A family falls apart in beguiling ‘The Bee Sting’

To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous sentence: Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, one member a punching bag for frustrations and grievances. In Paul Murray’s layered, beguiling “The Bee Sting,” 12-year-old PJ Barnes is that bag, absorbing emotional blows from his parents and older sister as their fortunes plummet. Long considered well-to-do in provincial Midland Ireland, the Barneses must confront gossip and vendettas, circling like buzzards. The Booker Prize-longlisted novel unpacks their flaws and frailties.

Dickie Barnes can only stare in disbelief as his car dealership tanks amid a recession. His ambitious daughter Cass has her sights on Trinity College, but cracks beneath teenaged social pressures. His wife, Imelda, still a looker, has amassed a wealth of fine clothes. She’s selling her wares online, hoping to drum up cash.

Then there’s PJ, always underfoot and annoying everyone. Terrified by his family’s disintegration, stalked by a bully, he plans to run away to Dublin, where he would stay with Ethan, a friend he knows only through gaming and texts. (Whether Ethan is a peer or a predator looms over “The Bee Sting” like a nimbus cloud.) Both PJ and his father are drawn to a shed in the woods behind their house, but for different reasons: PJ seeks sanctuary while Dickie repurposes it as a survivalist bunker. Both yearn to escape critical, suffocating Imelda.

The Barneses’ marriage is haunted by a ghost: Dickie’s brother Frank, the golden boy who’d been betrothed to Imelda until tragedy intervened. Susceptible to the romantic overtures of nouveau-riche “Big Mike” Comerford, Imelda commands each scene she’s in. Dickie moves like a zombie, affectless, wiped clean by business failures and the controlling hand of his retired father.

“The Bee Sting,” charts a clan drowning beneath a tide of calamity; Murray is unsparing in vivisecting his characters. But even as the Barneses spiral downward, his prose pops from the page, precise and piquant, biting in its gallows humor. He’s astonishingly versatile, tapping internet influences, stream-of-consciousness technique and social realism.