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Skippy Dies
Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin’s venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?
Or could “the Automator”—the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school—have something to hide?
Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin “MC Sexecutioner” Flynn to basketballplaying midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?
Or could “the Automator”—the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school—have something to hide?
Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin “MC Sexecutioner” Flynn to basketballplaying midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.
672 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Paul Murray
15 books1,455 followersPaul Murray is an Irish novelist. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has written two novels: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003, and nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award) and Skippy Dies (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction).
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July 28, 2022
Skippy Dies is a work of genius. Where else could you combine a coming-of-age tale with string theory, ancient Celtic mythology with fart humor, consideration of cultural forgetfulness with Druid drug dealers (say that five times fast), a look at adulthood as a continuation of adolescence with better tools but less hope, substance abuse of sundry sorts, from doughnuts to diet pills, from weed to heroin and cocaine, from sexual predation to the hormonal cravings of early adolescence to self-cutting? It may sound like too much but it all hangs together in its own entire and discrete dimension. Did I say that I laughed out loud many, many times? Did I say that I loved, loved, loved this book?
Paul Murray
Seabrook College, serving as our societal microcosm, is a six-year school in more-or-less contemporary Ireland, before larcenous corporate entities got all their wishes and left Ireland with an empty pot and no gold at all. Daniel “Skippy” Juster, who does indeed die in an opening scene, is a charming 14-year old with a hankering for a sweet thing named Lori. That is short for Lorelie, so break out your Vah-gner. Howard “The Coward” Fallon, a young teacher in a bad relationship, pines for an alluring substitute named Aurelie, which, I guess, makes her a golden variation on the theme. Can Skippy and/or Howard keep from being dashed on the rocks? The imagery of classical sirens resounds throughout the novel.
Ruprecht is Skippy’s genius, overweight roommate. He is very interested in string theory, particularly the notion of a possible eleventh dimension (don’t ask) and concocts experiments to test out his theories. That loud noise you hear might be Ruprecht attempting to transport matter into an alternate dimension. He has tales to tell about his parents, supposedly lost while kayaking in the Amazon. He plays the French Horn as well, and may be a bit too wedded to his analyses.
Carl is a troubled Columbine candidate, with a toxic home life and a host of friends one would definitely call the wrong sort. He deals drugs to students, and may sample the product a bit too much. He was obsessed with Lori before Skippy came along. Uh oh.
There is also a large cast of wise-cracking boys (mostly) who will definitely tickle your funny bone with their very witty, pun-soaked and profane banter, and creative nicknames for each other and adults as well. (My personal faves were “Pere Vert” for Father Green on the adult side and Kevin “What’s” Wong for student entries) Their conversations and their concerns make them very real, even if we do not spend a lot of time with most of them. For all you boys out there, Skippy offers plenty of scatological humor, although, being a very-over-age adolescent, there can never be quite enough for me. :-) Murray has a keen ear for the rhythm, tone and degrees of snarkiness these kids exude, leading one to think that either he recalls extremely well his time at the actual school on which Seabrook is based, or part of him never graduated.
The story opens with Skippy’s demise, then works up to that event from the past. Skippy has a lot to deal with. His swim coach is after him to shape up, for, among other reasons, Skippy is a natural in the pool. He is slack-jawed at the sight of Lori and struggles to establish a relationship with her, all the while being tormented by his romantic rival, the ominous, thuggish and maybe addled Carl. Add to that a mother dying of cancer and a father who can spare him no attention. Have a nice life. Oh, sorry. Once up to Skippy’s passing, the story continues, looking at how both teens and adults cope.
I was blown away by this book. I loved the characters, the story was compelling and the payload was considerable. I hated to put the thing down, or in this case, for the battery to run out, as I was reading it on a Nook. There is quite a bit of paralleling here about various sorts of dimensions that exist in close proximity to each other spatially or chronologically. There is a consideration of the Irish role in World War I and the subsequent national attitude about that, as well as how events in one’s personal past can define history on an individual basis, even if they might be somewhat misremembered, whether by design or not. Failure and redemption coexist nicely here. Growth and stasis as well. There is a look into string theory, which is a pretty neat trick, ancient religions and alternate dimensions occupy close turf as well.
A school filled with rambunctious teenaged-boys would be incomplete without the predictable evil principal. He remains a cardboard figure here, acting as the designated uber-schmuck to all around him. Think Dean Wormer from Animal House. He also personifies, beyond his cartoonish darkness, a more meaningful bleakness, voicing certain beliefs that most reasonable people would find troubling. There is also a very Snape-like priest, with a dark secret of his own, wandering the halls.
You will love Skippy and his bright-light roommate Ruprecht. Murray even gives us reasons to care about some of the unpleasant and damaged people who appear. You will laugh and you will cry. And you will never be able to think of Frost’s The Road Not Taken the same way again. With Skippy Dies Murray has proven, for any who might doubt it, that there is plenty of room for uproarious laughter in a work of great literature. Skippy Dies? I don’t think so. Skippy will live forever.
First posted - March 2011
PS - This is the review I wish I had written - from the NY Times
Here is another
I enjoyed the following interview with Murray from The Paris Review
Paul Murray
Seabrook College, serving as our societal microcosm, is a six-year school in more-or-less contemporary Ireland, before larcenous corporate entities got all their wishes and left Ireland with an empty pot and no gold at all. Daniel “Skippy” Juster, who does indeed die in an opening scene, is a charming 14-year old with a hankering for a sweet thing named Lori. That is short for Lorelie, so break out your Vah-gner. Howard “The Coward” Fallon, a young teacher in a bad relationship, pines for an alluring substitute named Aurelie, which, I guess, makes her a golden variation on the theme. Can Skippy and/or Howard keep from being dashed on the rocks? The imagery of classical sirens resounds throughout the novel.
Ruprecht is Skippy’s genius, overweight roommate. He is very interested in string theory, particularly the notion of a possible eleventh dimension (don’t ask) and concocts experiments to test out his theories. That loud noise you hear might be Ruprecht attempting to transport matter into an alternate dimension. He has tales to tell about his parents, supposedly lost while kayaking in the Amazon. He plays the French Horn as well, and may be a bit too wedded to his analyses.
Carl is a troubled Columbine candidate, with a toxic home life and a host of friends one would definitely call the wrong sort. He deals drugs to students, and may sample the product a bit too much. He was obsessed with Lori before Skippy came along. Uh oh.
There is also a large cast of wise-cracking boys (mostly) who will definitely tickle your funny bone with their very witty, pun-soaked and profane banter, and creative nicknames for each other and adults as well. (My personal faves were “Pere Vert” for Father Green on the adult side and Kevin “What’s” Wong for student entries) Their conversations and their concerns make them very real, even if we do not spend a lot of time with most of them. For all you boys out there, Skippy offers plenty of scatological humor, although, being a very-over-age adolescent, there can never be quite enough for me. :-) Murray has a keen ear for the rhythm, tone and degrees of snarkiness these kids exude, leading one to think that either he recalls extremely well his time at the actual school on which Seabrook is based, or part of him never graduated.
The story opens with Skippy’s demise, then works up to that event from the past. Skippy has a lot to deal with. His swim coach is after him to shape up, for, among other reasons, Skippy is a natural in the pool. He is slack-jawed at the sight of Lori and struggles to establish a relationship with her, all the while being tormented by his romantic rival, the ominous, thuggish and maybe addled Carl. Add to that a mother dying of cancer and a father who can spare him no attention. Have a nice life. Oh, sorry. Once up to Skippy’s passing, the story continues, looking at how both teens and adults cope.
I was blown away by this book. I loved the characters, the story was compelling and the payload was considerable. I hated to put the thing down, or in this case, for the battery to run out, as I was reading it on a Nook. There is quite a bit of paralleling here about various sorts of dimensions that exist in close proximity to each other spatially or chronologically. There is a consideration of the Irish role in World War I and the subsequent national attitude about that, as well as how events in one’s personal past can define history on an individual basis, even if they might be somewhat misremembered, whether by design or not. Failure and redemption coexist nicely here. Growth and stasis as well. There is a look into string theory, which is a pretty neat trick, ancient religions and alternate dimensions occupy close turf as well.
A school filled with rambunctious teenaged-boys would be incomplete without the predictable evil principal. He remains a cardboard figure here, acting as the designated uber-schmuck to all around him. Think Dean Wormer from Animal House. He also personifies, beyond his cartoonish darkness, a more meaningful bleakness, voicing certain beliefs that most reasonable people would find troubling. There is also a very Snape-like priest, with a dark secret of his own, wandering the halls.
You will love Skippy and his bright-light roommate Ruprecht. Murray even gives us reasons to care about some of the unpleasant and damaged people who appear. You will laugh and you will cry. And you will never be able to think of Frost’s The Road Not Taken the same way again. With Skippy Dies Murray has proven, for any who might doubt it, that there is plenty of room for uproarious laughter in a work of great literature. Skippy Dies? I don’t think so. Skippy will live forever.
First posted - March 2011
PS - This is the review I wish I had written - from the NY Times
Here is another
I enjoyed the following interview with Murray from The Paris Review
September 21, 2010
I'm the product of an Irish Catholic boarding school for boys. In September 1968, at the tender age of 11, I left the warm (over-)protective bosom of home and family -- not just one, but two grandmothers, and a housekeeper to fuss over me while my mother saw patients -- and became one of the 80 or so boys in the first year class at a Franciscan boarding school, about 25 miles north of Dublin, and 160 miles from home. The experience, particularly the first year, was incredibly brutal*. But it was also entirely necessary, and completely transformative. I can trace back almost all of what I consider to be my defining character traits to that first year at Gormanston. I wouldn't consider the time I spent at boarding school the "best years" of my life, but it was definitely formative. The survival strategies I learned there pretty much set the pattern for the rest of my life.
So I approached Skippy Dies with reservations, and a certain amount of trepidation. The defining characteristic of life in a boys' boarding school is tedium - would Paul Murray be able to capture the tedium accurately and still write an interesting book? Would reading it stir up a bunch of memories best left undisturbed? And could the book possibly live up to the considerable hype that it has generated?
It turned out to be pretty amazing. Paul Murray does indeed get boarding school life down right - he completely nails it. His more significant accomplishment is to have written a book whose appeal transcends the specificity of its setting. Skippy Dies is a sprawling, ambitious doorstopper of a book, with an extensive cast of characters (jocks, nerds, priests, lay teachers, parents, drug dealers, psychopaths), not unlike a Dickens story. Fortunately, Murray has the skill to bring these assorted character to life and to tell a story that grabs and keeps the reader's interest.
The main focus of the book is to present the events that led up to the death of 14 year old Skippy and to explore its effect on the school community. Along the way, Murray considers a huge variety of disparate themes, ranging from string theory to ancient Irish burial mounds to trench warfare in World War I. Not to mention the pervasive adolescent obsession with sex. At times it seems as if these are mere digressions in a book that's already quite hefty, but the author knows what he's about, and pulls the various threads of his tapestry together to a powerful and satisfying conclusion. With so many balls in the air, you keep expecting him to crash and burn, but he doesn't -- the writing is superb throughout, the story never flags, you don't want it to stop and are a little bit sad when it does.
What do we ask of a good novel? A question with as many answers as readers (a pointless question if you live in Toronto and are called Buck). I take a slightly old-fashioned view. If an author can create a vividly imagined world, make me care about his characters, and tell a good story that moves me, then I'm a happy camper. Paul Murray does all of these things in this terrific book, and does them so brilliantly that the story transcends the specificity of its particular milieu. Other reviewers have suggested that the book is likely to appeal only to male readers - I couldn't disagree more.
This is a terrific book. The Man Booker judges should hang their heads in shame for their failure to include it on this year's shortlist.
*factors that worked against me included my age (at least 2 years younger than anyone else in my class), my generally spastic performance at all sports (even more unforgivable was my unwillingness to even pretend to care about sports) and - fatally - showing up on the first day only to realize that I was the only kid in the school still outfitted in short pants. I might as well have had a "KICK ME" sign around my neck - my mother carried her guilt about this rare misstep with her to her grave.
So I approached Skippy Dies with reservations, and a certain amount of trepidation. The defining characteristic of life in a boys' boarding school is tedium - would Paul Murray be able to capture the tedium accurately and still write an interesting book? Would reading it stir up a bunch of memories best left undisturbed? And could the book possibly live up to the considerable hype that it has generated?
It turned out to be pretty amazing. Paul Murray does indeed get boarding school life down right - he completely nails it. His more significant accomplishment is to have written a book whose appeal transcends the specificity of its setting. Skippy Dies is a sprawling, ambitious doorstopper of a book, with an extensive cast of characters (jocks, nerds, priests, lay teachers, parents, drug dealers, psychopaths), not unlike a Dickens story. Fortunately, Murray has the skill to bring these assorted character to life and to tell a story that grabs and keeps the reader's interest.
The main focus of the book is to present the events that led up to the death of 14 year old Skippy and to explore its effect on the school community. Along the way, Murray considers a huge variety of disparate themes, ranging from string theory to ancient Irish burial mounds to trench warfare in World War I. Not to mention the pervasive adolescent obsession with sex. At times it seems as if these are mere digressions in a book that's already quite hefty, but the author knows what he's about, and pulls the various threads of his tapestry together to a powerful and satisfying conclusion. With so many balls in the air, you keep expecting him to crash and burn, but he doesn't -- the writing is superb throughout, the story never flags, you don't want it to stop and are a little bit sad when it does.
What do we ask of a good novel? A question with as many answers as readers (a pointless question if you live in Toronto and are called Buck). I take a slightly old-fashioned view. If an author can create a vividly imagined world, make me care about his characters, and tell a good story that moves me, then I'm a happy camper. Paul Murray does all of these things in this terrific book, and does them so brilliantly that the story transcends the specificity of its particular milieu. Other reviewers have suggested that the book is likely to appeal only to male readers - I couldn't disagree more.
This is a terrific book. The Man Booker judges should hang their heads in shame for their failure to include it on this year's shortlist.
*factors that worked against me included my age (at least 2 years younger than anyone else in my class), my generally spastic performance at all sports (even more unforgivable was my unwillingness to even pretend to care about sports) and - fatally - showing up on the first day only to realize that I was the only kid in the school still outfitted in short pants. I might as well have had a "KICK ME" sign around my neck - my mother carried her guilt about this rare misstep with her to her grave.
April 8, 2019
skippy dies on the first page of this book.
then there are 600 pages of buildup and aftermath.
it has been compared to Infinite Jest,which i can see, but i also feel it is a good companion-piece to The Instructions. all three of these books (IJ only in part) focus on adolescents who are in school/boarding school environments that use genuinely funny (as opposed to manipulative-funny) humor to offset the horrors of youth and its incipient discoveries. they all have elements of the absurd, of the near-slapstick spectacle, and each book's action revolves around a troubled holden caulfield-type of character whose actions propel the narrative. in the instructions, the characters all revolve around gurion, and infinite jest, the characters satellite hal. but what further links all these books, to my mind, is the strength of the supporting characters.
i am trying not to digress too much into a discussion of the comparison-pieces, so i will try to focus on the characters in this one here.
mario is fantastic, in his would-be lothario role, and there is something that should be gross but in this book is very funny, about a bunch of virgin boys sitting around and talking/boasting about sex. it is like when tobias talks about "the clatter" of his wife's breasts.
you just want to kind of pat them on the head, until you realize they are staring at your chest and you have to slowly back away.
dennis is another favorite of mine. he is so cynically realistic, so already-figured-it-out, you can't help but feel sympathy for him and recognize that his acerbity is a response to what shiny youth-hope he has already shrugged off.
ruprecht, obviously.
but the best are the scenes with all the boys together. their banter, their rapid-fire patter, the casually innocent homophobic remarks and endless dick-jokes of boys at that age, the "your mom" jokes, the giggling over the word "mound." (okay, i giggled, too.)
standout moments: patrick "da knowledge" noonan and eoin "MC sexecutioner" flynn's audition for the school concert. i spoil-tag it, because i think it is nice to have the option.
which is funny enough, just in the wide-eyed belief that this material would be suitable for a concert at a catholic boy's school, but the real hearttwist comes, for me, when the program(me) is announced:
'Did we get in?' Eoin 'MC Sexecutioner' Flynn asks anxiously, stuck at the back of the crowd examining the board.
Patrick 'Da Knowledge' Noonan scans the list again, then, scowling, turns away. 'No.'
'We didn't?' Eoin is shocked.
'What did you expect, man?' Patrick throws up his hands at him. 'Take a look at the programme, it's wall-to-wall Whitey!'
ah, the sweet optimism of youth. and the sweet racial dysmorphia, as both eoin and patrick are unhappily white themselves.
obviously the dance is another great moment, and what the dance devolves into, but those are the big show-stopping scenes. there are also amazing quiet scenes, like the fear of jelly. and more serious matters, like tom's secret, and what it does to howard, and the criminal way it is handled by the school, and just the fact that the situation subverts expectations in a surprising way, and then allows those expectations to play out to a conclusion in a way which perpetrates those expectations to the public-at-large without justice. this makes no sense if you haven't read the book, and probably maybe even no sense to you if you have, because i am trying to dance around the spoiler-flames here, and it's too juicy to spoiler-tag, because i know you people are drawn to those like a trail of breadcrumbs.
but - god - for all its humor, this book is so freaking sad. it's about all the Big Things, like how we never really know anybody, or appreciate the ones we should, about the disconnect that occurs between adolescence and adulthood, about the wide-eyed optimism of youth that slowly gets stripped away. about betrayal and the inability to confess, to communicate, to speak. this is probably where the connection to infinite jest is the strongest; the wounded shutting-down.
and then all the ways we try to cope with life:
drugs, romance, grasping at straws, charity, music, science, cutting, anorexia, pregnancy - anything to try to feel or to escape. (also very IJ-y)
it would be a bleak little book if not for the sheer lyrical momentum of it. paul murray's got a great sense of pacing, both in the unspooling of the story, and in the tonal pacing. it is never allowed to get too bleak or too frivolous - he manages the mood very well.
it's true that the female characters in this book kind of get the short end of the stick. (this is not meant to be a "penis envy" joke) they are less characters as stand-ins for ideals, mostly just there to embody the robert graves-idea of the white goddess and the black goddess;their role is just to affect the male characters, but this doesn't really hinder the story, unless you are someone for whom "the way females are represented" takes precedence over, you know, the story itself.
this is a great book, and one that is hard to review. it perfectly describes the conflicting teenage desires to grow up, while still clinging to brittle vestiges of innocence, and then flipsides it with the adult characters and their painfully-familiar nostalgia over their own lost youth, all in a bigger story about the search for truth in history and in present-day life.
there are so many elements i didn't even get to touch on: celtic mythology, the dark shadow of carl, donuts, scary drug dealers, pop music tarts... i encourage you to read it and tell me what else i forgot to even mention.
oh, and spoiler: skippy dies.
come to my blog!
then there are 600 pages of buildup and aftermath.
it has been compared to Infinite Jest,which i can see, but i also feel it is a good companion-piece to The Instructions. all three of these books (IJ only in part) focus on adolescents who are in school/boarding school environments that use genuinely funny (as opposed to manipulative-funny) humor to offset the horrors of youth and its incipient discoveries. they all have elements of the absurd, of the near-slapstick spectacle, and each book's action revolves around a troubled holden caulfield-type of character whose actions propel the narrative. in the instructions, the characters all revolve around gurion, and infinite jest, the characters satellite hal. but what further links all these books, to my mind, is the strength of the supporting characters.
i am trying not to digress too much into a discussion of the comparison-pieces, so i will try to focus on the characters in this one here.
mario is fantastic, in his would-be lothario role, and there is something that should be gross but in this book is very funny, about a bunch of virgin boys sitting around and talking/boasting about sex. it is like when tobias talks about "the clatter" of his wife's breasts.
you just want to kind of pat them on the head, until you realize they are staring at your chest and you have to slowly back away.
dennis is another favorite of mine. he is so cynically realistic, so already-figured-it-out, you can't help but feel sympathy for him and recognize that his acerbity is a response to what shiny youth-hope he has already shrugged off.
ruprecht, obviously.
but the best are the scenes with all the boys together. their banter, their rapid-fire patter, the casually innocent homophobic remarks and endless dick-jokes of boys at that age, the "your mom" jokes, the giggling over the word "mound." (okay, i giggled, too.)
standout moments: patrick "da knowledge" noonan and eoin "MC sexecutioner" flynn's audition for the school concert. i spoil-tag it, because i think it is nice to have the option.
which is funny enough, just in the wide-eyed belief that this material would be suitable for a concert at a catholic boy's school, but the real hearttwist comes, for me, when the program(me) is announced:
'Did we get in?' Eoin 'MC Sexecutioner' Flynn asks anxiously, stuck at the back of the crowd examining the board.
Patrick 'Da Knowledge' Noonan scans the list again, then, scowling, turns away. 'No.'
'We didn't?' Eoin is shocked.
'What did you expect, man?' Patrick throws up his hands at him. 'Take a look at the programme, it's wall-to-wall Whitey!'
ah, the sweet optimism of youth. and the sweet racial dysmorphia, as both eoin and patrick are unhappily white themselves.
obviously the dance is another great moment, and what the dance devolves into, but those are the big show-stopping scenes. there are also amazing quiet scenes, like the fear of jelly. and more serious matters, like tom's secret, and what it does to howard, and the criminal way it is handled by the school, and just the fact that the situation subverts expectations in a surprising way, and then allows those expectations to play out to a conclusion in a way which perpetrates those expectations to the public-at-large without justice. this makes no sense if you haven't read the book, and probably maybe even no sense to you if you have, because i am trying to dance around the spoiler-flames here, and it's too juicy to spoiler-tag, because i know you people are drawn to those like a trail of breadcrumbs.
but - god - for all its humor, this book is so freaking sad. it's about all the Big Things, like how we never really know anybody, or appreciate the ones we should, about the disconnect that occurs between adolescence and adulthood, about the wide-eyed optimism of youth that slowly gets stripped away. about betrayal and the inability to confess, to communicate, to speak. this is probably where the connection to infinite jest is the strongest; the wounded shutting-down.
and then all the ways we try to cope with life:
drugs, romance, grasping at straws, charity, music, science, cutting, anorexia, pregnancy - anything to try to feel or to escape. (also very IJ-y)
it would be a bleak little book if not for the sheer lyrical momentum of it. paul murray's got a great sense of pacing, both in the unspooling of the story, and in the tonal pacing. it is never allowed to get too bleak or too frivolous - he manages the mood very well.
it's true that the female characters in this book kind of get the short end of the stick. (this is not meant to be a "penis envy" joke) they are less characters as stand-ins for ideals, mostly just there to embody the robert graves-idea of the white goddess and the black goddess;their role is just to affect the male characters, but this doesn't really hinder the story, unless you are someone for whom "the way females are represented" takes precedence over, you know, the story itself.
this is a great book, and one that is hard to review. it perfectly describes the conflicting teenage desires to grow up, while still clinging to brittle vestiges of innocence, and then flipsides it with the adult characters and their painfully-familiar nostalgia over their own lost youth, all in a bigger story about the search for truth in history and in present-day life.
there are so many elements i didn't even get to touch on: celtic mythology, the dark shadow of carl, donuts, scary drug dealers, pop music tarts... i encourage you to read it and tell me what else i forgot to even mention.
oh, and spoiler: skippy dies.
come to my blog!
September 24, 2011
Q: Oh, what's this? I don't quite understand. As I recall you said a few derogatory things about Skippy Dies when you were on p 120 and even by p 250 you weren't dancing in the streets and giving out free copies, and yet, here we see five fat stars sitting there, I counted them, and as I understand it that's the maximum number you can award, so what accounts for this seeming change of heart and are you a little ashamed of your original remarks? Would you wish to do a little public recanting?
A : Yes, well, thank you for reminding me, but may I say that this brilliant novel is a very slow burner which gradually changes its character from – may I say? – relentless, verging on annoying, schoolboy humour (it's set in a posh school) into horror, terror, cruelty, you know, the whole nine yards of human experience, it's right here. Did I say it's brilliant? But you do need a little patience. And I would like to thank all of the people on this site who wrote great reviews (Paquita, Krok Zero and David Giltinan for instance) and those who told me to carry on. Thank you.
Q: So what was that thing you were telling me about Romeo and Juliet and Truman Capote? I wasn't really listening – you can go on at times you know.
A: Oh well, the title, you see, Skippy Dies, plus the very first couple of pages, in which Skippy actually dies, gives the central event of the book – 661 pages long – completely away. So it's like Romeo & Juliet where the prologue tells you
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife
See? it gives away the whole plot immediately. Also, in Truman Capote's best story Children on Their Birthdays he tells you that the amazing Miss Lily Jane Bobbitt will be run over by a bus in the first paragraph. First you think – how can this device work? But it does.
Q: What were you saying about how long it was? I mean it's actually really bloody long isn't it.
A: I was saying that it's 661 pages and not a page too long! Because it's like the way Jonathan Franzen makes his last two novels work. He gets his family and he starts filling in all the details, and one thing leads on very naturally to the next, so that there's kind of a plot but it's more like the plot in your own life, i.e. doesn't feel like a plot, and in Skippy, Paul Murray fills in the school and a few of the the foul-mouthed boys and their teachers and it's like a giant canvas, which bit shall I add in today, how about some trees here and a car crash there, and lots of drugs over here, and some horrible sex behind that car park. Not that there's any other resemblance between Mr Franzen and Mr Murray, it's just a kind of technique thing which for me works magnificently.
Q: I heard you ranting on about the Booker as usual. What's that got to do with the price of a pound of artichokes?
A: Skippy made the 2010 Booker long list – that's all. Not even the short list. I mean, what? What's that all about? Also, it made the Costa Prize shortlist but didn't win. Maggie O'Farrell won both damned prizes for The Hand that First held Mine. So now I can't read that one because I'd be reading through the clenched teeth of resentment.
Q: If you could pick one reason why you thought this was so fivestarry, what would...that...reason...beeeee...? Mmmm? And can I have the last piece of carrot cake?
A: This is a book about youth culture which in Britain is a phrase often pronounced sardonically in Estuary English like this :
Yoof cowcha
You could add an equally sardonic "innit" for extra effect, as in :
"It's yoof cowcha, innit"
I've complained in other reviews that often when there are actual young characters in novels the dialogue sounds like the author is one of those elderly uncles still trying to crack on that he's down with the kids and hip to the beat on the street, with toe curling results. Skippy Dies gets everything note perfect. Paul Murray knows what boys talk like. It's almost like he was one not very long ago. I enjoyed the total beyond-fetishising beyond-obsession centrality of the mobile phone. I enjoyed the mad disjunction between all the stuff in the boys' heads (love! Sex! Science!) and the actual reality they inhabit (being jerked around! Bad blowjobs! Stupid experiments which fail!). I enjoyed the vitality and boundless fizzing onrushing prose which Paul Morris brings to the subject of wretchedness and bleak betrayal.
Q: One last thing – who was your favourite character?
A: Mario, the 14 Year old Italian-Irish would-be stallion, who is consistently good value. Regarding the upcoming Hallowe'en Hop, for instance, he says: "I don't know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome."
To summarise : Skippy Dies - believe the hype.
A : Yes, well, thank you for reminding me, but may I say that this brilliant novel is a very slow burner which gradually changes its character from – may I say? – relentless, verging on annoying, schoolboy humour (it's set in a posh school) into horror, terror, cruelty, you know, the whole nine yards of human experience, it's right here. Did I say it's brilliant? But you do need a little patience. And I would like to thank all of the people on this site who wrote great reviews (Paquita, Krok Zero and David Giltinan for instance) and those who told me to carry on. Thank you.
Q: So what was that thing you were telling me about Romeo and Juliet and Truman Capote? I wasn't really listening – you can go on at times you know.
A: Oh well, the title, you see, Skippy Dies, plus the very first couple of pages, in which Skippy actually dies, gives the central event of the book – 661 pages long – completely away. So it's like Romeo & Juliet where the prologue tells you
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife
See? it gives away the whole plot immediately. Also, in Truman Capote's best story Children on Their Birthdays he tells you that the amazing Miss Lily Jane Bobbitt will be run over by a bus in the first paragraph. First you think – how can this device work? But it does.
Q: What were you saying about how long it was? I mean it's actually really bloody long isn't it.
A: I was saying that it's 661 pages and not a page too long! Because it's like the way Jonathan Franzen makes his last two novels work. He gets his family and he starts filling in all the details, and one thing leads on very naturally to the next, so that there's kind of a plot but it's more like the plot in your own life, i.e. doesn't feel like a plot, and in Skippy, Paul Murray fills in the school and a few of the the foul-mouthed boys and their teachers and it's like a giant canvas, which bit shall I add in today, how about some trees here and a car crash there, and lots of drugs over here, and some horrible sex behind that car park. Not that there's any other resemblance between Mr Franzen and Mr Murray, it's just a kind of technique thing which for me works magnificently.
Q: I heard you ranting on about the Booker as usual. What's that got to do with the price of a pound of artichokes?
A: Skippy made the 2010 Booker long list – that's all. Not even the short list. I mean, what? What's that all about? Also, it made the Costa Prize shortlist but didn't win. Maggie O'Farrell won both damned prizes for The Hand that First held Mine. So now I can't read that one because I'd be reading through the clenched teeth of resentment.
Q: If you could pick one reason why you thought this was so fivestarry, what would...that...reason...beeeee...? Mmmm? And can I have the last piece of carrot cake?
A: This is a book about youth culture which in Britain is a phrase often pronounced sardonically in Estuary English like this :
Yoof cowcha
You could add an equally sardonic "innit" for extra effect, as in :
"It's yoof cowcha, innit"
I've complained in other reviews that often when there are actual young characters in novels the dialogue sounds like the author is one of those elderly uncles still trying to crack on that he's down with the kids and hip to the beat on the street, with toe curling results. Skippy Dies gets everything note perfect. Paul Murray knows what boys talk like. It's almost like he was one not very long ago. I enjoyed the total beyond-fetishising beyond-obsession centrality of the mobile phone. I enjoyed the mad disjunction between all the stuff in the boys' heads (love! Sex! Science!) and the actual reality they inhabit (being jerked around! Bad blowjobs! Stupid experiments which fail!). I enjoyed the vitality and boundless fizzing onrushing prose which Paul Morris brings to the subject of wretchedness and bleak betrayal.
Q: One last thing – who was your favourite character?
A: Mario, the 14 Year old Italian-Irish would-be stallion, who is consistently good value. Regarding the upcoming Hallowe'en Hop, for instance, he says: "I don't know about you guys, but I am planning to score a lot of bitches at this Hop. Probably I will start with one really hot girl, straight sex, no frills. Then I will have a sixty-nine. Then it will be time for a threesome."
To summarise : Skippy Dies - believe the hype.
November 18, 2020
High school life apparently sucks. So does this book.
10 Things I Hate About You, Skippy Dies
(1) Nihilistic misery porn is never my favorite. Too bitter and sour to the taste, and lacking richness. Strange that people love to eat this stuff up. Isn't the world grotesque and maudlin enough to satisfy any hunger people may have for dying-inside despair? Ugh. Obnoxious books like this one are only looking at the trash side of the world, refusing to see anything that doesn't fit into their points of view. Joyless novels that pretend to portray real life make me break out.
(2) I get it that high school really sucked for a lot of people. I get it, I get it. My experience wasn't everyone's experience. But was it and is it truly hell on earth for everyone involved, students and teachers alike - literally all the time? That's the perspective of this epic (fail). It's some kind of achievement to be able to write a 600+ page book that manages to remain so one-note. Reverse-kudos and a Pelosi clap for the author. Paul Murray, I'm sorry that you hated high school, but I also don't think you needed to write an entire book about how much you hated high school and how you think everyone else did too. And how you think both high school and life itself are just a real waste of time. When your thesis is that high school - and being alive - is pure torture for everyone involved, that unimaginative thesis gets an F.
(3) The supporting characters are flat caricatures. It's like the author decided to give them one attribute and then ran with that attribute for 600+ pages. There's the kid who is cynical, the kid who speaks in a zombie voice, the kid who is Italian, the kid who insists she's pregnant. Etc. For a book so big, its ability to bring to life what should have been a vital supporting cast of teenagers is so, so small. Small talent at characterization and a large amount of small-mindedness.
(4) Apparently the entire purpose of the co-protagonist - a pathos-ridden teacher - is to portray a man who never does the right thing because he is so pathetic and weak. This is the opposite of an interesting or dynamic character. This static cardboard cutout is nearly half of the book. Whyyyyyyy
(5) Skippy dies deluded. Skippy is the most vibrant, good-natured, and fully realized character in the book. It must have pained the author to write about him, so he punishes Skippy mercilessly. Skippy gets to fall in love with a girl who doesn't love him, he gets to have a mother with cancer, he gets to have a distant father who doesn't support him, he gets to have teachers who don't understand him, he gets to have a principal who is his enemy, he gets to have peer pressure, oh and he gets to have a coach who drugs and molests him and then gets off scot-free. He gets to die in the opening pages and his last thoughts are about the girl who doesn't love him. And then his death becomes commodified. Skippy can't catch a break, even after he's dead.
(6) Okay I liked the teacher's live-in girlfriend, especially after she moves out. But other than her, the female characters in this book are a joke. I don't think the author likes women too much. Someone musta broke his heart :(
(7) The cruelty. TO ALL OF ITS CHARACTERS.
(8) The lack of empathy masking itself as empathy.
(9) The strong start that fooled me into thinking that this would be a big book full of life, despite the title. The realization that the book is as superficial and simple-minded as its title. Well, I can't say that the title didn't warn me.
(10) The author somehow thinks he's really, really funny. Strident repetition and joyless caricatures are not funny. Laughing at your own characters' stupidity and misery is also not funny. The author has no discernible sense of humor, despite his insistence that he is a really, really funny guy. Which really, really annoys me.
Extra Credit: 10 More Examples of Misery Porn That I Loathed
(1) Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(2) Black Butterflies by John Shirley
(3) The North Water by Ian McGuire
(4) Let's Go Play at the Adams' by Mendal W. Johnson
(5) The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
(6) We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
(7) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
(8) Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
(9) John Dollar by Marianne Wiggins
(0) White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
plus 1 That I Loved:
Island People by Coleman Dowell
10 Things I Hate About You, Skippy Dies
(1) Nihilistic misery porn is never my favorite. Too bitter and sour to the taste, and lacking richness. Strange that people love to eat this stuff up. Isn't the world grotesque and maudlin enough to satisfy any hunger people may have for dying-inside despair? Ugh. Obnoxious books like this one are only looking at the trash side of the world, refusing to see anything that doesn't fit into their points of view. Joyless novels that pretend to portray real life make me break out.
(2) I get it that high school really sucked for a lot of people. I get it, I get it. My experience wasn't everyone's experience. But was it and is it truly hell on earth for everyone involved, students and teachers alike - literally all the time? That's the perspective of this epic (fail). It's some kind of achievement to be able to write a 600+ page book that manages to remain so one-note. Reverse-kudos and a Pelosi clap for the author. Paul Murray, I'm sorry that you hated high school, but I also don't think you needed to write an entire book about how much you hated high school and how you think everyone else did too. And how you think both high school and life itself are just a real waste of time. When your thesis is that high school - and being alive - is pure torture for everyone involved, that unimaginative thesis gets an F.
(3) The supporting characters are flat caricatures. It's like the author decided to give them one attribute and then ran with that attribute for 600+ pages. There's the kid who is cynical, the kid who speaks in a zombie voice, the kid who is Italian, the kid who insists she's pregnant. Etc. For a book so big, its ability to bring to life what should have been a vital supporting cast of teenagers is so, so small. Small talent at characterization and a large amount of small-mindedness.
(4) Apparently the entire purpose of the co-protagonist - a pathos-ridden teacher - is to portray a man who never does the right thing because he is so pathetic and weak. This is the opposite of an interesting or dynamic character. This static cardboard cutout is nearly half of the book. Whyyyyyyy
(5) Skippy dies deluded. Skippy is the most vibrant, good-natured, and fully realized character in the book. It must have pained the author to write about him, so he punishes Skippy mercilessly. Skippy gets to fall in love with a girl who doesn't love him, he gets to have a mother with cancer, he gets to have a distant father who doesn't support him, he gets to have teachers who don't understand him, he gets to have a principal who is his enemy, he gets to have peer pressure, oh and he gets to have a coach who drugs and molests him and then gets off scot-free. He gets to die in the opening pages and his last thoughts are about the girl who doesn't love him. And then his death becomes commodified. Skippy can't catch a break, even after he's dead.
(6) Okay I liked the teacher's live-in girlfriend, especially after she moves out. But other than her, the female characters in this book are a joke. I don't think the author likes women too much. Someone musta broke his heart :(
(7) The cruelty. TO ALL OF ITS CHARACTERS.
(8) The lack of empathy masking itself as empathy.
(9) The strong start that fooled me into thinking that this would be a big book full of life, despite the title. The realization that the book is as superficial and simple-minded as its title. Well, I can't say that the title didn't warn me.
(10) The author somehow thinks he's really, really funny. Strident repetition and joyless caricatures are not funny. Laughing at your own characters' stupidity and misery is also not funny. The author has no discernible sense of humor, despite his insistence that he is a really, really funny guy. Which really, really annoys me.
Extra Credit: 10 More Examples of Misery Porn That I Loathed
(1) Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(2) Black Butterflies by John Shirley
(3) The North Water by Ian McGuire
(4) Let's Go Play at the Adams' by Mendal W. Johnson
(5) The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
(6) We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
(7) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
(8) Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
(9) John Dollar by Marianne Wiggins
(0) White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
plus 1 That I Loved:
Island People by Coleman Dowell
June 9, 2011
What to say, what to say. I really enjoyed this book, and I never really feel like writing reviews of my favorites, probably because it's easier to be snarky while taking the piss (oh British). Writing about something that I found intellectually stimulating, or that made me laugh, or moved me (or all three, which this one did) requires me to be genuine and thoughtful in a way making fun of Stephanie Meyer never will. But this is definitely one of my top new release reads of the year, probably a close second to The Lonely Polygamist, which I didn't review, and I didn't want to make the same mistake twice.
So, why did I like this book. For one thing, it consistently amused me. Paul Murray has written what a fancier reviewer than I would probably dub "a boisterous comic novel" or something. I'd just say it made me laugh a lot, and I am a bad reader when it comes to funny books -- I read them wrong, rush them and and forget to laugh. I think spending time with a bunch of real sex-obsessed high school boys sounds like pure hell, but I never got sick of reading about them picking on each other and making lewd jokes.
Murray's narrative voice is pretty effortless. He switches POV and tense at whim, and some chapters start in typical third person and then suddenly jump to second person and then stream of consciousness (sans punctuation) without missing a beat or jarring the reader (The Reader). It could have come across as incredibly affected or self-indulgent but it really works for this story, which is in large part about how we all feel alone, or terrified of being alone, almost all the time. Because he is writing about teenagers, these thoughts have an immediacy and hormone-fueled emotional force that just wouldn't be as propulsive with all those periods and commas and semi-colons cluttering up the page, or without sticking us right inside a character's head (I almost never want to be told what I am thinking while reading but Murray gets away with whole chapters of 'you's). Of course, there are adult characters too, and he captures their voices just as well, but the kids are the ones you're going to remember, because they're the ones who still have a chance at a little bit of hope.
Because the adults here are pretty broken, crushed by the realities of life and unrealized dreams and unfulfilled desires, many of them sexual, sometimes sexually disturbing (Did I mention this book is about an Irish Catholic boys' boarding school? I did not? Well read the plot summary yourself). The kids haven't quite reached that point yet, but don't worry, they'll probably get there: this is hardly a cutesy, idealized portrait of childhood; it's actually a pretty accurate recreation of the ways being a teenager sucks on about every level, one of them being that its the time when all of your illusions about your life, your future, and the adult world start to fall apart.
But the kids, they still want to hold everything together for a little longer. Overweight genius/social outcast/donut-lover Ruprecht, who is as much a central character as the titular Skippy (who does, indeed, die, on about page 11) in particular is obsessed with discovering the secret to the physical forces that are holding the universe together, and it's kind of heartbreaking to witness his naivety as he conducts elaborate, childish scientific experiments to prove his theories are correct because he cannot imagine being able to survive in a world in which they aren't. To some readers, the long digressions about physics and string theory will probably seem like self-indulgent filler stretching out a rather long book that is otherwise a sort of standard coming-of-age boarding school deal, but it is in these detours that it managed to make me feel something (and kept it from seeming like glorified YA striving for literary cred).
See, I already wrote a ton and have no idea if I have made you want to read the book. But if I tried to organize my thoughts any more I'd probably end up deleting the review and that would certainly have been a waste of time. Plus no one is going to read Lonely Polygamist just because I gave it five stars, but maybe someone will buy this one thanks to my poorly organized thoughts collected above. Or maybe if they know that, in one section, a character offers a rather spirited and convincing argument that Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is actually about anal sex. I never thought of it that way; never again will I not.
Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud.
So, why did I like this book. For one thing, it consistently amused me. Paul Murray has written what a fancier reviewer than I would probably dub "a boisterous comic novel" or something. I'd just say it made me laugh a lot, and I am a bad reader when it comes to funny books -- I read them wrong, rush them and and forget to laugh. I think spending time with a bunch of real sex-obsessed high school boys sounds like pure hell, but I never got sick of reading about them picking on each other and making lewd jokes.
Murray's narrative voice is pretty effortless. He switches POV and tense at whim, and some chapters start in typical third person and then suddenly jump to second person and then stream of consciousness (sans punctuation) without missing a beat or jarring the reader (The Reader). It could have come across as incredibly affected or self-indulgent but it really works for this story, which is in large part about how we all feel alone, or terrified of being alone, almost all the time. Because he is writing about teenagers, these thoughts have an immediacy and hormone-fueled emotional force that just wouldn't be as propulsive with all those periods and commas and semi-colons cluttering up the page, or without sticking us right inside a character's head (I almost never want to be told what I am thinking while reading but Murray gets away with whole chapters of 'you's). Of course, there are adult characters too, and he captures their voices just as well, but the kids are the ones you're going to remember, because they're the ones who still have a chance at a little bit of hope.
Because the adults here are pretty broken, crushed by the realities of life and unrealized dreams and unfulfilled desires, many of them sexual, sometimes sexually disturbing (Did I mention this book is about an Irish Catholic boys' boarding school? I did not? Well read the plot summary yourself). The kids haven't quite reached that point yet, but don't worry, they'll probably get there: this is hardly a cutesy, idealized portrait of childhood; it's actually a pretty accurate recreation of the ways being a teenager sucks on about every level, one of them being that its the time when all of your illusions about your life, your future, and the adult world start to fall apart.
But the kids, they still want to hold everything together for a little longer. Overweight genius/social outcast/donut-lover Ruprecht, who is as much a central character as the titular Skippy (who does, indeed, die, on about page 11) in particular is obsessed with discovering the secret to the physical forces that are holding the universe together, and it's kind of heartbreaking to witness his naivety as he conducts elaborate, childish scientific experiments to prove his theories are correct because he cannot imagine being able to survive in a world in which they aren't. To some readers, the long digressions about physics and string theory will probably seem like self-indulgent filler stretching out a rather long book that is otherwise a sort of standard coming-of-age boarding school deal, but it is in these detours that it managed to make me feel something (and kept it from seeming like glorified YA striving for literary cred).
See, I already wrote a ton and have no idea if I have made you want to read the book. But if I tried to organize my thoughts any more I'd probably end up deleting the review and that would certainly have been a waste of time. Plus no one is going to read Lonely Polygamist just because I gave it five stars, but maybe someone will buy this one thanks to my poorly organized thoughts collected above. Or maybe if they know that, in one section, a character offers a rather spirited and convincing argument that Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is actually about anal sex. I never thought of it that way; never again will I not.
Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 3: Book that makes you laugh out loud.
March 24, 2018
"If there is any substitute for love, it is memory."
This book was so engrossing from page one that I spent two sleepless nights trying to finish it, and yes, it was worth it. Skippy Dies will make you laugh out loud while ripping your heart out. As the title suggests, Skippy does die, which becomes the central plot of the book. He dies in the very first chapter. Over the next 600 pages, we find out what happened to Daniel "Skippy" Juster while coming across many distinct characters. I don't know if it's my nature, or the discovery of a book like this, but rarely have I felt so many emotions hitting me all at once, perhaps it is Paul Murray's witty and deep writing, perhaps it is the story of the fourteen year old Skippy, of his first love that inevitably had an effect on me.
Skippy Dies is a very comical book. It is so funny in the beginning, and heart wrenching towards the end. First, an overview of a few main characters:
Skippy, a shy boy studying in a Catholic boarding school in Ireland. Skippy's overweight roommate, Ruprecht, loves donuts (no wonder he's my favourite character) and wants to go to Stanford to pursue a career in science. Howard 'the Coward', history teacher who majorly screws up his love life. Carl, a drug dealer, the most dangerous kid in school and is high most of the time. And Lorelei, a girl who Skippy is falling in love with. After Skippy's death, it becomes obvious that something was troubling him. Skippy's death opens up a lot of issues sorrounding the fictional Seabrook College and its students.
Murray explores many sensitive topics like drug abuse, parental issues, teenagers struggling with hormones and their emotions. It is a book about boys trying to figure things out, trying to find out how the universe works. Paul Murray has managed to write a book with so many characters, their respective themes and plots without making it seem forced or manipulative. I loved the portrayal of school kids, their parents, teachers, friendship, first love, betrayal, and how everything just came together in the end.
The contrast of the kids growing up and finding out life is not a cakewalk, and the adults dealing with what it is like to be grown up is amazingly written. Out of various subplots, science and philosophies, Murray has created magic through words. The book is hilarious, emotional, profound and unpredictable. In the face of this book, all words seem superficial; a simple review just doesn't do justice. This is a brilliant book with unexpected twists and turns, a must read for everyone who wants to laugh and cry at the same time. Most of the book's elements can't be talked about without spoilers, so just go and read this book to find out how and why Skippy dies, how his friends come through, how a teacher is regarded from coward to brave and how drug abuse can ruin lives.
A cute little haiku poem Skippy tells Lori to end this review:
Lorelei Wakeham
Your sad eyes of emerald
Are my only stars
This book was so engrossing from page one that I spent two sleepless nights trying to finish it, and yes, it was worth it. Skippy Dies will make you laugh out loud while ripping your heart out. As the title suggests, Skippy does die, which becomes the central plot of the book. He dies in the very first chapter. Over the next 600 pages, we find out what happened to Daniel "Skippy" Juster while coming across many distinct characters. I don't know if it's my nature, or the discovery of a book like this, but rarely have I felt so many emotions hitting me all at once, perhaps it is Paul Murray's witty and deep writing, perhaps it is the story of the fourteen year old Skippy, of his first love that inevitably had an effect on me.
Skippy Dies is a very comical book. It is so funny in the beginning, and heart wrenching towards the end. First, an overview of a few main characters:
Skippy, a shy boy studying in a Catholic boarding school in Ireland. Skippy's overweight roommate, Ruprecht, loves donuts (no wonder he's my favourite character) and wants to go to Stanford to pursue a career in science. Howard 'the Coward', history teacher who majorly screws up his love life. Carl, a drug dealer, the most dangerous kid in school and is high most of the time. And Lorelei, a girl who Skippy is falling in love with. After Skippy's death, it becomes obvious that something was troubling him. Skippy's death opens up a lot of issues sorrounding the fictional Seabrook College and its students.
Murray explores many sensitive topics like drug abuse, parental issues, teenagers struggling with hormones and their emotions. It is a book about boys trying to figure things out, trying to find out how the universe works. Paul Murray has managed to write a book with so many characters, their respective themes and plots without making it seem forced or manipulative. I loved the portrayal of school kids, their parents, teachers, friendship, first love, betrayal, and how everything just came together in the end.
The contrast of the kids growing up and finding out life is not a cakewalk, and the adults dealing with what it is like to be grown up is amazingly written. Out of various subplots, science and philosophies, Murray has created magic through words. The book is hilarious, emotional, profound and unpredictable. In the face of this book, all words seem superficial; a simple review just doesn't do justice. This is a brilliant book with unexpected twists and turns, a must read for everyone who wants to laugh and cry at the same time. Most of the book's elements can't be talked about without spoilers, so just go and read this book to find out how and why Skippy dies, how his friends come through, how a teacher is regarded from coward to brave and how drug abuse can ruin lives.
A cute little haiku poem Skippy tells Lori to end this review:
Lorelei Wakeham
Your sad eyes of emerald
Are my only stars
September 27, 2012
Skippy, buddy, I am sorry. I wanted to hear out your story, but some of these people around you tried my patience too far.
From the moment I started reading Skippy Dies, I couldn't stop thinking that I could be reading something better instead. More than 150 pages later, I was still thinking the same. I decided I didn't want to continue reading about a couple of teenagers (except Skippy and Ruprecht) being kind of d*cks and the dismal life of one uninteresting adult.
Skippy Dies is not bad. I so wish it were better though. Most of all, some subtlety would have been a huge relief. How many mentions of zombies, drugs, girls, classroom pranks etc. need to be made to convince the readers that we are in the world of teenagers? How many times does Ruprecht need to prattle on about aliens and the eleventh dimension to establish his position as the token nerdy kid? (His weight problem is only an unavoidable side-effect of his nerdiness. That's a proven Hollywood-ian fact, and no one can tell me otherwise.) How many times is Howard going to mention Graves, before we catch on to what (psst. who) he really means to talk about?
Me and Paul Murray don't seem to agree on the answers to these questions.
Skippy Dies brought back memories of a couple of other books that I read during the last few months, but didn't get along very well with:
- a new enthusisatic author trying a little too hard
- one-dimensional characters constantly highlighting their only trait (Though SD is better than HYS in many ways.)
- teenage drama
With these things occupying my mind, it became impossible for me to keep reading without nitpicking.
I do wonder, though, if I (we?) am somehow ill-conditioned to like a novel set in the present age. This being a time I am familiar with, I am quite likely to compare the book to the real world around me. For example, at one point in this novel Paul Murray held up a big arrow sign saying - "Hey, look! that teenager is texting on his cellphone". Now that's something we have seen plenty of and take for granted. Paul Murray making a big deal out of it, instead of simply mentioning it in passing, just doesn't sit right.
Anyway, I hope there is better stuff to come out of Murray's pen. I will keep an eye out for his upcoming books.
PS: Since I am already nitpicking, let me add that I don't like the cover either.
September 29, 2024
I just finished, and I’m so glad to be done, so eager to be somewhere new. But that doesn’t mean this wasn’t good. In many ways, very good.
This wasn’t a 3-star book, which for me means a solid like that will never stand out as special. This was a 2-star book for me because the manic energy pushed me away more often than it pulled me in; because the sentences could run on and into lists, causing my mind to drift; because the structure felt too fragmented at times to settle in. This was a 4-star book for me because the themes felt meaningful, because the main characters were original and sympathetic (if not likable), and because as quickly as it would push me away, the writing would pull me in again, sometimes despite myself. On the other hand, (2-stars again), at this Catholic boarding school in Ireland, there was a lot of “boys will be boys” dialogue that bored me. And then it would make me laugh and offer something profound (4-stars!). A push-pull relationship, for sure.
This was no Bee Sting. I loved The Bee Sting. There, Murray was able to titrate and culminate his mania to let more emotion through. Here I was told about the longing (so much longing for female objects!), in The Bee Sting, I felt it. This, like Bee Sting, was told by different characters in each chapter. Here, I sometimes felt that Howard, a teacher, could just be Skippy, a student, all grown up. Aside from that, each character felt unique, and I admit, I was interested in Skippy and Howard.
Skippy had a boy-genius roommate who supplied a lot of comic relief with his scientific experiments, while also intriguing me with theories. I feel like fans of Wallace’s, Infinite Jest, would love this book. I think the writing might appeal to fans of The Sympathizer (this is leads angry), Midnight’s Children, and maybe if you’re not expecting too much of an alternate universe, David Mitchell. This kind of very cerebral writing is never going to be truly for me, although I can appreciate it. This book was so full, I need more time to absorb it, and I want to share quotes with you to see both the issues with the writing, and how inspiring it could be. And I want to say more about ALL the themes, that made this read worth the push to finish, even if it bogged it down.
This wasn’t a 3-star book, which for me means a solid like that will never stand out as special. This was a 2-star book for me because the manic energy pushed me away more often than it pulled me in; because the sentences could run on and into lists, causing my mind to drift; because the structure felt too fragmented at times to settle in. This was a 4-star book for me because the themes felt meaningful, because the main characters were original and sympathetic (if not likable), and because as quickly as it would push me away, the writing would pull me in again, sometimes despite myself. On the other hand, (2-stars again), at this Catholic boarding school in Ireland, there was a lot of “boys will be boys” dialogue that bored me. And then it would make me laugh and offer something profound (4-stars!). A push-pull relationship, for sure.
This was no Bee Sting. I loved The Bee Sting. There, Murray was able to titrate and culminate his mania to let more emotion through. Here I was told about the longing (so much longing for female objects!), in The Bee Sting, I felt it. This, like Bee Sting, was told by different characters in each chapter. Here, I sometimes felt that Howard, a teacher, could just be Skippy, a student, all grown up. Aside from that, each character felt unique, and I admit, I was interested in Skippy and Howard.
Skippy had a boy-genius roommate who supplied a lot of comic relief with his scientific experiments, while also intriguing me with theories. I feel like fans of Wallace’s, Infinite Jest, would love this book. I think the writing might appeal to fans of The Sympathizer (this is leads angry), Midnight’s Children, and maybe if you’re not expecting too much of an alternate universe, David Mitchell. This kind of very cerebral writing is never going to be truly for me, although I can appreciate it. This book was so full, I need more time to absorb it, and I want to share quotes with you to see both the issues with the writing, and how inspiring it could be. And I want to say more about ALL the themes, that made this read worth the push to finish, even if it bogged it down.
October 16, 2011
Talk about truth in advertising….
As promised in the title, Skippy dies. In fact, he dies in the first few pages when he falls off his stool in a doughnut shop. Who was this kid and what happened? Well, that’s what the rest of the book is for.
Skippy was Daniel Juster, a shy and nerdy boy at a Catholic boy’s school in Ireland. In the time before his death, we meet a variety of characters that are unknowingly part of the chain of events that lead to his untimely demise. There’s Skippy’s roommate, an overweight student named Ruprecht who is fascinated by the promise of multiple dimensions hypothesized in M-theory and who makes bizarre inventions that never work. Lorelai is a girl from a neighboring school that Skippy has developed a crush on, but she’s also the object of a creepy obsession of one of his fellow students who is also a pyschopath and novice drug dealer. Howard ‘The Coward’ Fallon is Skippy’s history teacher with his own complicated history at the school and who hopes to cure his dissatisfaction with his life by sleeping with a beautiful substitute geography teacher. Greg Costigan is the acting principal who cares so much about the school that looking out for its students has slipped far down his priority list.
What becomes apparent before Skippy’s death is that something is seriously troubling him, but all the characters are so wrapped up in the details of their own lives that no one takes the time to really help the young man. The resulting guilt causes a wave of bizarre repercussions.
I’ve seen this book compared to Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen. Those are apt, and I’d also say that it reminded me a bit of the film Donnie Darko. However, this is also a unique and moving book that had me at times laughing, angry, sad wistful, depressed and hopeful. The characters are incredibly well drawn and believable. Greg Costigan in particular is such a son-of-a-bitch that I wished he was real so I could get on a plane to Ireland just so I could kick him in the junk.
The teen characters are also very well done, and Murray absolutely nailed that weird contradiction where kids that age have well-honed instincts about some things like the hypocrisy of adults but are still naive enough to think that you can get pregnant from oral sex.
Also, I listened to the audio version of this and it was done with a full cast doing all the different dialogue. It was one of the best listening experiences I’ve had yet with an audible book.
As promised in the title, Skippy dies. In fact, he dies in the first few pages when he falls off his stool in a doughnut shop. Who was this kid and what happened? Well, that’s what the rest of the book is for.
Skippy was Daniel Juster, a shy and nerdy boy at a Catholic boy’s school in Ireland. In the time before his death, we meet a variety of characters that are unknowingly part of the chain of events that lead to his untimely demise. There’s Skippy’s roommate, an overweight student named Ruprecht who is fascinated by the promise of multiple dimensions hypothesized in M-theory and who makes bizarre inventions that never work. Lorelai is a girl from a neighboring school that Skippy has developed a crush on, but she’s also the object of a creepy obsession of one of his fellow students who is also a pyschopath and novice drug dealer. Howard ‘The Coward’ Fallon is Skippy’s history teacher with his own complicated history at the school and who hopes to cure his dissatisfaction with his life by sleeping with a beautiful substitute geography teacher. Greg Costigan is the acting principal who cares so much about the school that looking out for its students has slipped far down his priority list.
What becomes apparent before Skippy’s death is that something is seriously troubling him, but all the characters are so wrapped up in the details of their own lives that no one takes the time to really help the young man. The resulting guilt causes a wave of bizarre repercussions.
I’ve seen this book compared to Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen. Those are apt, and I’d also say that it reminded me a bit of the film Donnie Darko. However, this is also a unique and moving book that had me at times laughing, angry, sad wistful, depressed and hopeful. The characters are incredibly well drawn and believable. Greg Costigan in particular is such a son-of-a-bitch that I wished he was real so I could get on a plane to Ireland just so I could kick him in the junk.
The teen characters are also very well done, and Murray absolutely nailed that weird contradiction where kids that age have well-honed instincts about some things like the hypocrisy of adults but are still naive enough to think that you can get pregnant from oral sex.
Also, I listened to the audio version of this and it was done with a full cast doing all the different dialogue. It was one of the best listening experiences I’ve had yet with an audible book.
July 25, 2015
In Skippy Dies Paul Murray writes 21st-century Ireland's response to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Set in the fictional Seabrook College, the novel follows the lives of Daniel 'Skippy' Juster and his overweight, genius friend Ruprecht van Doren. However, as the title suggests, Skippy dies. He dies on the very first page. The novel then rewinds back (à la The Secret History) and the story begins.
Over the next 600-pages Murray writes one of the greatest Irish novels of the century thus far. At points in this novel it was like reading dispatches of my life in secondary school. Murray perfectly encapsulates life in an all-boys Irish Catholic secondary school (I went to an all-boys Irish Catholic secondary school). The antics in the classroom, the attitude towards teachers, the banter between classmates, it was all so wonderful that it made me long for my school days. God I miss them.
In Ireland there is nothing funnier than a funeral. We're an incredibly morbid nation and our literature reflects that. The humour in Skippy Dies is subtle but biting, highly offensive, and undeniably Irish.
This is without a doubt Paul Murray's masterpiece. He joins the ranks of Laurence Sterne, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O'Brien. I highly recommend this masterful novel.
Over the next 600-pages Murray writes one of the greatest Irish novels of the century thus far. At points in this novel it was like reading dispatches of my life in secondary school. Murray perfectly encapsulates life in an all-boys Irish Catholic secondary school (I went to an all-boys Irish Catholic secondary school). The antics in the classroom, the attitude towards teachers, the banter between classmates, it was all so wonderful that it made me long for my school days. God I miss them.
In Ireland there is nothing funnier than a funeral. We're an incredibly morbid nation and our literature reflects that. The humour in Skippy Dies is subtle but biting, highly offensive, and undeniably Irish.
This is without a doubt Paul Murray's masterpiece. He joins the ranks of Laurence Sterne, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O'Brien. I highly recommend this masterful novel.
December 21, 2010
I am somewhat reluctantly abandoning this book. I feel a bit guilty about it, because I am not without curiosity about how all this meandering prose will resolve itself into a single theme. Or maybe it won't.
But my guilt only carries me so far. Most of the blame here must be assumed by Mr. Murray. The narration is tedious and gloomy. The characters are bleakly hopeless. There are occasional references to things like cell phones, string thory, and computers, but I frequently felt the author had roughly shifted a story from the mid-twentieth century and shoved it into a contemporaneous frame.
Some of the blame, too, must go to the publisher or flogger or whoever wrote the delightful summaries I've read of this book. If the prose I've been wading through had even a scintilla of the lightness and precision of these enticers, I'd have read the whole book greedily and longed for more.
I am clearly in the minority regarding Skippy Dies, but, despite my previously mentioned guilt, I leave it with an ever-lightening sense of relief ---
But my guilt only carries me so far. Most of the blame here must be assumed by Mr. Murray. The narration is tedious and gloomy. The characters are bleakly hopeless. There are occasional references to things like cell phones, string thory, and computers, but I frequently felt the author had roughly shifted a story from the mid-twentieth century and shoved it into a contemporaneous frame.
Some of the blame, too, must go to the publisher or flogger or whoever wrote the delightful summaries I've read of this book. If the prose I've been wading through had even a scintilla of the lightness and precision of these enticers, I'd have read the whole book greedily and longed for more.
I am clearly in the minority regarding Skippy Dies, but, despite my previously mentioned guilt, I leave it with an ever-lightening sense of relief ---
January 9, 2021
Audacious.
Crackling.
Whip-smart.
A whirling, swirling, nonstop rise and fall of energy.
But what exactly are we reading about? Frustrated potential? Emergent identities in adolescence? A sci-fi mystery? A bildungsroman? All of the above?
There is much fun to be had, but before long the themes begin bubbling up and darned if this doesn't get you thinking and feeling:
There's a seemingly ever-expanding cast of characters who range widely through the ups and downs of male adolescence and the familiar microcosmic drama of school, friendship, puberty, and a search for belonging. And there's an added layer of the adults who oversee this world with a sorrowful sort of detachment:
What's more is the whole thing is fantastically crafted and crammed with evocative descriptions, like this one, of a junior high Halloween dance and its accompanying adolescent hormonal horniness:
Or this one, of a school bully finally confronted:
Or this downright David-Foster-Wallace-ian single sentence inner monologue:
Or here, the aftermath of a breakup:
Wow.
Not only is the writing immensely talented on the small scale of sentence ("Traffic pants on the quays in a shimmer of monoxides.") and paragraph (see above), there's a wide-ranging snakepit of intermingling plotlines that twist and turn and start up and cross over and switch back around. And the whole thing is somehow not a complete mess, has an order and a structure that feels just out of sight and lets you lose yourself in the delightful prose housed on every page—little gems and comforting adages and prosaic insights and exuberant rushes. It's a sumptuous feast for a reader, a kind of friendly Pynchonian free-for-all that rollicks along with nothing held back:
To those who might object that it seems juvenile, that text message transcriptions, salacious rap lyrics, cut scenes of survival-horror/fantasy video game action, and the antics of drugged-out teenagers trying to get laid preclude the possibility of literary weight and magnitude, I'll point right back to Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow and say if that's artistic, with all its orgies and puking chimpanzees and deviant breaks from reality, than so is this (and it's a hell of a lot easier to make sense of, to boot). Because this book makes some significant and thought-provoking points, amid the zaniness and the flatulence and the raw adolescence. Points about history, about memory, about whether or not to move forward at the expense of forgetting the past or to stay mired in yesterday at the expense of forsaking tomorrow:
5 stars out of 5. Highly recommended.
Crackling.
Whip-smart.
A whirling, swirling, nonstop rise and fall of energy.
But what exactly are we reading about? Frustrated potential? Emergent identities in adolescence? A sci-fi mystery? A bildungsroman? All of the above?
You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see there will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'. Now, with every day that passes, another door seems to close, the one marked PROFESSIONAL STUNTMAN, or FIGHT EVIL ROBOT, until as the weeks go by and the doors – GET BITTEN BY SNAKE, SAVE WORLD FROM ASTEROID, DISMANTLE BOMB WITH SECONDS TO SPARE – keep closing, you begin to hear the sound as a good thing, and start closing some yourself, even ones that didn't necessarily need to be closed . . . (25)
There is much fun to be had, but before long the themes begin bubbling up and darned if this doesn't get you thinking and feeling:
There's a seemingly ever-expanding cast of characters who range widely through the ups and downs of male adolescence and the familiar microcosmic drama of school, friendship, puberty, and a search for belonging. And there's an added layer of the adults who oversee this world with a sorrowful sort of detachment:
What's more is the whole thing is fantastically crafted and crammed with evocative descriptions, like this one, of a junior high Halloween dance and its accompanying adolescent hormonal horniness:
By four o'clock – except for the small gaggle that scurries back and forth between the Art Room and the Sports Hall, arms heaped with dyed-black netting, papier-mache skulls, partially eviscerated pumpkins with craft knives still jutting from their flanks – the school is utterly deserted. Or so it appears; beneath the superficial emptiness, the air groans with the freight of anticipation: the silence shrieks, the space trembles, crammed with previsions so feverish and intense that they begin to threaten to flicker into being, there in the depopulated hallways. Meanwhile, above the old stone campus, sombre grey clouds gather, laden and growling with pent-up energies of their own. (163)
Or this one, of a school bully finally confronted:
In the doorway, Carl slowly turns, and his bloodshot eyes fall emptily on Skippy. They show no sign of knowing who he is; they show no sign of anything. It is like staring into an abyss, an infinite indifferent abyss . . . when at last he speaks it's as if every word is a deadweight that must be hauled up with chains and pulleys from the bottom of his feet. 'What are you going to do about it?' he says. (353)
Or this downright David-Foster-Wallace-ian single sentence inner monologue:
It doesn't matter where you go though, nowhere feels big enough to contain you, even if you're right in the middle of the mall it still somehow seems too shallow, like when you were younger and you tried to make your Transformers visit your Lego town, and they were just out of scale, it didn't work – it's like that, or maybe it isn't, because you also feel really tinily small, you feel like a lump in somebody's throat, or actually who cares what you feel, and everywhere you go you encounter other grey-clad boys from your year, looming up like hateful reflections – Gary Toolan, John Keating, Maurice Wall, Vincent Bailey and all of the others that are the pinnacle of the evolution that began so many years ago with that one depressed fish that if you met him now you'd tell him to stay in the sea – there they are, pale-faced but smirking, sleeves rolled up, and though it's sad, it's sadder than a three-legged dog, it's also flat, it makes you angry, so when someone says Skippy was a homo you're almost glad because you can fight them, and they're glad too, so you fight, until someone gets his jumper ripped or the security guard chases you out of the mall, and you've already been kicked out of the other mall, and it's too cold to go to the park, and you think it must be almost time to go to bed but it's not, it's only just time for dinner, which is car-tyre with phlegm sauce and which you leave mostly uneaten, and privately you're thinking Skippy is a homo too, you['re thinking, Fuck you Skippy, though you're also thinking, Hey, where's Skippy? or Skippy, did you borrow my – and then you think, Oh fuck, and everything shakes around the edges again and you have to hold on tight to your lucky condom or your Tupac keyring or your actual live shotgun bullet, or if you don't have one of those things, wedge your hands deeper in your pockets or throw a stone at a seagull or shout after a knacker in the village how his mother was in excellent form last night and run for it, and dream of being Hulk, or a Transformer in a Lego town going smash! bash! crash! stomping the whole city to the group, incinerating the little yellow-headed Lego people with your laser eyes till the smiles melt right off their faces. (477)
Or here, the aftermath of a breakup:
...[H]e's beset by memories. Independently of him, his mind has started filling in the Halley-shaped blanks. He'll be reading in the kitchen in the small hours, and realize that he is waiting for her to come through the door – can almost see her, in her pyjamas, rubbing her eyes and asking him what he's doing, forgetting to listen to the answer as she gets sucked into an investigation of the contents of the fridge. At the cooker scrambling eggs; crossing the living room to straddle him as he watches TV; lost in some corporate website with a cigarette and a dogged expression; brushing her teeth in the mirror while he shaves – soon the house is haunted by a thousand different ghosts of her, with a million infinitesimal details in attendance, things he'd never noticed himself noticing. They don't come with an agenda, or an emotional soundtrack; they don't pluck at his heartstrings, or elicit any reaction that he can identify definitely as love, or loss; they are simply there, profusely and exhaustingly there. (405)
Wow.
Not only is the writing immensely talented on the small scale of sentence ("Traffic pants on the quays in a shimmer of monoxides.") and paragraph (see above), there's a wide-ranging snakepit of intermingling plotlines that twist and turn and start up and cross over and switch back around. And the whole thing is somehow not a complete mess, has an order and a structure that feels just out of sight and lets you lose yourself in the delightful prose housed on every page—little gems and comforting adages and prosaic insights and exuberant rushes. It's a sumptuous feast for a reader, a kind of friendly Pynchonian free-for-all that rollicks along with nothing held back:
To those who might object that it seems juvenile, that text message transcriptions, salacious rap lyrics, cut scenes of survival-horror/fantasy video game action, and the antics of drugged-out teenagers trying to get laid preclude the possibility of literary weight and magnitude, I'll point right back to Pynchon and Gravity's Rainbow and say if that's artistic, with all its orgies and puking chimpanzees and deviant breaks from reality, than so is this (and it's a hell of a lot easier to make sense of, to boot). Because this book makes some significant and thought-provoking points, amid the zaniness and the flatulence and the raw adolescence. Points about history, about memory, about whether or not to move forward at the expense of forgetting the past or to stay mired in yesterday at the expense of forsaking tomorrow:
5 stars out of 5. Highly recommended.
October 10, 2010
Things I learned from Skippy Dies:
"The Road Less Traveled" by Robert Frost is actually about anal sex. (Now please don't all leave me outraged comments and personal messages asking me how I can be so disgusting and impugn Frost's memory. I didn't make it up -- it's actually in the book. Ok, I did choose to mention it, but seriously, how you can review this book without mentioning it, I don't know.)
But there's a lot more to Skippy Dies, which was long-listed for the Man Booker. Paul Murray is pretty brilliant in his ability to get into teenagers' heads -- their dialogue here is pitch perfect, including stuff like (I'm about to mention the Frost thing again, so all you sensitive people, please avert your eyes):
"I've been thinking about that Robert Frost poem," he says. "I don't think it's about making choices at all."
"What's it about, so?" Geoff says.
"Anal sex," Dennis says.
"Anal sex?"
"How'd you figure, Dennis?"
"Well, once you see it, it's pretty obvious. Just look at what he says. He's in a wood, right? He sees two roads in front of him. He takes the one less travelled. What else could it be about?"
"Uh, woods?"
"Going for a walk?"
"Don't you listen in class? Poetry's never about what it says it's about, that's the whole point of it. Obviously Mrs. Frost or whoever isn't going to be too happy with him going around telling the world about this time he gave it to her up the bum. So he cleverly disguises it by putting it in a poem which to the untrained eye is just about a boring walk in some gay wood."
"But, Dennis, do you think Mr. Slattery'd be teaching it to us if it was really about anal sex?"
"What does Mr. Slattery know?" Dennis scoffs. "You think he's ever taken his wife up the road less travelled?"
"Poh, when have you ever gone up the road less travelled?" Mario challenges.
Dennis strokes his chin. "Well, there was that magical night with your mother...I tried to stop her!" -- ducking out of the way as Mario swings at him. "But she was insatiable! Insatiable!"
Murray also manages to juggle a lot of characters, major themes, and plot points, and do it all well. It's been an excellent year for novels in general, so I know that your to-read pile is probably too tall already, but this one is definitely worth adding.
"The Road Less Traveled" by Robert Frost is actually about anal sex. (Now please don't all leave me outraged comments and personal messages asking me how I can be so disgusting and impugn Frost's memory. I didn't make it up -- it's actually in the book. Ok, I did choose to mention it, but seriously, how you can review this book without mentioning it, I don't know.)
But there's a lot more to Skippy Dies, which was long-listed for the Man Booker. Paul Murray is pretty brilliant in his ability to get into teenagers' heads -- their dialogue here is pitch perfect, including stuff like (I'm about to mention the Frost thing again, so all you sensitive people, please avert your eyes):
"I've been thinking about that Robert Frost poem," he says. "I don't think it's about making choices at all."
"What's it about, so?" Geoff says.
"Anal sex," Dennis says.
"Anal sex?"
"How'd you figure, Dennis?"
"Well, once you see it, it's pretty obvious. Just look at what he says. He's in a wood, right? He sees two roads in front of him. He takes the one less travelled. What else could it be about?"
"Uh, woods?"
"Going for a walk?"
"Don't you listen in class? Poetry's never about what it says it's about, that's the whole point of it. Obviously Mrs. Frost or whoever isn't going to be too happy with him going around telling the world about this time he gave it to her up the bum. So he cleverly disguises it by putting it in a poem which to the untrained eye is just about a boring walk in some gay wood."
"But, Dennis, do you think Mr. Slattery'd be teaching it to us if it was really about anal sex?"
"What does Mr. Slattery know?" Dennis scoffs. "You think he's ever taken his wife up the road less travelled?"
"Poh, when have you ever gone up the road less travelled?" Mario challenges.
Dennis strokes his chin. "Well, there was that magical night with your mother...I tried to stop her!" -- ducking out of the way as Mario swings at him. "But she was insatiable! Insatiable!"
Murray also manages to juggle a lot of characters, major themes, and plot points, and do it all well. It's been an excellent year for novels in general, so I know that your to-read pile is probably too tall already, but this one is definitely worth adding.
February 17, 2011
First, whoever wrote the jacket copy for this book deserves to be given a few punches to the head. For the life of me I can't even remember there being a midget basketball player (oh wait, now I can, but the very brief paragraph or two that he appears in the book is unessential), and the white rapper character is just a piece of comic relief. Other reviews do a good job of lambasting the jacket blurbs.
Second, I've read about half of the Harry Potter books, and I don't see the comparison between this and that except there are some kids in both. I do see the Infinite Jest comparison though. I'd be very very very (add some more here if you'd like in your head) surprised to find out that the author hadn't read DFW's masterpiece a few times. This could be a bad thing, but it's not. Like The Instructions this book does a fantastic job at paying an homage to Infinite Jest but adding enough of it's own originality and quirks to the book so that it doesn't feel like your just reading a second-rate rip-off.
One way I've been describing the book to people (well three people, but that's like my whole social world plus a co-worker) is that it's IJ light: the book doesn't demand very much from the reader, it's fairly linear (except that in the first chapter Skippy dies, and then get to read up to the event, knowing full well that Skippy aint gonna be living too much longer), and while it has a large cast of characters it doesn't bombard the reader with the number that DFW does. It also doesn't have any of the big asides, there is no eschaton-esque scene, there is nothing like the need to be given chemical compounds for drugs, long filmographies or even a single footnote. The book also takes place in just one general place, sort of like if IJ took place only at ETA.
What I mean to say is, it's like all the fun of the ETA parts of IJ without any of the work! Sort of like what I might want to have for a beach-read version of IJ.
I should admit here that the book isn't a pure 5 stars for me. It's a four and a half, but I was feeling generous and wanted to get it to stand apart from the plethora of four star ratings I've been handing out lately.
Another sort of aside: I think the author shouldn't have named a character Mario, even though the Mario character here is nothing like the IJ Mario there was minor confusion in my head sometimes. That is probably because I'm not so smart and easily obsessed trying to find DFW similarities in books.
I said earlier that the book was all the fun without the work. That is kind of a lie. The book is lots of fun but it's also somewhat bleak at times. I find bleak to be on the fun side sometimes, but I wouldn't want someone to read this book based on my review and expect a laugh riot of silliness and absurdity. The book is basically about why a fourteen year old drops dead one Friday night in a donut shop (here is another IJ quality, the first chapter where the reader meets Hal in his ruined state, here we meet Skippy, who turns out to be a quite Hal-like, dead, but without a good reason given in that opening chapter of how he came to die on the floor of some donut shop).
My big complaints with the book are all about the last book. I thought that certain parts of the story fell apart here, there was a sense of certain scenes being rushed and a feeling of finality was present, but it made me think, why does there need to be the answers and this kind of resolution to the book. It's not that the book becomes unenjoyable here it just felt like the beginning (first 2/3's) of the book didn't necessarily point to there being a need for the book to take the direction that it did. I don't know what I would have rather liked to have happened and the direction the book takes is fine it just felt like there is the need for a moral or something put on the end that doesn't need to be there. I still enjoyed it though, it's only when I try to think of the book as a whole that I start to have some problems with some of the decisions Murray made with the ending.
Second, I've read about half of the Harry Potter books, and I don't see the comparison between this and that except there are some kids in both. I do see the Infinite Jest comparison though. I'd be very very very (add some more here if you'd like in your head) surprised to find out that the author hadn't read DFW's masterpiece a few times. This could be a bad thing, but it's not. Like The Instructions this book does a fantastic job at paying an homage to Infinite Jest but adding enough of it's own originality and quirks to the book so that it doesn't feel like your just reading a second-rate rip-off.
One way I've been describing the book to people (well three people, but that's like my whole social world plus a co-worker) is that it's IJ light: the book doesn't demand very much from the reader, it's fairly linear (except that in the first chapter Skippy dies, and then get to read up to the event, knowing full well that Skippy aint gonna be living too much longer), and while it has a large cast of characters it doesn't bombard the reader with the number that DFW does. It also doesn't have any of the big asides, there is no eschaton-esque scene, there is nothing like the need to be given chemical compounds for drugs, long filmographies or even a single footnote. The book also takes place in just one general place, sort of like if IJ took place only at ETA.
What I mean to say is, it's like all the fun of the ETA parts of IJ without any of the work! Sort of like what I might want to have for a beach-read version of IJ.
I should admit here that the book isn't a pure 5 stars for me. It's a four and a half, but I was feeling generous and wanted to get it to stand apart from the plethora of four star ratings I've been handing out lately.
Another sort of aside: I think the author shouldn't have named a character Mario, even though the Mario character here is nothing like the IJ Mario there was minor confusion in my head sometimes. That is probably because I'm not so smart and easily obsessed trying to find DFW similarities in books.
I said earlier that the book was all the fun without the work. That is kind of a lie. The book is lots of fun but it's also somewhat bleak at times. I find bleak to be on the fun side sometimes, but I wouldn't want someone to read this book based on my review and expect a laugh riot of silliness and absurdity. The book is basically about why a fourteen year old drops dead one Friday night in a donut shop (here is another IJ quality, the first chapter where the reader meets Hal in his ruined state, here we meet Skippy, who turns out to be a quite Hal-like, dead, but without a good reason given in that opening chapter of how he came to die on the floor of some donut shop).
My big complaints with the book are all about the last book. I thought that certain parts of the story fell apart here, there was a sense of certain scenes being rushed and a feeling of finality was present, but it made me think, why does there need to be the answers and this kind of resolution to the book. It's not that the book becomes unenjoyable here it just felt like the beginning (first 2/3's) of the book didn't necessarily point to there being a need for the book to take the direction that it did. I don't know what I would have rather liked to have happened and the direction the book takes is fine it just felt like there is the need for a moral or something put on the end that doesn't need to be there. I still enjoyed it though, it's only when I try to think of the book as a whole that I start to have some problems with some of the decisions Murray made with the ending.
February 16, 2012
The juggler walks on stage to polite applause. He hasn’t won us over yet, but he seems confident that he will. Somewhat surprisingly, he announces what the dramatic highpoint of his act will be before even starting. Like all jugglers, he has his clichéd elements: rings, knives, a little fire maybe. But hopes are raised knowing the balls-aloft crowd nominated him for their big annual award. Then he begins proving his chops. He adds quality and quantity, complexity and pizzazz. There are flourishes galore – balls behind his back and through his legs, then bounced on the floor with blurring speed. And there’s never so much as a bobble. We can’t help but be impressed when he keeps 7 balls going at once. Applause, applause! This guy deserves his stay in Vegas.
Actually, these weren’t really spoilers at all. I just saw Bird Brian use the sliding door to great effect in one of his recent reviews and thought it was fun and different.
Getting back to Skippy, this book has plenty to recommend it. The characters seemed very real, the dialog was pitch perfect, the conflicts were plausible, and the writing was top-notch. I can’t say whether it was plot-driven or character-driven because it was both. And it was funny. And sad. At times even thought-provoking.
As we’ve established, Skippy does die right at the start. The book then backtracks to tell us about the months leading up to that point. Skippy’s roommate, Ruprecht, is also central to the story – an overweight genius with an abiding interest in string theory and all eleven of its abstract dimensions. A cross-section of other friends includes one who was idiosyncratic in his earnest good nature, one who was nobody’s fool, and one who provided comic relief as a would-be Lothario (named Mario) who didn’t catch the irony of a lucky condom he’d been carrying for three years. Anyway, Skippy has conflicts (surprise, surprise). One is a dying mother, another is a dream girl at the neighboring school who is both out of his league and unaware of his existence. Besides that, she kind of has this thing going with bad-boy Carl who trades pills for affections. We get to know this cast of 14-year-olds well, with that odd mix of credulity and cynicism characteristic of the age.
Adults are given full treatment, too. There’s Howard (the Coward) who teaches history and lives with his American girlfriend Halley, who fell for him because he was "Irish-looking, by which she meant a collection of indistinct features – pale skin, mousy hair, general air of ill-health – that combine to mysteriously powerful romantic ¬effect". But Howard was also in the thrall of a substitute geography teacher, the alluring Aurelie (alliteratively speaking). She may have been a femme fatale, but she did inspire him to improve his classroom performance. One of the more poignant bits of the book was during an impromptu field trip where Howard told the boys about the WWI experiences of an Irish unit that had been renowned for their rugby prowess during school days only to find dramatic changes in their fortunes from the war as heroism was redefined in the wake of anti-English sentiment. Then there was Father Green (or Pere Vert as the boys called him). There’s a murkiness about this guy which would be a true spoiler to reveal. Another, Greg Costigan, was an exceedingly political school administrator. He was so bad it was funny. Anyone who talks about the school “brand” is meant to be a caricature, I figure. It’s surprising he wasn’t made out to be an American, one of the buzzword-wielding business-trained elite.
The plot makes its way to these various characters very skillfully; never too fast, never too slow. We get fights, bravery, cowardice, boy meeting girl, and even a few flirtations with the supernatural (or might that be quantum physics, as only Ruprecht could possibly know). I won’t go into the details because this is already too long, but I will say that any fears I had about jumping the shark (at the dance where Skippy meets Dream Girl) were off base. In Murray’s capable hands, I ended up buying it all – the White Goddess, the Irish mythology, the weird science, the Druid drug dealer – all of it.
Sadly, Skippy does die. But we’re better people for knowing his story and the stories of those around him. Murray tells it so well.
Actually, these weren’t really spoilers at all. I just saw Bird Brian use the sliding door to great effect in one of his recent reviews and thought it was fun and different.
Getting back to Skippy, this book has plenty to recommend it. The characters seemed very real, the dialog was pitch perfect, the conflicts were plausible, and the writing was top-notch. I can’t say whether it was plot-driven or character-driven because it was both. And it was funny. And sad. At times even thought-provoking.
As we’ve established, Skippy does die right at the start. The book then backtracks to tell us about the months leading up to that point. Skippy’s roommate, Ruprecht, is also central to the story – an overweight genius with an abiding interest in string theory and all eleven of its abstract dimensions. A cross-section of other friends includes one who was idiosyncratic in his earnest good nature, one who was nobody’s fool, and one who provided comic relief as a would-be Lothario (named Mario) who didn’t catch the irony of a lucky condom he’d been carrying for three years. Anyway, Skippy has conflicts (surprise, surprise). One is a dying mother, another is a dream girl at the neighboring school who is both out of his league and unaware of his existence. Besides that, she kind of has this thing going with bad-boy Carl who trades pills for affections. We get to know this cast of 14-year-olds well, with that odd mix of credulity and cynicism characteristic of the age.
Adults are given full treatment, too. There’s Howard (the Coward) who teaches history and lives with his American girlfriend Halley, who fell for him because he was "Irish-looking, by which she meant a collection of indistinct features – pale skin, mousy hair, general air of ill-health – that combine to mysteriously powerful romantic ¬effect". But Howard was also in the thrall of a substitute geography teacher, the alluring Aurelie (alliteratively speaking). She may have been a femme fatale, but she did inspire him to improve his classroom performance. One of the more poignant bits of the book was during an impromptu field trip where Howard told the boys about the WWI experiences of an Irish unit that had been renowned for their rugby prowess during school days only to find dramatic changes in their fortunes from the war as heroism was redefined in the wake of anti-English sentiment. Then there was Father Green (or Pere Vert as the boys called him). There’s a murkiness about this guy which would be a true spoiler to reveal. Another, Greg Costigan, was an exceedingly political school administrator. He was so bad it was funny. Anyone who talks about the school “brand” is meant to be a caricature, I figure. It’s surprising he wasn’t made out to be an American, one of the buzzword-wielding business-trained elite.
The plot makes its way to these various characters very skillfully; never too fast, never too slow. We get fights, bravery, cowardice, boy meeting girl, and even a few flirtations with the supernatural (or might that be quantum physics, as only Ruprecht could possibly know). I won’t go into the details because this is already too long, but I will say that any fears I had about jumping the shark (at the dance where Skippy meets Dream Girl) were off base. In Murray’s capable hands, I ended up buying it all – the White Goddess, the Irish mythology, the weird science, the Druid drug dealer – all of it.
Sadly, Skippy does die. But we’re better people for knowing his story and the stories of those around him. Murray tells it so well.
November 24, 2012
‘How telling it is,’ he says in his sermon, shaking his illustrious golden-locked head, ‘that Daniel’s short life should come to its end in a restaurant devoted to doughnuts. For in some ways, is our modern way of life not comparable to one of these doughnuts? “Junk food” that satisfies only temporarily, that offers a “quick fix”, but has, at the center of it, a hole?’
Doughnuts, alcohol, drugs, sex, tv, video games, exercise, goodreads --you name it -- we as a society have used it to try to fill up that empty little hole in our centers, haven’t we?
I don’t really know where to begin reviewing this book. How’s about I begin by saying that whoever wrote the jacket copy for this book is a moron. If I were Murray, I would be pissed! Instead of making this book sound like a sort of poignant treatise on the failures of modern society (which it is) it makes it sound like an episode of ‘Saved By the Bell.’ Murray manages to write this heartbreaking yet heartwarmingly hilarious commentary on everything from infidelity to pedophilia, and it never seems preachy or hackneyed, and this moron doesn’t touch on any of that. ‘Hip-hop-loving Eoin ‘MC Sexecution’ Flynn? Who the flip is that? Caveat emptor, dear reader: ignore the jacket copy. Instead, read any of the stellar reviews on this site to get an idea of how this book can enrich your life.
Because it can. Because it will. Interestingly enough, I read the majority of this book during a hurricane-induced power outage. Stripped away of any contact with the outside world, Murray’s message took on a whole new meaning for me. We try to find so many different ways to distract ourselves from our feelings of “apartness,” of distance from everyone else in the world. But the thing is, yes we are alone in many fundamental ways, but that is okay. It’s okay to feel lonely; it’s okay to feel lost. Everyone does at one time or another. The important thing is to FEEL it, instead of burying it or hiding. This book will show you the insanity that ensues from trying to fill our holes instead of accepting them.
And then it will give you hope.
August 9, 2016
“…a string vibrating at one frequency will give you a quark, say, and a string vibrating at another frequency will give you a photon…Nature is made of all the musical notes that are played on this superstring, so the universe is like a kind of symphony.” (Ruprecht, p. 152)
It’s been years since this book came out. It made such a big splash on its debut I feared it may be popular fiction of a type that doesn’t interest me. I waited a little, had a peek, retreated. A big book in the vernacular of adolescent boys: a wave of exhaustion overcame me. Gradually I began to notice that many people whose reviews I follow were finding it an exceptional read. I took another look. No. Still couldn’t ever seem to find the time to wade through the (what I am embarrassed to say I thought at the time) triviality of the thoughts of fourteen-year-olds.
Wrong.
The voice I had in my head as I read was inadequate to this opus. Out of frustration for my lack of understanding the significance of what others were enjoying, I bought the audio of this, performed with great brio, skill, and cognizance by Nicola Barber, Fred Berman, Clodagh Bowyer, Terry Donnelly, Sean Gormley, Khristine Hvam, John Keating, Lawrence Lowry, Graeme Malcolm, Paul Nugent, and produced by Audible, Inc. Suddenly I experienced what I had been missing. This has to be one of the best audiobook performances I have ever heard.
The book is a symphony in four parts, but in the voices of these performers, it is a four-part spoken opera. It is broken into three parts in print and in audio, but make no mistake: This is music. It is Murray’s attempt to reach those of us in alternate universes:
“There is a certain amount of evidence that music of various kinds is audible in the higher dimensions—“(Ruprecht, p. 590)
This is also a classic of literature, worthy of all the kudos heaped upon it, and many more besides. If I could place it next to another book of comparable stature, it would be Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s was slim and this is comparatively huge. But Murray makes his words count.
The four parts are named after video games. I believe Hopeland is an invention of the author, but Skippy finds details in the game that seem to reflect his own challenges. The other game names may also be inventions, but there are real games out there with those names & the challenges sort of follow along with Skippy's. They may, however, have been created after, and as a result of the novel rather than having been referenced by Murray. Heartland (The Heartland has fallen under the rule of the ruthless tyrant Midan and his minions...); Ghostland (The blood elves applied the scorched earth policy to the woodlands...); Afterland (a traveling carnival of magical misfits in the afterlife).
Every review I have seen mentions its size as a stumbling block. Pity. It takes days, weeks even, to get to it all, but after having lived with the boys and teachers of Seabrook College for some time now, I am convinced this tragicomic masterpiece is one of the great books of the new century. Funny, tragic, sad, true, and painfully revealing, it addresses major themes of our times and reminds us, with lacerating humor, just how it is to be young today.
The ferociously hormonal boys central to the drama are engaged in the epic battle we all face but prefer to forget: how best does one grow up, today, in a world of global warming? To a fourteen-year-old, the gloom this question casts is rarely acknowledged but manages to shadow thoughts of the future. Murray captures the idiocy of youth, how they are so unsure of themselves, yet feel immortal at the same time.
The cast of characters is positively Dickensonian. Murray peoples an embattled Catholic boarding school with an administration loathe to lose paying students to competitors yet fully aware and conspiratorially silent about the school’s deficiencies. Teachers involved in personal dramas struggle to inspire the teens in their charge while warily watching and abetting the administration in their deceptions.
But he is funny, really funny at the same time he is tearing your heart out with the stories of the boys trying to make their way in such a world. Howard, the history teacher, stays on the subject of the First World War for much of the term. The following riff could be taken for one of Murray's central themes, just by substituting global warming for WWI.
"In today's History class, Howard the Coward--who looks like he hasn't slept much lately, or washed, or shaved--wants to talk about betrayal.'That's what the war was really about. The betrayal of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong, above all the young by the old. "If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied" --that's how Rudyard Kipling put it. Young men were told all kinds of stories in order to get them to go and fight. Not just by their fathers of course. By their teachers, the government, the press. Everybody lied about the reasons for war and the true nature of the war. Serve your country. Serve the King, Serve Ireland...[Robert] Graves's friend Siegfried Sasson called the war "a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation"...'"
And what of the White Goddess, who makes appearances throughout the story? The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, a cycle of desire and destruction. One will always desire her but one can never possess her lest she lose her power to inspire. Those that survive her ravishment will eventually pass to the Black Goddess who represents enduring, reciprocating love. A reader might take this to mean that if one manages to "take the road less traveled by" and overcome their desire for the ultimately meaningless trifles that are the result of 'wealth creation', one might finally reach a higher stage of consciousness featuring enduring love.
“At the docks…we saw…the whole front half of a destroyer that had been completely crushed, like a car that had hit a telegraph pole at high speed…we were told that it had been hit by a wave—one wave, which came out of nowhere, crashed into the bow and smashed everything right back to the bridge…What if the eleventh dimension was not a serene place, but a place of storms, with entire universes ripping through it like huge turbulent waves? Imagine the kind of cataclysm you’d have if one of these white-wave universes collided into another universe…” (Professor Tomashi, p. 215)This is how I feel now, after having reviewed and revisited this work for some weeks. I feel quite as though a gigantic wave has crashed over me and Murray has broken through to another dimension. It is a fabulous experience…Ruprecht would be happy.
An interview with Paul Murray speaking to Jesse Montgomery gives us the mind of the author. He speaks the way he writes: he is funny, but he reminds us of the darkness surrounding us and our lives of plenty. “I think the tragedy of the world at the moment is that it’s more and more intent on turning us all into teenagers and making us long for this period in our life when we were totally at sea.” He reminds us of responsibility: of our tendency to act the “kidult” when what we really need to do is, each of us, take personal responsibility for the world we have created.
Jill Owens interviewed Murray for Powell’s: “The only reality in our lives is loss, you know? The kids in the last part of the book are realizing that, and realizing that all the illusions they've been chasing are false, and the only real thing they have is each other…But at the same time I think the ending has a certain amount of optimism to it, because even in the middle of this quite cynical system that they're in, these kids have made a valuable discovery, that they have friendship and they have this capacity to take care of each other.”
In Murray’s book, Howard is one of the teachers who tells the boys what they need to pull together after Skippy dies. Speaking again of WWI and the men of “D” Company going to fight:
“They had joined up as friends, and when they got out to the Front, when the grand words evaporated, the bond between them remained. That they stayed friends, that they looked out for each other, most agreed, was what kept them from cracking up altogether. And in the end was the only thing, was the one true thing, that was genuinely worth fighting for.” (Howard, p. 557)
Murray: “M-theory is so complex and it's so astonishingly intricate. It has the fascination of what's difficult, in the same way that drugs are fascinating, or music is fascinating��At the same time, ultimately, they are leading you down a rabbit hole and they are leading you away from the world, and they are leading you away from people into this little narcissistic closed circuit.”
“It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality’s building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents. (Ruprecht, p. 301)”
Murray was mum in 2010 about his next project, but he did give a few hints to LitBlog interviewer in April 2011:”…I’d like to write something short and funny. I think the central gag of it is that this French banker meets a writer and the banker is very sensitive and poetic and the writer is just looking for a quick buck. I think it’ll be first person.”
There is more on his new project on a Farrar Strauss Giroux blog here.
Pachelbel's Canon combines the techniques of canon and ground bass. Canon is a polyphonic device in which several voices play the same music, entering in sequence. In Pachelbel's piece, there are three voices engaged in canon, but there is also a fourth voice, the basso continuo, which plays an independent part. [Wikipedia]
A fictional short story by Paul Murray published in The New York Times is not to be missed. In the story a young boy goes to school for the first time. As his father walks him to school, the son asks, “Did you go to school, Dad?”
“If there is a substitute for love, it is memory.” --Kipling
“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word…” (Lori, p. 654)
November 6, 2014
My sons attended a Boys School with the same traditions as Seabrook College with its 140 years of excellence.
After reading the Spud Trilogy of John van der Ruit :
Spud #1
The Madness Continues #2 and
Learning to Fly #3 ,
I wanted to read Skippie Dies as well.
In a way I felt I owed it to my sons to read these books, since they never shared everything with me. I knew they were not talking. Not that they were the totally innocent type at all. The books made me laugh and cry. They confirmed my suspicions, good and bad. Their dad was their confidant. I was jealous. They said mom had antennas they could not dodge. But they ain't talkin' anyway!
So it was not only subjective intent with which I took this book on, and not only in loyalty to my own boys. I knew what to expect, but still ended up overwhelmingly grateful for reading this excellent masterpiece as a novel as well.
I do not want to find the blasé words to describe a book in which such a vast array of human traits were combined to end up with an in-depth exploration of the aspects of our own selves that name and shame us as a species. Besides, I have interviewed victims of horrific events taking place in similar schools, which makes the stories in this book look like a Sunday school picnic.
The history teacher, Howard The Coward, had almost an obsession with WWI which had the Acting Principal (the 'Automator') in a tiff. But through his teachings, after observing the events taking place in the school, he used the WWI-period as a metaphor for what was really behind the fame and glory of the school.
Daniel Juster, or Skippy, dies in the beginning of the book. This opens up a hornet's nest of adolescent struggles with emotions, drugs, girls, parents, teachers and life in general. Teachers have their own skeletons in the closets, the parents do not have lily white morals either, the priests have their own secrets to hide. Most of them felt responsible, which slowly heats up the fire that will lead to the final big bang. And what an unbelievably dramatic ending it is!
There's nothing new in the book. In fact, it got so boring that I wanted to just pack it away. So I read and slept, read and slept, and wondered which decade in future will get me finishing this book. However, I could not go there. I simply wanted to know it all, although much of the events was expected.
What impressed me about the book was the way in which all the strings, and there were a multitude of sub-plots in the book, knotted together in the end. There were love, kindness and empathy. But there were also narcissism, greed,aspirations, egotism and brutality. So many ideas, philosophies, as well as religions, ancient and new, graced the pages. So much innocence lost the plot of life. Oh how it made me cry for our young people.
The prose is often hilarious, witty, scatological, profound.
If the book ended differently than it did, I would have burnt it! I would have felt violated, betrayed!- because I mourned the demise of Skippy and did not want him to die in vain. He did not.
The story of a micro-cosmos of characters had my emotions jumping ship several times. Either being ravingly mad, or heart breakingly sad. No one will be able to close this book and walk away in apathy. It's not possible.
Brilliant plot, brilliant writing !!
After reading the Spud Trilogy of John van der Ruit :
Spud #1
The Madness Continues #2 and
Learning to Fly #3 ,
I wanted to read Skippie Dies as well.
In a way I felt I owed it to my sons to read these books, since they never shared everything with me. I knew they were not talking. Not that they were the totally innocent type at all. The books made me laugh and cry. They confirmed my suspicions, good and bad. Their dad was their confidant. I was jealous. They said mom had antennas they could not dodge. But they ain't talkin' anyway!
So it was not only subjective intent with which I took this book on, and not only in loyalty to my own boys. I knew what to expect, but still ended up overwhelmingly grateful for reading this excellent masterpiece as a novel as well.
I do not want to find the blasé words to describe a book in which such a vast array of human traits were combined to end up with an in-depth exploration of the aspects of our own selves that name and shame us as a species. Besides, I have interviewed victims of horrific events taking place in similar schools, which makes the stories in this book look like a Sunday school picnic.
The history teacher, Howard The Coward, had almost an obsession with WWI which had the Acting Principal (the 'Automator') in a tiff. But through his teachings, after observing the events taking place in the school, he used the WWI-period as a metaphor for what was really behind the fame and glory of the school.
Daniel Juster, or Skippy, dies in the beginning of the book. This opens up a hornet's nest of adolescent struggles with emotions, drugs, girls, parents, teachers and life in general. Teachers have their own skeletons in the closets, the parents do not have lily white morals either, the priests have their own secrets to hide. Most of them felt responsible, which slowly heats up the fire that will lead to the final big bang. And what an unbelievably dramatic ending it is!
There's nothing new in the book. In fact, it got so boring that I wanted to just pack it away. So I read and slept, read and slept, and wondered which decade in future will get me finishing this book. However, I could not go there. I simply wanted to know it all, although much of the events was expected.
What impressed me about the book was the way in which all the strings, and there were a multitude of sub-plots in the book, knotted together in the end. There were love, kindness and empathy. But there were also narcissism, greed,aspirations, egotism and brutality. So many ideas, philosophies, as well as religions, ancient and new, graced the pages. So much innocence lost the plot of life. Oh how it made me cry for our young people.
The prose is often hilarious, witty, scatological, profound.
If the book ended differently than it did, I would have burnt it! I would have felt violated, betrayed!- because I mourned the demise of Skippy and did not want him to die in vain. He did not.
The story of a micro-cosmos of characters had my emotions jumping ship several times. Either being ravingly mad, or heart breakingly sad. No one will be able to close this book and walk away in apathy. It's not possible.
Brilliant plot, brilliant writing !!
August 7, 2014
It’s not you, Skippy Dies, it’s me.
I’d heard nothing but praise for this book before I started it. Almost all of my Goodreads friends who’ve reviewed it have given it five stars. Nearly all of the top-rated reviews on Goodreads give it five stars. It was nominated for various awards, including the Booker (well, it was longlisted at least). Apparently, it’s one of Donna Tartt’s favourite books. So you can imagine that I had high hopes for this one, and started it with absolute optimism that it was bound to become a favourite.
The story is set at an Irish Catholic boys' boarding school, Seabrook, and charts the interlocking lives of a number of characters. There's the titular Skippy, aka Daniel Juster, a troubled young boy who - you won't be surprised to learn - dies; his friends, notably the overweight and frighteningly intelligent Ruprecht van Doren; Carl, a drug-addled boy in the year above who is 'in love' with Lori, a student from the neighbouring girls' school, who also happens to be the object of Skippy's affections; Howard, the boys' history teacher, who is obsessed with a female colleague and haunted by memories of a traumatic incident by his own days at Seabrook. The narrative weaves around these characters in a mix of third and second person voices, which vary hugely depending on which character is in the spotlight. It’s all very well-written, incredibly clever, and doesn’t put a foot wrong as far as themes and plotting are concerned. It’s also very amusing - laugh-out-loud funny in places and darkly comic in others.
So what went wrong?
The main barrier was that I liked almost none of the characters. Skippy and Ruprecht are just about the only likeable people in the story. The boys were mostly funny, and definitely true-to-life, but I found the girls horrendous (perhaps they were too reminiscent of people I loathed at that age?), and the adults... I can't emphasise enough how much I detested Howard (appropriately nicknamed 'the Coward'), which was a significant problem since he was the adult protagonist. Aurelie, the object of his affections/lust, was equally infuriating - such a contrived fantasy figure I would have thought she was a figment of Howard's imagination if there hadn't been scenes with other characters speaking to her. Such was my dislike for these characters that I delayed reading for as long as possible whenever I knew a chapter involving them was coming up. Then there's the dreadful headmaster, the positively Satanic Father Green, psychotic Carl, and supporting characters in various shades of horrible. I totally understand that the awfulness of these people is a part of the story (although I'm not convinced I was supposed to hate Howard as much as I did) but for whatever reason, rather than making it entertaining to me, this just made me keep wishing I was reading something else.
I did find that the book picked up towards the end. The description of the boys' changed world following Skippy's death was beautifully done, and I even felt a bit sorry for Howard (despite the fact that he was still being a spineless idiot, and ). The fact that Howard made me happy. I liked the fact that the ending did everything but tie the story up neatly, even if some of the resolutions were quite horrifying. It's hard not to see the story as an indictment of this type of education, especially since Murray was a student at an all-boys Catholic school himself.
Ultimately I'm finding it difficult to put my finger on what made Skippy Dies such a hard slog to get through (it took me a month and a half to read, almost unheard of for me), which forces me to conclude that the problem is with me as a reader, not the book itself. This book and I just weren't compatible with each other. This was a big reminder that books can't just be sorted into 'good' and 'bad' - there will always be someone who hates even the most revered classic, and there will always be plenty of readers who adore the most dreadful examples of 'literature' imaginable. I'm saying all this because I really do not want to put anyone else off reading Skippy Dies, and apart from the dreadfulness of Howard, I can't find anything really negative to say about it. It simply wasn't right for me.
I’d heard nothing but praise for this book before I started it. Almost all of my Goodreads friends who’ve reviewed it have given it five stars. Nearly all of the top-rated reviews on Goodreads give it five stars. It was nominated for various awards, including the Booker (well, it was longlisted at least). Apparently, it’s one of Donna Tartt’s favourite books. So you can imagine that I had high hopes for this one, and started it with absolute optimism that it was bound to become a favourite.
The story is set at an Irish Catholic boys' boarding school, Seabrook, and charts the interlocking lives of a number of characters. There's the titular Skippy, aka Daniel Juster, a troubled young boy who - you won't be surprised to learn - dies; his friends, notably the overweight and frighteningly intelligent Ruprecht van Doren; Carl, a drug-addled boy in the year above who is 'in love' with Lori, a student from the neighbouring girls' school, who also happens to be the object of Skippy's affections; Howard, the boys' history teacher, who is obsessed with a female colleague and haunted by memories of a traumatic incident by his own days at Seabrook. The narrative weaves around these characters in a mix of third and second person voices, which vary hugely depending on which character is in the spotlight. It’s all very well-written, incredibly clever, and doesn’t put a foot wrong as far as themes and plotting are concerned. It’s also very amusing - laugh-out-loud funny in places and darkly comic in others.
So what went wrong?
The main barrier was that I liked almost none of the characters. Skippy and Ruprecht are just about the only likeable people in the story. The boys were mostly funny, and definitely true-to-life, but I found the girls horrendous (perhaps they were too reminiscent of people I loathed at that age?), and the adults... I can't emphasise enough how much I detested Howard (appropriately nicknamed 'the Coward'), which was a significant problem since he was the adult protagonist. Aurelie, the object of his affections/lust, was equally infuriating - such a contrived fantasy figure I would have thought she was a figment of Howard's imagination if there hadn't been scenes with other characters speaking to her. Such was my dislike for these characters that I delayed reading for as long as possible whenever I knew a chapter involving them was coming up. Then there's the dreadful headmaster, the positively Satanic Father Green, psychotic Carl, and supporting characters in various shades of horrible. I totally understand that the awfulness of these people is a part of the story (although I'm not convinced I was supposed to hate Howard as much as I did) but for whatever reason, rather than making it entertaining to me, this just made me keep wishing I was reading something else.
I did find that the book picked up towards the end. The description of the boys' changed world following Skippy's death was beautifully done, and I even felt a bit sorry for Howard (despite the fact that he was still being a spineless idiot, and ). The fact that Howard made me happy. I liked the fact that the ending did everything but tie the story up neatly, even if some of the resolutions were quite horrifying. It's hard not to see the story as an indictment of this type of education, especially since Murray was a student at an all-boys Catholic school himself.
Ultimately I'm finding it difficult to put my finger on what made Skippy Dies such a hard slog to get through (it took me a month and a half to read, almost unheard of for me), which forces me to conclude that the problem is with me as a reader, not the book itself. This book and I just weren't compatible with each other. This was a big reminder that books can't just be sorted into 'good' and 'bad' - there will always be someone who hates even the most revered classic, and there will always be plenty of readers who adore the most dreadful examples of 'literature' imaginable. I'm saying all this because I really do not want to put anyone else off reading Skippy Dies, and apart from the dreadfulness of Howard, I can't find anything really negative to say about it. It simply wasn't right for me.
February 10, 2012
Skippy Dies is an eager-to-please puppy.
Now let me just say, I'm very sympathetic to the problems of an author: avoid cliches, show, don't tell, consistent characters that grow, realistic dialogue, active voice. Semicolons? Adjectives? and so on. I pat Skippy on its head and say good boy, you’re really trying.
And yet.
Little Skippy, I like you well enough - but you do get on my nerves.
Let’s be clear: Skippy is not a dog. I mean that in every sense. It’s pretty much a good story, though somewhat predictable. You can practically visualize the storyboard and plotting, the hours at the keyboard, the googling for facts, theories, & histories (perhaps googling porn sites for the constant mindless sexual references). I felt like reading Skippy with a green eyeshade on, a large red crayon in hand, crossing out this and that, adding a question mark, circling paragraphs, making changes & suggestions. Yes we get string theory, Irish history, WWI, Gallipoli, info on drugs & medications, & how anorexia develops, tech info, and more - and it’s all great to know - but often awkwardly stuck in, the characters sort of lecturing.
So, 3.5 stars and a kick in the groin for creating the idiotic Mario Bianchi.
October 6, 2011
This book is a bit long. There are certainly good reasons for it but I do have Murray to blame for staying up all night to finish the last 200 pages of this book. Which, without a doubt, are enthralling. The length does several things (a comment that I'm sure the characters of the book would make a crass joke out of), but the most important is the slow roll of character development. As many others have pointed out, the book begins on pretty familiar territory. There are handfuls of coming-of-age tropes and clichés. But I think because of this familiarity Murray is able to really slap you across the face, when the drama hits hard. And you are sitting there going, "wait what! Did that just happen?" I.e. the p.o.v. of a lonely and sexually deprived Catholic Priest plus a little boy being called to his office. Need I say more?
When I first began reading, I wrote this off as a well-written buildunsgroman. I must admit, I am a huge sucker for these stories. (see Black Swan Green, Stand By Me, Catcher in the Rye, Norwegian Wood, Rushmore, Submarine). It's a phase that I'm sure I'll grow out of, but I can't get enough of the first love, loss of innocence and teenage awkwardness that permeates in every one of these stories. This is largely what Murray focuses on for the first section of the book. There are plenty of laughs to be had here. Sure, there are many funny moments throughout the entire book (including, in my opinion the funniest scene, when the school's classical quartet initiates a negative feedback loop of Pachobel's Cannon in D into the PA system. The description of the ensuing aural chaos is hysterical). But Murray's layout of adolescent social customs and interactions are so spot on and gut-busting, I often completely forgot that this book was set in Ireland and not in the very high school I went to!
I think that is what allows readers to keep plunging through this large book; Murray, while relying on typical teenage conventions, packs in humor and terrific writing to keep you wanting more. After he has established this as a basis for his story, he begins subtly applying layers onto the story. At one moment he drops in the second-person narration. Which, at first, feels like the colloquial "you", as in "that's what happens when you do this." Then I began to notice that the "you" corresponded to a specific character and he continues with this motif throughout. It reminded me much of the self-conciousness of teenage years. When you constantly talk yourself through situations, like "you need to stop being so nervous. Why are you acting this way." I felt like the content of the story earned Murray the right to use this narrative stylization without it being a gimmick. It also proved once again, that there is still fresh ground to cover in the field of teenage novels. Moreover, the "you" begins to place a strange distance between the character and the exposition so that Murray can continue to "slip in" other elements. Once you have accepted the second person, he begins throwing in details about serious family dysfunction. Family dysfunction isn't new to coming of age, but Murray takes it to the next level.
The moment I realized that this book was not going to pull any punches was a scene involving fourteen year-old sex in exchange for drugs, followed by the drug dealer's father beating his mother. I shouldn't give away too much more about this book, but there will so many moments where you have to re-read paragraphs just because you don't believe what you have read.
And the brilliance of it all is that it never feels forced or over-dramaticized. You believe this story. It is brutally honest and believable. So yes it's a bit long, but for a damn good reason.
Plus, I'll never read Robert Frost's poetry sans a sexually depraved undertone ever again.
When I first began reading, I wrote this off as a well-written buildunsgroman. I must admit, I am a huge sucker for these stories. (see Black Swan Green, Stand By Me, Catcher in the Rye, Norwegian Wood, Rushmore, Submarine). It's a phase that I'm sure I'll grow out of, but I can't get enough of the first love, loss of innocence and teenage awkwardness that permeates in every one of these stories. This is largely what Murray focuses on for the first section of the book. There are plenty of laughs to be had here. Sure, there are many funny moments throughout the entire book (including, in my opinion the funniest scene, when the school's classical quartet initiates a negative feedback loop of Pachobel's Cannon in D into the PA system. The description of the ensuing aural chaos is hysterical). But Murray's layout of adolescent social customs and interactions are so spot on and gut-busting, I often completely forgot that this book was set in Ireland and not in the very high school I went to!
I think that is what allows readers to keep plunging through this large book; Murray, while relying on typical teenage conventions, packs in humor and terrific writing to keep you wanting more. After he has established this as a basis for his story, he begins subtly applying layers onto the story. At one moment he drops in the second-person narration. Which, at first, feels like the colloquial "you", as in "that's what happens when you do this." Then I began to notice that the "you" corresponded to a specific character and he continues with this motif throughout. It reminded me much of the self-conciousness of teenage years. When you constantly talk yourself through situations, like "you need to stop being so nervous. Why are you acting this way." I felt like the content of the story earned Murray the right to use this narrative stylization without it being a gimmick. It also proved once again, that there is still fresh ground to cover in the field of teenage novels. Moreover, the "you" begins to place a strange distance between the character and the exposition so that Murray can continue to "slip in" other elements. Once you have accepted the second person, he begins throwing in details about serious family dysfunction. Family dysfunction isn't new to coming of age, but Murray takes it to the next level.
The moment I realized that this book was not going to pull any punches was a scene involving fourteen year-old sex in exchange for drugs, followed by the drug dealer's father beating his mother. I shouldn't give away too much more about this book, but there will so many moments where you have to re-read paragraphs just because you don't believe what you have read.
And the brilliance of it all is that it never feels forced or over-dramaticized. You believe this story. It is brutally honest and believable. So yes it's a bit long, but for a damn good reason.
Plus, I'll never read Robert Frost's poetry sans a sexually depraved undertone ever again.
August 10, 2013
I discovered Skippy dies through Goodreads and it immediately caught my attention. I love novels dealing with perilous youth and growing up, novels dealing with school and academic life; when I learned that Skippy Dies follows the lives and adventures of a group of teenagers in an Irish boarding school, I was sold. Judging by ratings and reviews I even though that Skippy might enter the great canon of boarding school literature. School stories are a very British thing - they really kicked off after Thomas Hughes published his Tom Brown's Schooldays in 1857, which set the path for future works. Rudyard Kipling published his Stalky & Co in 1899, a collection of stories about the charismatic Stalky and his friends and their life at a boarding school for boys. Stalky marks a departure from the tone set by Hughes in Tom Brown: Tom made trouble every now and then but was basically a decent boy, one who stood up for the underdogs and befriended them, fighting bullies. What he didn't achieve in the classroom he made up for at the playing field. >i>Stalky is far from being sentimental or idealized: it openly presents sadism and bullying as they took place in British boarding school, letting readers peek into the darker side of the institutions which were supposed to protect and educate their children. The boys in Stalky engage in violence and bullying, and are especially cruel to cats. Critics accustomed to Hughes's boyish Tom Brown accused Kipling of not writing about boys, but about ugly little men, little beasts that could have only been dreamed up by a spoiled child made by the utterly brutal public school system. His work was described as vulgar, savage and vile; Cambridge's Concise History of English Literature (published in 1942) summed it up as An unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school. Today, some readers see Stalky & Co as the only school novel which prepared its readers for real life.
Although they originated and reached popularity in Britain, school stories are not exclusive to the isles. My personal childhood favorite is a series of novels published in my home country of Poland, and written by a man whose work all Polish children are familiar with - Jan Brzechwa. Brzechwa wrote a trilogy of novels about character known as Pan Kleks (Mr. Kleks, with Kleks being Polish for inkblot). Mr. Kleks's name was Ambroży (try pronouncing it) and he was a creator and headmaster of a mysterious and magical Academy, open only for boys whose names begun with the letter "A". The Academy itself is located in an enormous park full of gorges and ravines and is hidden from the outside world with an enormous wall, which is full of doors locked with silver padlocks, and each opens to a new fable...these books have been written after the war, in the 40's and 60's, and to the best of my knowledge have not been translated into English. Which is a total shame - when I read them as a little tyke I thought that the intrigue was stellar and that suspense was through the roof, and that the author's imagination knew no bounds. I'm supposed to be all grown up now and haven't read these books in years - I'm fearful that I'd take the few happy moments of my childhood away if they wouldn't prove to be as fantastical and wonderful as I remembered them.
Brzechwa was the first author whom I read and who thought about mixing the boarding school story with magical elements, but he's certainly not the most popular. In the late 90's a British (surprised?) author named J.K. Rowling single-handedly revived the genre with the first installment in what would be one of the most widely read and appreciated sagas of all time, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Rowling invented the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where she set the adventures of Harry, Ron, Hermione and their friends, and which captured the attention of the whole world, proving enormously successful with readers of all ages. I'm happy for Ms. Rowling's great success as it provided me with many pleasant hours and gave faith to many struggling writers across the globe; but at the same time can't help but be a bit sad for my beloved Jan Brzechwa, whose Mr. Kleks never even got a chance to enchant young readers the way Harry did. He did enchant for me, that he did - and I remember him.
There's a reason why Hogwarts proved to be so popular with young readers. Kids love the idea of living away from their parents and following a completely different set of rules, with the school being an entirely new environment - a whole world - made just for them; they take delight in exploring it, pushing the boundaries and often crossing them, taking their first stabs at questioning authority, fighting it, and discovering what lies beyond. I very well remember the feeling when I realized that my parents made mistakes and bad decisions, and that life in our house was not perfect. I felt that a wall which was surrounding me since birth was cracked, and what was behind it was ugly. I was a very young boy and had lots to learn; I wished to attend a remote school like the boys in Brzechwa's novels did, but I never got the chance. I went through the public school system which Kipling's critics so despised, and like all kids everywhere I had to build my own wall. I'm still building it but then who isn't, and does it ever really stop?
But I digress. Skippy Dies is a boy's book: it's a big, fat book about a group of teenagers in Seabrook College, a Catholic boarding school in Dublin. Although it originally started as a short story, ideas kept popping into the head of Paul Murray and it grew and grew. It took 10 years to write and originally was more than 1000 pages long, but Murray cut it to below 700. Skippy doesn't lie - the title character, Daniel "Skippy" Juster dies at a donut eating contest in the novel's opening scene. Skippy's death is as tragic as it is bizarre: why did Skippy end up dead at the floor of Ed's Doughnut House seen by all other participants? Was he trying to say something to his friends in his last moments? Murray rewinds his book, and for two of its three volumes (Skippy was originally published as a set of three separate paperbacks) takes us through the events leading up to Skippy's death, and then shows us its aftermath on the community of Seabrook.
Skippy, who is a rather passive boy, is just one of Murray's many characters; they're both juvenile young teens and adult teachers of Seabrook, but both groups seem to be equally lost and not sure of their sense of place in the world. One can accuse Murray of employing stereotypical characters but then anyone who has ever attended a school will recognize these boys from the pages: there's Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight geek obsessed with string theory who wants to open a portal to another dimension; Mario, a teenage Lothario wannabe who carries a condom in his wallet because he's up all night to get lucky; there are also Geoff, Niall and other goofs. There's also Lori, a pupil of the neighboring's school for girls, whom Skippy sees throwing a Frisbee as he looks into Ruprecht's telescope and with whom he falls in love; there's also Carl, a teenage drug dealer and a thug who also has his eyes on her. The adult faculty is also an important part of this story: there's Howard Fallon, a history teacher nicknamed Howard The Coward because of an episode from his past which still haunts him; there's Father Green, the French teacher whose name the boys have translated as "Pere-Vert". Greg Costigan, the acting principal is known as Greg the Automaton because of his heated intention on modernizing what he sees to be a hopelessly dated school.
The two adult female characters, Howard's American girlfriend Halley and the beautiful substitute geography teacher, miss Aurelie McIntyre. Halley seems to merely exist for Howard to slowly realize his disillusionment with the life he leads, while Aurelie seems to be almost mythologized and reduce to being a muse, a golden haired and lovely but ultimately fantastical maiden. To Murray's credit, the teenage Lori is a much better realized character than both adult women; it's a curious incident in what otherwise is a book which paints real attention to portray an extensive cast of varied characters.
There's a lot of juvenile humor in this book (which is genuinely funny, at least for yours truly) but also of juvenile violence and juvenile, terrible cruelty. The boys relentlessly tease one another, harshly and insultingly; they are openly racist to a Vietnamese restaurant owner and take pure pleasure in damaging and disturbing his business and insulting him and his workers. These are things that many young boys - good boys, from good homes, not thugs - do every day, and which we refuse to believe and accept and would just rather brush under the rug. There's a sexual scene which is a homage to the ending section of Ulysses - that breathless pornography. But it also sags and slows down, and shows that while Murray clearly had lots of ideas he doesn't quite know what to do with such a wide array of them and how to organize them into a narrative which wouldn't be helplessly bogged down in certain sections. which then arrive at an ending which ties the lose ends all too neatly. The book shows that it was edited and shortened down; perhaps it would have been more coherent at its full uncut length of 1000 pages? We'll never know.
In his review, Mike calls Skippy a YA novel for adults. Although sounding like a contradiction, this might actually be the best way to describe this novel. It has ideas, it has juveniles, it's not slow but it's not fast, it certainly is not for younger kids but it's certain to wear some adult readers down, and they might not even finish it. It's a very difficult book to rate - in the end I chose to give it four stars, but mostly for the author's ambition and great talent at recapturing the way young boys behave, but not so much for what turned out of his work. Skippy Dies is not bad. It really isn't - but what bothers me is that it could have been great, but lost its real potential somewhere between string theories and fart jokes.
Although they originated and reached popularity in Britain, school stories are not exclusive to the isles. My personal childhood favorite is a series of novels published in my home country of Poland, and written by a man whose work all Polish children are familiar with - Jan Brzechwa. Brzechwa wrote a trilogy of novels about character known as Pan Kleks (Mr. Kleks, with Kleks being Polish for inkblot). Mr. Kleks's name was Ambroży (try pronouncing it) and he was a creator and headmaster of a mysterious and magical Academy, open only for boys whose names begun with the letter "A". The Academy itself is located in an enormous park full of gorges and ravines and is hidden from the outside world with an enormous wall, which is full of doors locked with silver padlocks, and each opens to a new fable...these books have been written after the war, in the 40's and 60's, and to the best of my knowledge have not been translated into English. Which is a total shame - when I read them as a little tyke I thought that the intrigue was stellar and that suspense was through the roof, and that the author's imagination knew no bounds. I'm supposed to be all grown up now and haven't read these books in years - I'm fearful that I'd take the few happy moments of my childhood away if they wouldn't prove to be as fantastical and wonderful as I remembered them.
Brzechwa was the first author whom I read and who thought about mixing the boarding school story with magical elements, but he's certainly not the most popular. In the late 90's a British (surprised?) author named J.K. Rowling single-handedly revived the genre with the first installment in what would be one of the most widely read and appreciated sagas of all time, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Rowling invented the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where she set the adventures of Harry, Ron, Hermione and their friends, and which captured the attention of the whole world, proving enormously successful with readers of all ages. I'm happy for Ms. Rowling's great success as it provided me with many pleasant hours and gave faith to many struggling writers across the globe; but at the same time can't help but be a bit sad for my beloved Jan Brzechwa, whose Mr. Kleks never even got a chance to enchant young readers the way Harry did. He did enchant for me, that he did - and I remember him.
There's a reason why Hogwarts proved to be so popular with young readers. Kids love the idea of living away from their parents and following a completely different set of rules, with the school being an entirely new environment - a whole world - made just for them; they take delight in exploring it, pushing the boundaries and often crossing them, taking their first stabs at questioning authority, fighting it, and discovering what lies beyond. I very well remember the feeling when I realized that my parents made mistakes and bad decisions, and that life in our house was not perfect. I felt that a wall which was surrounding me since birth was cracked, and what was behind it was ugly. I was a very young boy and had lots to learn; I wished to attend a remote school like the boys in Brzechwa's novels did, but I never got the chance. I went through the public school system which Kipling's critics so despised, and like all kids everywhere I had to build my own wall. I'm still building it but then who isn't, and does it ever really stop?
But I digress. Skippy Dies is a boy's book: it's a big, fat book about a group of teenagers in Seabrook College, a Catholic boarding school in Dublin. Although it originally started as a short story, ideas kept popping into the head of Paul Murray and it grew and grew. It took 10 years to write and originally was more than 1000 pages long, but Murray cut it to below 700. Skippy doesn't lie - the title character, Daniel "Skippy" Juster dies at a donut eating contest in the novel's opening scene. Skippy's death is as tragic as it is bizarre: why did Skippy end up dead at the floor of Ed's Doughnut House seen by all other participants? Was he trying to say something to his friends in his last moments? Murray rewinds his book, and for two of its three volumes (Skippy was originally published as a set of three separate paperbacks) takes us through the events leading up to Skippy's death, and then shows us its aftermath on the community of Seabrook.
Skippy, who is a rather passive boy, is just one of Murray's many characters; they're both juvenile young teens and adult teachers of Seabrook, but both groups seem to be equally lost and not sure of their sense of place in the world. One can accuse Murray of employing stereotypical characters but then anyone who has ever attended a school will recognize these boys from the pages: there's Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight geek obsessed with string theory who wants to open a portal to another dimension; Mario, a teenage Lothario wannabe who carries a condom in his wallet because he's up all night to get lucky; there are also Geoff, Niall and other goofs. There's also Lori, a pupil of the neighboring's school for girls, whom Skippy sees throwing a Frisbee as he looks into Ruprecht's telescope and with whom he falls in love; there's also Carl, a teenage drug dealer and a thug who also has his eyes on her. The adult faculty is also an important part of this story: there's Howard Fallon, a history teacher nicknamed Howard The Coward because of an episode from his past which still haunts him; there's Father Green, the French teacher whose name the boys have translated as "Pere-Vert". Greg Costigan, the acting principal is known as Greg the Automaton because of his heated intention on modernizing what he sees to be a hopelessly dated school.
The two adult female characters, Howard's American girlfriend Halley and the beautiful substitute geography teacher, miss Aurelie McIntyre. Halley seems to merely exist for Howard to slowly realize his disillusionment with the life he leads, while Aurelie seems to be almost mythologized and reduce to being a muse, a golden haired and lovely but ultimately fantastical maiden. To Murray's credit, the teenage Lori is a much better realized character than both adult women; it's a curious incident in what otherwise is a book which paints real attention to portray an extensive cast of varied characters.
There's a lot of juvenile humor in this book (which is genuinely funny, at least for yours truly) but also of juvenile violence and juvenile, terrible cruelty. The boys relentlessly tease one another, harshly and insultingly; they are openly racist to a Vietnamese restaurant owner and take pure pleasure in damaging and disturbing his business and insulting him and his workers. These are things that many young boys - good boys, from good homes, not thugs - do every day, and which we refuse to believe and accept and would just rather brush under the rug. There's a sexual scene which is a homage to the ending section of Ulysses - that breathless pornography. But it also sags and slows down, and shows that while Murray clearly had lots of ideas he doesn't quite know what to do with such a wide array of them and how to organize them into a narrative which wouldn't be helplessly bogged down in certain sections. which then arrive at an ending which ties the lose ends all too neatly. The book shows that it was edited and shortened down; perhaps it would have been more coherent at its full uncut length of 1000 pages? We'll never know.
In his review, Mike calls Skippy a YA novel for adults. Although sounding like a contradiction, this might actually be the best way to describe this novel. It has ideas, it has juveniles, it's not slow but it's not fast, it certainly is not for younger kids but it's certain to wear some adult readers down, and they might not even finish it. It's a very difficult book to rate - in the end I chose to give it four stars, but mostly for the author's ambition and great talent at recapturing the way young boys behave, but not so much for what turned out of his work. Skippy Dies is not bad. It really isn't - but what bothers me is that it could have been great, but lost its real potential somewhere between string theories and fart jokes.
May 19, 2014
It's several months in the life of a boys' public school in Ireland. It is nothing like Harry Potter. It is chockablock with early teen angst and cruelty, and the particular vagaries of that age of life, which are so easily forgotten when the headiness of later adolescence closes in. And everyone's story is the most important story to them, and yet, we discover how different those stories are, and how stories are covered up and papered over, and different narratives installed in their place to make things seem neat and tidy and explainable to a board of investors and a bunch of angry parents.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
December 27, 2016
Skippy Dies is a mystery. Much less and not really of the “who dunit” variety, but it’s a mystery of life. A fairly common complaint among reviewers is that it’s too long, but after it’s over it’s hard to imagine what to cut out. I also agreed that it compares to A Catcher in the Rye (in spite of the vast difference in size) in that you’ve learned and are changed by the reading, but it’s near impossible to put it in words. Since I’m not a literature expert, I was confused by the new (to me) categories. Is this “creative nonfiction”, since it has so much actual science, popular references? I don’t understand how some called this “magic realism”, as the mythology references were quite a small part of the book, overall, including, even, Ruprecht’s attempts to communicate with the dead. Perhaps MR as conceived by the literary includes unknown aspects of scientific study, and that term was broadened to mean the epistemology of physics. Certainly that was a common concern in Ruprecht’s thinking, and does sits at the junction of realism and idealism. I’d also not come across the description of the “tragicomic” book, but that fits here. Indeed, the jokes made you laugh out loud and so often, even though the jokes were more ordinary and some almost corny - although with exquisite timing. It wasn’t the “black”, witty, edgy, or deprecating humor that generally makes me laugh that often. It was the easy nature of the joke that prepared you for the onslaught of epiphany and power that came between. Perhaps such jokes help “lower our guard”, so the next serious activity was stronger in impact. Indeed, humor and seriousness were not combined, but thematically sequential, sometimes in quick time, and sometimes more slowly.
Maybe it wasn’t wise to jump back into major fiction with a 600+ pages that is compared to Pynchon and Franzen in complexity (not that I’ve read either - yet). I do think it was the audiobook format that caught and held my attention (for almost a 24 hours’ worth of narration) during and a bit after a cross-country road trip July ‘16. The audiobook is highly recommended. This was my first “book on tape” and it was a revelation in how much I enjoyed it. I was stunned when I saw how many hours I’d have to dedicate to it, and just that made me think of the paradox of time, and how we spend it especially when we’re aware of making it as meaningfully as possible. Reading in hard copy takes about half the time, no? Makes me also reflect on “information overload” (coined by the recently departed sociologist-futurologist Toeffler) and how we judge the value of time. Months later, I can still conjure up the voice of the narrator, and think I may always will. I’m not sure if that’s the wonderful tenor, pacing, and timing of the voice, or that from the voice came so many powerful phrases and ideas.
War and sex-segregated prep schools are both “womanless worlds”, and are meant to horrify, brutally separate, reify, codify. My male partner listed to the audio by my side, and it did pain him a bit to remember his own boy’s preparatory school, a well-known one in Northern New England. He recalled similar homophobia including experiencing taunts for a year after he was “caught” looking at a book with his roommate while sitting besides him on his bed. It made him terribly sympathetic to gays and lesbians the rest of his life. It is as if during a certain age of boys the entire quest is denying any potential homophobic yearnings as much as Mario hallucinated up a busy sex life. My partner realized, even at the age of Skippy and his pals, it wasn’t good, or right, or “natural” to suddenly go from co-education grade school, where boys and girls learn to know and accept they’re going to be in the world together, to a sex-segregated prep school, with artificially pre-arranged “group dates” with a nearby girl’s prep school. He protests his relationships with women were twisted from that experience clear through his entire Yale undergraduate days before females were other than the Other, as it were, again.
In a fascinating interview with Murray in Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20... Murphy sympathizes with how difficult life as teens may be, to try to mature in all ways without clear, desirable, or constant guideposts, and says of gender: “My school was a boys’ school; there were no girls, so life really felt kind of pointless in that regard. You’ve got these huge sexual transformations happening, but if there are no girls, obviously all the energy is just going to be turned into brutalizing whoever is smaller than you.” Is this why, while females obviously bully, the rate for bullying in boys is twice the rate in high schools? It was disheartening to me, though, in the same interview, that Murray notes that his old school chums get together and “we do regress really quickly—it’s kind of scary—to our teenage state and talk in a not hugely dissimilar way to the kids in the book”, and that was disheartening to me. Is this why some manly men (who are definitely not gay) have Man Caves, to work out their homophobia with their bros? As much as I loved this book, it was psychologically bruising to hear the casual slurs of “gay” and “fag” said literally hundreds of times. I know it’s also a giggle when the word “gay” becomes noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and likely that lowered my defenses and left me more vulnerable to the sting, as I waited for homophobia among the boys to be addressed or reckoned with, but it never was. Contrast that with the nonchalance towards sexual impropriety among adults trusted to protect the children. Indeed, I was also on edge waiting for sexual abuse to enter the plot once I realized it was a parochial school with priests – on guard and expectant for it although wishing it would never come. I agreed with one comment that the boys, themselves, were tortured participating in the gay-bashing almost as much as those that were on the receiving end.
Do we really never have more than an “inner teenager”, Murray asks in the Paris Review, one from which we never evolve and instead just “learn to keep him (sic) quiet”? There was a psychological article decades ago on denial and responsibility that wondered why the largest Holocaust museum was in D.C., and not in Germany, and why D.C. didn’t have the largest museums on Native Americans, for example? (Now D.C. does have a Native American museum – and it’s a fabulous one, but it took a long time). The author of the article sardonically asked whether perhaps we should be less concerned about freeing our “inner child” than getting more in touch with the “inner adult” within. Also in the 80s (and it’s shocking to recollect this was pre-social media) Josh Meyowitz, a Communications professor, wrote about the impact of television and said that it had already produced kid-like adults and adult-like kids, e.g., adults watch cartoons and kid shows (Simpson’s) and we subject children to adult themed situations on shows they see with their parents as well as unsupervised. Murray rips us open existentially by showing us how the line between child and adult is always blurred, but perhaps it is getting more so. He shows us that sometimes the thinking and behavior of the 14 year old is indistinguishable from the 25 and older group. We older people come to respect the thinking of a 14 year old, and we should listen to them as Murray shows us they’re all calling out for help. However, how can adults help them, when there is not a single, solitary example of anything approaching a “healthy” adult portrayed? (Did I miss one? Howard was the only one with adult potential, it seemed.) Ruprecht with his French horn is frustrated as he knows there is something wrong with how the song is going, but doesn’t know how to fix it. Similarly, so often with life, we guess he is thinking, or maybe it’s just us, now, working the metaphors after Murray got us going.
We are reminded, as educators and scientists among other readers, that both schools and physics have a tenuous “fabric of society” that is needed to hold them together, therefore both the process of schooling under post-modernity as well as the physical universe are slowly unraveling. Because it’s part of my academic work life I particularly loved hating the “acting” administrator at the school. The administration of the school is disturbingly similar to the de-evolution of perhaps all human bureaucracies but certainly apparent in those of K-16 schools in the U.S.. Murray recollects the similarities with his own, quite similar, boys’ prep school in Ireland and how the focus was on grades, not learning, and on getting lucrative careers, not making a meaningful life. Back to the Paris Review interview, Murray speaks of how Ireland became a “cruel” place and especially for those “marginalized” groups during it’s own economic boom and bust, leaving the materialistic consumerism he grossly details in his writing as the goal of the work ethic as it’s own reward and punishment. Murray says that Ireland adopted a “very American model of capitalism” that has, likewise with neoliberal global capitalism, now left the Ireland “completely destitute.” Shades of Schooling In Capitalist America: Educational Reform And The Contradictions Of Economic Life were throughout this work – how education reproduces the ideologies (destructive) and behaviors (likewise, and soul-sucking) in our children and students, the future “brick in the walls” (from the Pink Floyd refrain featured in the book).
I did love the student questioning whether Jesus is a zombie.
Maybe it wasn’t wise to jump back into major fiction with a 600+ pages that is compared to Pynchon and Franzen in complexity (not that I’ve read either - yet). I do think it was the audiobook format that caught and held my attention (for almost a 24 hours’ worth of narration) during and a bit after a cross-country road trip July ‘16. The audiobook is highly recommended. This was my first “book on tape” and it was a revelation in how much I enjoyed it. I was stunned when I saw how many hours I’d have to dedicate to it, and just that made me think of the paradox of time, and how we spend it especially when we’re aware of making it as meaningfully as possible. Reading in hard copy takes about half the time, no? Makes me also reflect on “information overload” (coined by the recently departed sociologist-futurologist Toeffler) and how we judge the value of time. Months later, I can still conjure up the voice of the narrator, and think I may always will. I’m not sure if that’s the wonderful tenor, pacing, and timing of the voice, or that from the voice came so many powerful phrases and ideas.
War and sex-segregated prep schools are both “womanless worlds”, and are meant to horrify, brutally separate, reify, codify. My male partner listed to the audio by my side, and it did pain him a bit to remember his own boy’s preparatory school, a well-known one in Northern New England. He recalled similar homophobia including experiencing taunts for a year after he was “caught” looking at a book with his roommate while sitting besides him on his bed. It made him terribly sympathetic to gays and lesbians the rest of his life. It is as if during a certain age of boys the entire quest is denying any potential homophobic yearnings as much as Mario hallucinated up a busy sex life. My partner realized, even at the age of Skippy and his pals, it wasn’t good, or right, or “natural” to suddenly go from co-education grade school, where boys and girls learn to know and accept they’re going to be in the world together, to a sex-segregated prep school, with artificially pre-arranged “group dates” with a nearby girl’s prep school. He protests his relationships with women were twisted from that experience clear through his entire Yale undergraduate days before females were other than the Other, as it were, again.
In a fascinating interview with Murray in Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20... Murphy sympathizes with how difficult life as teens may be, to try to mature in all ways without clear, desirable, or constant guideposts, and says of gender: “My school was a boys’ school; there were no girls, so life really felt kind of pointless in that regard. You’ve got these huge sexual transformations happening, but if there are no girls, obviously all the energy is just going to be turned into brutalizing whoever is smaller than you.” Is this why, while females obviously bully, the rate for bullying in boys is twice the rate in high schools? It was disheartening to me, though, in the same interview, that Murray notes that his old school chums get together and “we do regress really quickly—it’s kind of scary—to our teenage state and talk in a not hugely dissimilar way to the kids in the book”, and that was disheartening to me. Is this why some manly men (who are definitely not gay) have Man Caves, to work out their homophobia with their bros? As much as I loved this book, it was psychologically bruising to hear the casual slurs of “gay” and “fag” said literally hundreds of times. I know it’s also a giggle when the word “gay” becomes noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and likely that lowered my defenses and left me more vulnerable to the sting, as I waited for homophobia among the boys to be addressed or reckoned with, but it never was. Contrast that with the nonchalance towards sexual impropriety among adults trusted to protect the children. Indeed, I was also on edge waiting for sexual abuse to enter the plot once I realized it was a parochial school with priests – on guard and expectant for it although wishing it would never come. I agreed with one comment that the boys, themselves, were tortured participating in the gay-bashing almost as much as those that were on the receiving end.
Do we really never have more than an “inner teenager”, Murray asks in the Paris Review, one from which we never evolve and instead just “learn to keep him (sic) quiet”? There was a psychological article decades ago on denial and responsibility that wondered why the largest Holocaust museum was in D.C., and not in Germany, and why D.C. didn’t have the largest museums on Native Americans, for example? (Now D.C. does have a Native American museum – and it’s a fabulous one, but it took a long time). The author of the article sardonically asked whether perhaps we should be less concerned about freeing our “inner child” than getting more in touch with the “inner adult” within. Also in the 80s (and it’s shocking to recollect this was pre-social media) Josh Meyowitz, a Communications professor, wrote about the impact of television and said that it had already produced kid-like adults and adult-like kids, e.g., adults watch cartoons and kid shows (Simpson’s) and we subject children to adult themed situations on shows they see with their parents as well as unsupervised. Murray rips us open existentially by showing us how the line between child and adult is always blurred, but perhaps it is getting more so. He shows us that sometimes the thinking and behavior of the 14 year old is indistinguishable from the 25 and older group. We older people come to respect the thinking of a 14 year old, and we should listen to them as Murray shows us they’re all calling out for help. However, how can adults help them, when there is not a single, solitary example of anything approaching a “healthy” adult portrayed? (Did I miss one? Howard was the only one with adult potential, it seemed.) Ruprecht with his French horn is frustrated as he knows there is something wrong with how the song is going, but doesn’t know how to fix it. Similarly, so often with life, we guess he is thinking, or maybe it’s just us, now, working the metaphors after Murray got us going.
We are reminded, as educators and scientists among other readers, that both schools and physics have a tenuous “fabric of society” that is needed to hold them together, therefore both the process of schooling under post-modernity as well as the physical universe are slowly unraveling. Because it’s part of my academic work life I particularly loved hating the “acting” administrator at the school. The administration of the school is disturbingly similar to the de-evolution of perhaps all human bureaucracies but certainly apparent in those of K-16 schools in the U.S.. Murray recollects the similarities with his own, quite similar, boys’ prep school in Ireland and how the focus was on grades, not learning, and on getting lucrative careers, not making a meaningful life. Back to the Paris Review interview, Murray speaks of how Ireland became a “cruel” place and especially for those “marginalized” groups during it’s own economic boom and bust, leaving the materialistic consumerism he grossly details in his writing as the goal of the work ethic as it’s own reward and punishment. Murray says that Ireland adopted a “very American model of capitalism” that has, likewise with neoliberal global capitalism, now left the Ireland “completely destitute.” Shades of Schooling In Capitalist America: Educational Reform And The Contradictions Of Economic Life were throughout this work – how education reproduces the ideologies (destructive) and behaviors (likewise, and soul-sucking) in our children and students, the future “brick in the walls” (from the Pink Floyd refrain featured in the book).
I did love the student questioning whether Jesus is a zombie.
May 25, 2013
Rating: one bazillionth of one star out of five (p19)
Oh dear GAWD please please please send plagues of boils and masses of ingrown back hairs and painful rectal itch upon the next writer, editor, and publisher to think the adolescent Irish boys are worthy of ANY MORE ATTENTION!!
Enough already, no more, basta, and just F*CKING STOP IT!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Oh dear GAWD please please please send plagues of boils and masses of ingrown back hairs and painful rectal itch upon the next writer, editor, and publisher to think the adolescent Irish boys are worthy of ANY MORE ATTENTION!!
Enough already, no more, basta, and just F*CKING STOP IT!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
January 5, 2012
Bought this today as an "OMG congratulations on being 31 and finally getting a real job" reward. It better be worth it; even at the Strand it was $14. Real job does not equal real money on the first day, turns out.
**
Holy balls this book is so good. I put it #1 on my CCLaP best-of-2011! Here's what I said about it there:
This is a straight-up, no nonsense, trickery-free whirl of a novel. It takes place in an Irish boys' school, following a whole group of tween boys, as well as many of their teachers, through a month or so in real time, but with scads and scads of backstory. It's filled with incredibly drawn characters, slippery dicey morality, bad bad luck and timing, the howling chaos of lived lives. There are so many chances for Murray to take the easy way out -- becoming corny, melodramatic, or needlessly devastating -- but he hews instead to something that approaches real truth, actions and dialogue and characters that remain consistently, utterly believable, and it's therefore all the more crushing when they fall.
**
Holy balls this book is so good. I put it #1 on my CCLaP best-of-2011! Here's what I said about it there:
This is a straight-up, no nonsense, trickery-free whirl of a novel. It takes place in an Irish boys' school, following a whole group of tween boys, as well as many of their teachers, through a month or so in real time, but with scads and scads of backstory. It's filled with incredibly drawn characters, slippery dicey morality, bad bad luck and timing, the howling chaos of lived lives. There are so many chances for Murray to take the easy way out -- becoming corny, melodramatic, or needlessly devastating -- but he hews instead to something that approaches real truth, actions and dialogue and characters that remain consistently, utterly believable, and it's therefore all the more crushing when they fall.
June 1, 2012
I hadn't expected to like Skippy Dies. Literary novels haven't attracted my interest for some time now---since, say, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and several works by Cormac McCarthy, all read and loved a long time ago. Frankly, many literary tomes can seem tedious or pompous or both. I relish strange new worlds with unfamiliar landscapes such as those written by China Miéville and more recently, the mind-blowing The Quantum Thief.
That said, how in the world did Paul Murray pull me into Seabrook College for Boys with a starring cast of pubescent critters? Raging hormones are predicable and single-minded, so why bother with clumsy sexual fixations when there are so many more interesting tales to read? Well, Paul Murray described a world with those alien creatures that was fascinating in variety and complexity such as exists in each human heart, which is, after all, albeit familiar, still in need of exploration and explanation.
A plethora of topics unfold, such as how love can be fueled by illusions that stem from neediness, which often has little to do with reality. And then there's string theory! Interestingly, I saw the characters as worlds unto themselves, but woven together such that pulling one small thread such as the diminutive Skippy can wreck and heal the lives of children and adults alike. --All this and more, laughter and pain found in beautiful, profound writing that won me over rather early.
The writing was magnificent in places and the overall structure of the plot and subplots were expertly handled. I found myself reading 'just one more chapter' well into the night. And to think, all that marvel takes place in a boys school---as good a center of the universe as any, I now admit.
That said, how in the world did Paul Murray pull me into Seabrook College for Boys with a starring cast of pubescent critters? Raging hormones are predicable and single-minded, so why bother with clumsy sexual fixations when there are so many more interesting tales to read? Well, Paul Murray described a world with those alien creatures that was fascinating in variety and complexity such as exists in each human heart, which is, after all, albeit familiar, still in need of exploration and explanation.
A plethora of topics unfold, such as how love can be fueled by illusions that stem from neediness, which often has little to do with reality. And then there's string theory! Interestingly, I saw the characters as worlds unto themselves, but woven together such that pulling one small thread such as the diminutive Skippy can wreck and heal the lives of children and adults alike. --All this and more, laughter and pain found in beautiful, profound writing that won me over rather early.
The writing was magnificent in places and the overall structure of the plot and subplots were expertly handled. I found myself reading 'just one more chapter' well into the night. And to think, all that marvel takes place in a boys school---as good a center of the universe as any, I now admit.
December 23, 2023
Seabrook College in Dublin raises young men to be the future leaders and power brokers of modern society. They will be the investment bankers and decision makers. But in the meantime they have to get through being fourteen years old. Paul Murray brilliantly depicts the banter and bravado of that strange time in life where you're trying to figure out where you fit in. The cliques, the friendships, the nerds, the bullies, the secret crushes. The teachers are no better with their own sets of problems with private lives in tatters. And their own secrets to hide.
The title is a giveaway, with the opening pages seeing the sad demise of Daniel "Skippy" Juster at the local doughnut shop to the horror of his best friend Ruprecht van Doren. Imagine being that age and watching something like that happen. The story then goes back to the recent past, to the events leading up to this tragedy.
When I finished reading this I was emotionally wrung out. Growing up can be difficult, and this story tackles a lot of sensitive and tough subjects. The loneliness of school, the pressure to conform, family breakdowns, sexual abuse and cruelty, drug addiction. There are so many red flags throughout that the supposed adults should have seen to be able to avoid the inevitable, but they were simply too wrapped up in what was going on in their own little worlds. Or in the case of the college itself, being willing to ignore abhorrent events and sweep them under the carpet to save face and the reputation of 140 years of tradition.
And yet Murray handles it all with plenty of dark humour and laugh out loud situations.
Another WOW from me. This was a buddy read with the wonderful talented @neale 💙📚 Having recently read (and loved) The Bee Sting, Neale suggested we read some of Murray's back catalogue. To be honest, I'm now writing this review several weeks after finishing Skippy Dies and I feel it has had even more of an emotional impact on me than The Bee Sting. And that's really saying something.
4.5 full stars ⭐️
The title is a giveaway, with the opening pages seeing the sad demise of Daniel "Skippy" Juster at the local doughnut shop to the horror of his best friend Ruprecht van Doren. Imagine being that age and watching something like that happen. The story then goes back to the recent past, to the events leading up to this tragedy.
When I finished reading this I was emotionally wrung out. Growing up can be difficult, and this story tackles a lot of sensitive and tough subjects. The loneliness of school, the pressure to conform, family breakdowns, sexual abuse and cruelty, drug addiction. There are so many red flags throughout that the supposed adults should have seen to be able to avoid the inevitable, but they were simply too wrapped up in what was going on in their own little worlds. Or in the case of the college itself, being willing to ignore abhorrent events and sweep them under the carpet to save face and the reputation of 140 years of tradition.
And yet Murray handles it all with plenty of dark humour and laugh out loud situations.
Another WOW from me. This was a buddy read with the wonderful talented @neale 💙📚 Having recently read (and loved) The Bee Sting, Neale suggested we read some of Murray's back catalogue. To be honest, I'm now writing this review several weeks after finishing Skippy Dies and I feel it has had even more of an emotional impact on me than The Bee Sting. And that's really saying something.
4.5 full stars ⭐️
October 14, 2021
This is another book I read because I am catching up on Booker longlists from before I started following them closely. It is a comic novel, but one with a little more substance than most, and I couldn't help wondering whether Murray's starting point might have been writing an Irish answer to Infinite Jest, albeit a more tightly plotted book with fewer digressions and no footnotes.
The book is set in Seabrook College, a boys' school with an elite reputation. The plot is complicated, and the focus frequently switches between different members of the cast and between the teenaged pupils and the staff of the school, many of whom are also alumni. The opening scene starts as a comic set piece, a doughnut eating contest, but its part in the story becomes much clearer later - indeed about three quarters of the story takes place before it.
I won't even attempt to describe the plot or characters in detail, but I found the book a very enjoyable read, with surprising depth for a book with so much comic content.
The book is set in Seabrook College, a boys' school with an elite reputation. The plot is complicated, and the focus frequently switches between different members of the cast and between the teenaged pupils and the staff of the school, many of whom are also alumni. The opening scene starts as a comic set piece, a doughnut eating contest, but its part in the story becomes much clearer later - indeed about three quarters of the story takes place before it.
I won't even attempt to describe the plot or characters in detail, but I found the book a very enjoyable read, with surprising depth for a book with so much comic content.
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