When the Bees Lose Their Way

“But I would feed you with the finest of wheat, and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” The lines conclude Psalm 81, which begins with Asaph’s affirmation to “Sing for joy to God our strength.” Soon, though, Asaph describes how he “heard an unfamiliar language”: God, exasperated, speaking to the Jewish people.

Especially when juxtaposed with the prosaic first clause, the second clause is both enigmatic and enticing. Roy Schoeman connects the sentiment with Psalm 34:8: “taste and see the sweetness of the Lord.” God’s words are a call, and a promise; faith would be rewarded, even under impossible circumstances.

The line appears early in Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, the debut novel by Carolyn Kuebler. For the past decade, Kuebler has been editor-in-chief of the New England Review, published at Middlebury College, where she attended as an undergraduate.

Jim Calper, a writer who has relocated from New York City to Glenville, Vermont with his wife, Sarah, encounters the quote on an apiary website. His agent has nudged him to take on a new assignment: “This is going to be big, she says. The bees are losing their way, and nobody knows why. In Europe, Brazil, California.” Best of all, “the largest apiary in the county” is “right down the road from your new house.”

Jim is skeptical of the Bible verses peppering the apiary website, but equally skeptical are David and Ruth Mitchell, the owners. David ponders how “the journalist wants an answer for what’s happening out in California. In Europe.” But the origin, David thinks, is “no mystery.” Instead, “It’s sin,” and “we’re all to blame.” While at first glance, David’s ruminations might seem like caricature, Kuebler gives her characters breadth to express themselves.

This narrative generosity is a function of her form. Liquid, Fragile, Perishable is told in epigrammatic paragraphs, spaced from each other so they arrive as vignettes. The form recalls Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen. Kuebler and Hansen’s styles differ, but their shared technique is notable: by isolating each paragraph as a disparate whole, she enables the reader to methodically accumulate senses of atmosphere and character. For example, early in the book Nell Castletown, a town resident still wracked by grief over the death of her sister thirty years prior, watches a fisherman enter the river: “The fisherman steps in deeper, and out goes a ribbon of line.” Then: “The shadow of a cloud lifts from the grass across the river. The fishing line swoops and glitters.” Finally, “She could stay here forever, with the sunshine pressing through her hair, the cool of the rock through her jeans.” While the lines might be lost within longer paragraphs, they shine isolated on their own.

Kuebler’s style enables her to bear witness to the evolving nature of relationships, how love can transcend heartache. (One character observes: “Love is not always patient and kind. Sometimes it devours you. Sometimes it’s mean and selfish. But that’s love, too, isn’t it?”) In Glenville, with “the mountains and rivers all around them,” Sarah “can be alone now in the quiet, as the sunlight warms the new cedar and a breeze shakes the trees. It’s the best kind of music, the best perfume.” Her husband is writing, and her son, Will, is home from college, and off to investigate some local hiking trails.

Will soon becomes smitten with Honey Mitchell, her “two blond braids running down her shoulders.” While Jim begins his story about the apiary, Will does whatever he can to be around Honey. Her friend, Sophie, soon becomes jealous. “Summer is like this,” she thinks. “If you don’t grab it right from the start it just floats away and nothing happens. Nothing happens and nothing happens, and yet everything happens, but to everyone else.”

Kuebler is masterful at capturing these shades of nostalgia and old-fashioned worry. Everyone in Glenville seems to be on the precipice of something, even if they’ve been crawling toward that edge for decades. Jeanne, who works at the town post office, laments: “It used to be a parade here on Fridays. I should bring chips and dip, she used to say. Everyone coming for their paychecks, stopping to talk.” Now, though, “it’s just auto-pay, auto-response, and her job on the line. Nobody wants to pay a clerk to just stand around.”

Kuebler offers David Mitchell some of the finest lines in the novel. While showing Jim what it looks like when he opens a hive, he thinks: “He feels some thrill with the miracle of it every time. The way the queen struts around among her minions, the way their antennae are constantly moving, the larvae constantly hatching, constantly working, making wax, making honey.”

Will, at first taken with Honey’s beauty, is soon taken with her song: she is an ardent believer, who pierces his collegiate skepticism. “Just some translation of a translation,” he quips, but changes his mind. “Still, it’s hard to resist the phrasing. How can you sell the land and the sky? With honey from the rock I would feed you.”

Honey baptizes Will in the river: “And she says some kind of prayer. She calls on Jesus and they both look up to the blue sky peeking through the treetops, white clouds rushing past.” Afterward, Will thinks: “This is what it is to believe in heaven and hell and everything in between. He has never felt so much peace.”

That peace is shattered when they learn that Honey is pregnant with his child, a fact that will change the course of both their lives and the lives of everyone around them. In the novel’s final quarter, many characters pray with all their souls. Liquid, Fragile, Perishable’s bombshell ending unveils the hearts of many but also holds out the possibility of redemption.