From the very outset, this book made me smile. It is humorously written, and it is clear the author is the type who likes to surprise her reader, usually by extending information in an unusual way. For example, when telling us about our protagonist, Greta’s housing arrangements, she writes,
Her housemates had started dying soon after she moved in. Sometimes they were only half-dead and twitching on the floor…She’d never thought of them as individuals, but now that they were dying, she made sure to look at each one. Such hairy bodies! Such oddly shaped eyes! Sometimes they died in pairs and seemed to be holding hands. She found them everywhere, on windowsills and countertops, in cups and drawers. Last week, she’d found one in her hairbrush.
Her housemates were sixty thousand honey bees” (p11)
It turns out Greta has a human housemate and landlady, Sabine, who seem eccentric, newly divorced and single, in her mid-fifties. When Sabine discovered the hive in her new house, she decided to keep it, in the kitchen above the ceiling which had been removed by Sabine with a sledgehammer, with an enclosure built specially for the bees. In fact, most of the characters in the book are eccentrics in some form or other, and moreover, eccentrics who are reinventing themselves wholesale. Also, everyone seems to know everyone else, and have a relationship with everyone else; when Greta has a meeting with her employer, Om, at a café, she spots 3 of his patients in one morning, and
The barista who used to date Ollie Patterson, who used to date Betsy Hanna, the famous chef who was not engaged to Peter Green, who had a kid with Punk Rock Charlotte, a former skank, who used to fuck the drummer for the Dead Kennedys but was now a herbalist, finally delivered Greta’s Americano, along with Om’s usual (p31).
Greta’s job is to transcribe Om’s therapy sessions with his patients, having moved from California, where she was a ‘pharm tech’ as she describes herself, and having broken up with her boyfriend. She has moved to Hudson, New York, where everything is a little “on the nose” (p25). Hudson, in fact, seems as much a character in this novel as any other human character,
She’d heard Hudson described as a college town without a college, or summer camp for adults, but it seemed more like a small community of expats. Everyone behaved as if they’d be banished from their native country, or had simply withdrawn allegiance, or on the lam, and now they were all living abroad, they bonded with people they never would’ve back home (p33)
Sabine tells Greta that there is not a lot of shame in Hudson, not that people don’t feel shame, but that people don’t shame each other.
The transcription which Greta is working on when the novel commences, with that of The Big Swiss. The Big Swiss is how Greta refers to this patient
because she was tall and from Switzerland, and often dressed from top to toe in white, the color of surrender (p1).
The Big Swiss is a 28 year old woman, a patient of Om’s, with plenty of quirks of her own (such as never having had an orgasm, not being able to eat anything unless it is “drowning in hot sauce, or some other intense condiment” (p2), being unable to bear anything near her face to the extent of sleeping without a pillow. Beagin takes plenty of pokes at Switzerland and the Swizz straightaway, “Her beauty was like Switzerland itself – stunning but sterile” (p1). When asked if she knows any Swiss people, Sabine says,
They are really boring and intense at the same time, which is a weird combination when you think about it” (p14).
As the novel unspools, somehow, it grows a little less interesting than its opening chapters. We follow Greta’s relationship with the Big Swiss, and there seem a lot too many references to sex throughout the novel, probably there more for comic value than anything else, but losing its shock value, and becoming neither naughty nor nice; just rather tedious eventually. It isn’t a difficult read, and well crafted enough to be easy to follow even if sometimes the details are unnecessary and detailed and rather goes on and on. It would be unfair to say the novel loses momentum as it goes, but it does lose it freshness and edge and fun. I finished it, without much trouble, but with diminishing enjoyment, rather than with growing interest and engagement. It is a feel-good novel, so at the end, there is the insertion of two miniature donkeys into the story, but they feel like they come a little late in the narrative to play much of a part. Pinon, Greta’s Jack Russell, should have been a major character, but somehow, despite the considerable air time and many descriptions, that canine character never really took off for me or seemed convincing; probably too much telling over showing.
Overall, am not sorry to have read this book, but am not looking for other books authored by Beagin either.
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