Skippy Dies

Intelligent, funny, sad and exceptionally well written, I was riveted. You can see some shades of James Joyce in the writing which is always interesting. Highly recommended.

Enjoyable read. It's a bit depressing at times, but overall it's a great coming-of-age story and and entertaining read.

As Paul Murray ends his novel "Skippy Dies" the skeletal remnants of a character for whom Skippy dies deliberates on her own ending to find a new beginning: "once upon a time they were all part of one superstory, except that 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 is weave it all 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." Or, a culminating doughnut that she bites into; thus reconnecting with the sugary world of stories she is just about to end. Murray's novel begins with Skippy's end, his ignominious death at Ed's, a doughnut shop. The story then spins backwards in time to trace the events and people who led to this sad demise of a young man, through the rites of passage at his boarding school in Dublin, Ireland. Teacher and students receive accurate portrayals of the jejune and often animalistic atmosphere that pervades the life at a boys' school, with nicknames, insults, pranks, and events that live on far beyond the impetuous acts and personas that define them. To read of Howard Fallon's struggles with teaching the lessons on the war to end all wars as he recites "In Flanders Field" to his students taps into the core of this novel-- a story about people who are struggling to be remembered, to mark their place, to live on beyond the momentary struggles that have brought them low; a story about people who want new stories, grand ones, to be recorded and retold with vigor and pride. As the story unfolds so do hopes and dreams of those who wish to spin such tales, often out of control with tragic and fractious results, and sometimes into wishful refrains like the quote with which I started. And when the story ends, it begins again. Murray has told a good one here, one to be remembered.