Skippy Dies: A Novel Review
That's an Irish word for an English word whose meaning seeps through the first third of this surprisingly well-written and funny novel by a dude who I only heard of about a month or two ago coz he's Irish and so am I apparently although living this last long time in exile but I went back for a break in August and Skippy Dies, Mister Murray's second novel, got itself longlisted or some such rhubarb and next thing me sister hands the very book to me to see what I think. I swapped her out of some obscure principle Bruce Robinson's devastatingly funny and sad and happy and lovely novel, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, another book about a 14-year-old schoolboy that I read each autumn on account of it reminds me of autumns in Ireland (even though it's set in England, in the late fifties I think, but in the end, what's the big bleeding diff?) when school starts up again and the summer's over. "The old story of the salad days, torment in the terms and in the intervals a measure of ease," as the felly said. Any road up it turns out that the young Irish author's younger than I am which is always a great laugh and furthermore has supposedly laid out a picture of an Ireland I never even got to know, having fled the wretched little outpost as early as 1991. Believe me even as late as late 1991 Ireland was still well and truly mired in its perpetually dismal circumstances with nothing much by way of succour but thick woolly socks and the ubiquitous Wellington boot. Then suddenly all bets were off and some species of hell broke loose and people from the country shucked off their wellies and started swallying brand new bricks of Dubliner cheese and the roads got wider and straighter and automobile ownership mushroomed beyond all comprehension and the word mortgage gained an unheard-of new currency among the green and giddy populace which reminds me they changed from the pound or punt or whatever it was they used to buy a lump of pints with to the Euro the eejits and the coin component of this new Monopoly money is called the cent, just like here, except that the Irish in yet another stupefyingly typical instance of their famed resistance to just the most obvious structures of authority denominate this denomination in the strictest singular. Never cents, always and only cent. Like that excruciatingly awful Al Pacino movie. That'll be eight hundred Euros and seventy five cent, please. And that's just for a cake in Kylemore, a baked goods emporium which doesn't even exist anymore! At any rate I missed completely this total tribal transformation so I thought maybe I'd see how a novelist present during the duration of such an unprecedentedly high Hibernian tide might present it. Plus also the setting is a school run by what Murray styles The Holy Paraclete Fathers and these happen to be more or less the same exact holy ghosts who ran the secondary shool I went to in Dublin during the seventies (class of 81), we were in fact a baby sister college of Blackrock College, the giant blue and white striped kip Seabrook is allegedly based on and which used to invariably kick the living crap out of us at both JCT and SCT levels, to mention rugby only. So I guess you could say I was primed but apprehensive and perhaps even a little nostalgic too prior to taking the plunge into Skippy Dies but so far, and I'm about twenty pages into Heartland, the second book, I have to tell ya this Murray chap does a lovely clean line in comedy and the pacing burns oxygen when it has to but mostly it seems to me there's a real sense of considered unfolding going on here and I for one am enjoying the entertainment hugely. The janitor's name is Noddy too I also couldn't help but notice. This far in I'm going to go out on a limb here and say so far so very bleeding good. The two disputatious little dudeens at the Halloween Hop gesticulating inscrutably in their gigantic trousers and hijacking the sound system? Well that's a right larf right there. And rightly or wrongly I seem to picture Aurelie McIntyre as a slightly naughtier version of the stunningly gorgeous elementary school teacher Miss Cross from that great 1998 movie Rushmore. The delectable Olivia Williams played Miss Cross, I know that coz I've had a big fat crush on her ever since I saw Wes Anderson's priceless film.
Skippy Dies: A Novel Overview
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.
Skippy Dies: A Novel Specifications
Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2010: Seabrook College is an all-boys Catholic prep school in contemporary Dublin, where the founding Fathers flounder under a new administration obsessed with the school's "brand" and teachers vacillate between fear and apathy when faced with rooms full of texting, hyper-tense, hormone-fueled boys. It's the boys--and one boy in particular--that give this raucous, tender novel its emotional kick. Daniel "Skippy" Juster is a breed apart from his friends, more sensitive than any of them, but never visibly reactive to the pressures that weigh heavily on him. The events that lead to his untimely (though tragicomic) death unfold scene by scene, in a chorus of perfectly executed moments that are powerful enough to make you laugh and weep at once. When you read Skippy Dies, you won't necessarily feel like a teenager again--and in fact, may realize you'd never want to--but you'll certainly appreciate how painful, exhilarating, and confusing it still is to grow up. --Anne Bartholomew
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Customer Reviews
There is no truth - just perceptions - S. M. Pratt - New Zealand
What a nice book - ok, so the story is a little dark - it's no secret that skippy dies but..... One of the things that the book told me is that there is no truth, just a series of perceptions about what might be truth. Each of the characters have their own stories, told their own way, about their view of events. Each story is complete and reasonable from their perspective but ultimately wrong and the reader has to guess at the real reason behind Skippy's death. Nicely crafted, nice language and quite believable.
Youth (isn't) wasted on the young here - Robert Daniel - USA
Five stars. Loved it. Funny, touching, full of wonder and youthful foibles. Written beautifully; I'm a full-blown Paul Murray fan now. For me, one of its best aspects is that it is set in the world TODAY. So many of these "adolescent boarding school tales" are set in the past. Makes 'em seem distant. This is in your face, and it packs a heartfelt wallop.
All the Strings and Theory - K. L. Cotugno - San Francisco, CA USA
The events preceding and following an untimely, useless death are examined in depth with a unique perspective. This coming of age novel, in which almost everyone but the eponymous hero attains insight and maturity, is by turns filled with unbearable sadness laced with shots of original hilarity. The book meanders through an usually fraught autumn in the school year of a Dublin boys' school. It is populated almost entirely with the students and faculty (both lay and clergy), with parents only appearing as necessary. This would seem to indicate that the importance of the privileged homes these boys came from wasn't important, but oddly enough, the effect of the parents' benign neglect and self absorbtion is one of the most insidious aspects of the events as they materialize. For example, the "school psychopath" as described in other reviews has a home life that somewhat explains his need to do things he does that set ripples in motion.
Given the subject matter, I was initially put off by the book's length, but with few exceptions, there is very little bloat. According to those who have attended such schools, the jargon is spot on, the obsession with sex and desire to be somewhere else, anywhere else but "here," jibes with experience.
Epic - J. Prather - IN USA
It's not often that you pick up a novel that tackles such disparate topics as quantum physics, World War 1 history, Irish folklore, and donuts...lots of donuts. Skippy Dies reminded me of how mind - blowingly obnoxious teenage boys can be and also how crushingly hard it is to be fourteen. It's not for everyone. If you are easily offended by crass talk and lewd behavior, then this book is not for you. It is a very well told story full of humor and heartbreak that uses all of it's 661 pages to make you laugh, despair,contemplate your existence, and wonder how any of us every survive the trials of adolescence. The author expertly weaves together his story through the lives of characters carefully constructed and richly portrayed. The tale of how their lives intersect is both tragic and comic. Even though on occasion I felt that fate was truly messing with these people a bit too much, or when the irony and combined tragedies were just a bit too overwhelming, the author never lost my interest or my belief in his story.
So how does an author turn a book that gives away the ending in the prologue into a riveting page turner? You know what's going to happen...it's in the title! I don't know exactly how he did it, but I do know that he kept me up late wanting to know exactly how Skippy ended up dead, why Howard was called a coward, just what was up with Ruprecht and his inventions (I never thought string theory could be so engaging), and what exactly was the dark secret Skippy didn't want to face. He doles this information out as the story moves along, resulting in a perfectly paced read. This was a rich intricate novel that makes many that I've read lately pale in comparison. It should be winning many prizes this year, all well deserved. A solid choice for fans of literary fiction, especially coming of age stories. Recommended.
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