On Paul Murray's "The Bee Sting"

Major spoilers for "The Bee Sting" ahead.

I finished Paul Murray's "tragicomedy" (as the inside jacket insists) "The Bee Sting" last week, largely disappointed. There's a naked, hunchback plot that, pressed upon The Barnes Family, overtakes any narrative curses laid at their feet.

Dickie's repressed sexuality, for example, reads mechanical, a gear implemented for other pieces of the novel to progress—if Dickie wasn't gay, he wouldn't cheat with his mechanic, who videotapes the tryst for blackmail, which sends Dickie inward, confiding in Victor, who offers the gun Dickie may fire to accidentally kill his own children. Cass suffers the same cog-making. With infinite conflicts available—best friends living together for the first time in college—Murray welds the characters into a tired framework of unrequited love. Even PJ gains a newfound and seedless fear of, um, things changing when they're gone (?), that lays the tracks for him and Cass to return to the Bunker together.

At a point, every plot is a series of actions and consequences, but "The Bee Sting" is just so blunt about it.

Also, if you're going to foreshadow a father killing his own family in the first sentence of your novel, do as all a fucking favor and actually go through with it. The ambiguous ending is a cop-out from a frightened author.

I also did not like the 150 pages without punctuation or its threadbare symbolism.