A Recipe for Bees

Gail Anderson-Dargatz

At first, A Recipe for Bees has the look and feel of your typical dysfunctional family novel. Augusta Olsen, traveling home from the hospital where her son-in-law is being operated on after a seizure-induced stroke, ends up getting off the train at the wrong stop to use the rest room. The train goes on without her, and Augusta calls her next-door neighbor, Rose to come pick her up. While Rose is driving her home, and after they get there, Augusta tells Rose and Karl, Augusta’s husband, a number of stories about Augusta and Karl’s lives up to this point, interspersed with present-day events and reflections on things she’d rather not talk about aloud. While there is dysfunction in evidence all around, there are snatches of writing here and there that alert the reader that this isn’t your typical novel; Anderson-Dargatz is capable of much more than the average Oprah-zombie dysfunction novel of the week.

Those moments of inspired, poetic writing are few, however, and some of them are easily missed in the greater scheme of things. A Recipe for Bees is one of the most difficult kinds of novels to read, a book with almost no pace to it that demands all the concentration the reader can give it. The first few chapters, especially, are quite difficult to get through. Once you’ve got a sense of the characters, the book gets more engrossing, and eventually it does give the distinct feeling that Anderson-Dargatz will eventually write the novels that will put her on a par with fellow Canadian authors Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman. A Recipe for Bees isn’t one of them, but years from now, scholars will come back to it and call it a formative novel.

I’ll be looking forward to reading more of Anderson-Dargatz’ work.