw the same scene from two points of view and this gave you a piercing view of their isolation in particular between Aaron and his father who manage to mis-time their efforts to reforge their formerly strong bond. Another example of this was the fight scene at school where Aaron gets beaten up and Eliza witnesses - which fundamentally changes their relationship. This led to some discussion about relationships with our own brothers and also family dynamics and who, growing up, we thought to be our parents' favourite child.

Miriam was discussed at great length - whether she was a believable character or not. Alison said she wondered where she was in the first p art of the book and felt that she was somewhat of a cypher. But Clare felt that this worked because as the book went on and you found out more about her that the absence made sense - reflecting her emotional and mental distance from the rest of the family. A couple of people had difficulty with Miriam's need for sex feeling that it didn't match her psychology for example her endless cleaning. But others felt that this worked quite well - like the scene with the spike at the end of the film The Pawnbroker - almost making herself feel pain in order to feel anything at all.

Fiona thought that the questions raised by the oddity of the couple were then successfully answered by the backward looking sections about Miriam and Saul's early life and courtship - a how we got here from there - and revealed how the attraction arose.

Everyone was bewitched by the idea of her lock-up and wanted to see it. The descriptions were fabulous and Alison raised the idea that some artist ought to recreate it as an installation.

Cathy loved the writing she felt that the descriptions were fantastic: Miriam driving around these depressing, empty suburbs and entering stranger's houses; the warehouse where she keeps her stolen treasures.

Kate raised the issue of Eliza's name and suggested that there were overtones of pygmalion and Eliza Doolittle in the book. This then prompted a long discussion about the ending of the book - whether it was positive or negative, hopeful or depressing. Alison said that she had had real trouble reading the section where Eliza goes into her transcendent state- almost to the point where she put the book down to read it in daylight.

Bridie too had trouble with this passage feeling that it was so far out of her experience it seemed unreal, but accepting that Eliza could almost be in a trance-like state. She also felt that she didn't know enough about Jewish religious teachings to know how true any of this was. Clare really liked the writing in this passage.

Bridie then went on to raise the issue of Eliza's misspelling - she thought it was a deliberate act to try to get the family - and herself - back on an even keel. Several present thought that her head was so mixed up by the permutations of letters that she had just made a mistake and it hadn't occurred to them as a possibility that it was a deliberate act. Bridie pointed out a couple of phrases that seemed to point to the possibility of her deliberately choosing to lose. The talk then moved on to what her motivation for this would be: trying to bring the family back from the abyss to some kind of order, trying to level off things again between herself and Aaron by being no longer special, to shake off her father's intense attention and possible jealousy ? Talk also focused on what might happen after the book.

The general consensus was that we had enjoyed reading the book and would recommend it to others.

The next book

We then went on to have an extremely long discussion about what book we wanted to read next. Alice said that as the recent things we had read had been by women she wanted to read something by a man.

Various suggestions were proffered and dismissed but in the end we decided on Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Douglas Parmee, £7.99 in Penguin, despite Clare's reluctance to read things in translation.