Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. Doubleday; 275 pp. $22.95. ISBN: 0385498799

***

Few American novelists concern themselves with obsessions that aren't sexual, especially the obsession to know God. Myla Goldberg's precisely rendered and highly original first novel, Bee Season, is obsessed with divine obsession. The result is a gripping, if not quite believable, portrait of a family whose members are able to see God's face more clearly than the face of the husband, wife or child sitting across from them at the breakfast table.

The novel's protagonist, Eliza Naumann, is the sort of little girl whose powers are not visible even to herself, let alone to her teachers. Despite her parents' brilliance she is relegated to a dreary classroom for mediocre fifth-graders. Only by accident does anyone discover Eliza's genius forspelling. She doesn't just memorize the words; she has such otherworldly concentration she need only close her eyes and the letters line up and dance into formation.

Until she qualifies for the national spelling bee in Washington, D.C., Eliza is all but ignored by her father. In his youth, Saul Naumann disappointed his father by regressing from the family's assimilated American everymanism to its Orthodox Jewish past. After trying to attain transcendence through LSD, sex and the kabbalah – mystical writings, Saul settles for a job as the guitar-strumming cantor at a synagogue run by a much stricter rabbi ("Rabbi Mayer is the dentist, Saul is the congregation's lollipop reward for having kept their appointment"). Talk about frustration. Saul is a would-be mystic who can't achieve even the lowest rung of the ladder to the divine described in his books, a Don Juan who marries a woman too fastidious for sex.

Miriam, Saul's wife, grew up as the only child of wealthy parents who interpreted her eccentricities as signs of precocious genius and "insist(ed) she be humored to facilitate her intellectual growth." One day, playing hopscotch, Miriam discovers the joy of tossing a stone in the exact center of a square. Soon afterward, she steals a pink rubber ball that comes to represent a flawless world she names "Perfectimundo." Somehow, from these beginnings, Miriam grows up to be a lawyer who believes that she can make the world whole by pocketing trinkets from stores and strangers' houses.

With Miriam off on her crime spree and Saul tutoring Eliza in the techniques of an obscure Jewish mystic who promises his followers an encounter with the divine if they permute the letters of Hebrew words, Eliza's brother, Aaron, is left on his own. Not surprisingly, Aaron also has claims to spiritual precocity, having experienced, at his Bar Mitzvah, his own version of grace.

Unable to recreate this oneness in adolescence, Aaron shops for another religion, eventually finding what he seeks with a Hare Krishna sect. In one of the novel's most beautiful moments, Eliza thinks she hears her brother chanting "hairy, hairy," a mistake that exposes a deeper truth, given that Aaron is using meditation to escape his discomfort with his own newly hirsute body.

Bee Season's strength lies in Goldberg's uncanny knowledge of the odd but touching ways in which bright, inward children confuse their need to feel special in the eyes of their peers and parents with their need to feel special in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, the adults in Bee Season aren't as convincing as their offspring. Only a lunatic would pressure his fifth-grader into pursuing a spiritual state whose attainment would flood her with the "divine influx," weakening her external and internal organs so her "entire body will begin to tremble" until she thinks she is about to die.

At best, such a bizarre line of study would leave a child unhinged and estranged from other kids. And how could any man remain clueless – for a decade – as to his wife's daily whereabouts?

Though Goldberg masterfully shifts her novel's point of view from character to character, she keeps us in the dark as to Miriam's true activities until the novel's end. Because we have been privy to Miriam's thoughts from the start, this withholding of information seems a trick. And Miriam's motivations, once revealed, seem more intellectually necessary than emotionally true. People may become kleptomaniacs for many reasons, but taking to heart a line from the kabbalah probably isn't one of them.

Novels need not be realistic. But investing every character in a novel with mystical pretensions channels the reader into a thematically overdetermined realm where it's difficult to breathe. Myla Goldberg is a terrifically smart, acutely talented writer. But in pushing her themes too hard, she has given Bee Season an overwrought, claustrophobic tone that keeps us from achieving the wisdom and transcendence we might otherwise have reached.