A boarding school in the British Isles. Reverent children huddle in a gloomy chamber, watching as one of their fellow students assays a devilishly difficult trick. The boy’s hand trembles. And then — success! A jet of fire, a “cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment,” fills the ancient tower with an indescribable illumination.
Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of Paul Murray’s heartfelt and profane new novel, “Skippy Dies” — and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles.
The extravagantly entertaining “Skippy Dies” chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. “Skippy Dies” then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.
Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. (...)
Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I.
In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?”
Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are.
That’s not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. “Skippy Dies” doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope.
In fact, the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.
Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For Murray remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” Murray notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.”
[ed. Highly recommended. See also: Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ (Paris Review).]
Is this Hogwarts? Are these boys practicing spells that might one day protect the world from evil? No, it’s Seabrook College, the Dublin boys’ school of Paul Murray’s heartfelt and profane new novel, “Skippy Dies” — and that “magnificent plume of flame” isn’t coming from a wand. Boys in close quarters will always, always find a way to make their own miracles.
The extravagantly entertaining “Skippy Dies” chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death — on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling — opens the novel. “Skippy Dies” then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.
Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy. (...)Our guide to Seabrook’s staff room, meanwhile, is “Howard the Coward” Fallon, Seabrook ’93, once a Skippyish nerd but now a history teacher at his alma mater. (The book is set in the early part of this decade, in the midst of the Celtic Tiger economic boom.) “I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc,” Howard, working on an early midlife crisis, confides to a colleague, even though his life has in fact been a perfectly structured disappointment — beginning with that persistent schoolboy nickname, through his failure as a futures trader, up to his current position trying to get snoozing nitwits to care about World War I.
In a reflective moment, Howard thinks that his classes themselves resemble trench warfare, “a huge amount of labor and bloodshed for a dismally small area of terrain.” So uninterested in the past are his students that they indiscriminately refer to any time before today as “days of Yore.” But when he attempts to jump-start the boys’ enthusiasm with an impromptu excursion to a war memorial, he’s berated by Seabrook’s efficiency-obsessed acting principal: “Do you think this is some kind of a ‘Dead Poets Society’ situation we’re in here, is that it?”
Living with a nice American writer whom he can’t bring himself to marry, Howard is as adrift romantically as he is professionally. He’s ripe for an awakening, and it comes courtesy of Aurelie McIntyre, a fetching substitute geography teacher whose presence has turned the entire student body into dazed geography buffs. She empties Howard’s mind just as effectively, for the adults of Seabrook are as in thrall to their whims and appetites as their spotty, shame-faced students are.
That’s not always a source of comedy, of course, especially to readers for whom the book’s religious-school setting will call to mind a decade of news about the sexual abuse of children by priests. “Skippy Dies” doesn’t shy away from this issue. In fact, Seabrook’s students come to suspect a priest of abuse, although it’s to Murray’s credit that the man is neither exactly as guilty as you think, nor quite as blameless as you might hope.
In fact, the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography — as well as the sad story of the all-Irish D Company of the Seventh Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sent to their doom at Gallipoli in 1915. There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.
Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death — and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward — but also expands into an elegy for lost youth. For Murray remembers, better than most writers, the “grim de-dreamification” of growing up. You won’t be a pop singer or a ninja superspy in the future. You won’t be exceptional at all, despite the promises of TV, video games and your parents. “Santa Claus,” Murray notes, “was just the tip of the iceberg.”
by Dan Kois, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Rutu Modan[ed. Highly recommended. See also: Paul Murray and ‘Skippy Dies’ (Paris Review).]
