The unthinkable end of growth: family time in Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting

This article argues that Paul Murray’s 2023 novel The Bee Sting forges a deep connection between the unsustainability of economic growth and the unsustainability of the nuclear family form. By tracking Murray’s borrowings from, and revisions of, different traditions of the family novel – the realism of Jonathan Franzen, the modernism of William Faulkner, the genre horror of Stephen King – the article proposes that in its thematics and formal innovations, The Bee Sting links the ‘degrowth communism’ proposed by eco-Marxists to the ‘family abolition’ associated with feminist and queer thinkers. Murray’s novel goes further than either of these brands of radical thought, moreover, in considering the implications of degrowth for the family and of the family for degrowth. ‘If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, quips Sophie Lewis, riffing on Fredric Jameson, ‘it is still perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family’. By pushing the family novel to its limit and beyond, The Bee Sting invites its readers to imagine the end of capitalism and the family together, in the hope that it is not yet too late to avoid the end of the world.