Skippy Dies (Murray) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Extravagantly entertaining . . . One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently [Paul Murray] addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography . . . Six hundred sixty-one pages may seem like a lot to devote to a bunch of flatulence-obsessed kids, but that daunting length is part and parcel of the cause to which Skippy Dies, in the end, is most devoted. Teenagers, though they may not always act like it, are human beings, and their sadness and loneliness (and their triumphs, no matter how temporary) are as momentous as any adult’s. And novels about them—if they’re as smart and funny and touching as Skippy Dies—can be just as long as they like.
Dan Kois - New York Times


Dazzling.... If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book....  Murray is an expansive writer, bouncing around in time, tense and point of view. He’s unafraid to tempt sentimentality, to write directly at his deep themes, to employ shameless cliffhangers. And he’s talented enough to get away with most of it.... The mixture of tones is the book’s true triumph, oscillating the banal with the sublime, the silly with the terrifying, the sweet with the tragic. In short, it’s like childhood. In shorter, like life.... Murray makes the right choices, refusing to spare kid and kidult alike the gorgeous harshness of the world, filled as it is with ‘a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.
Jess Walter - Washington Post Book World


He really does die. It’s in the opening scene. But as Paul Murray’s novel backtracks to explain what brought about his death, Skippy is so desperately, painfully alive that you hope the mere act of reading about him will save him.... Murray balances.... forces in finely tuned chords of pathos and comedy, a virtuosic display you’d expect from a writer with the confidence to kill of his title character in the title.
Radhika Jones - Time


At Dublin's Seabrook College, Skippy survives the daily indignities common to a boarder's life in an elite boys school. Still, something's wrong. Why does he want to quit the swim team? Why are his grades slipping? And who's the dark-haired St. Brigid's girl Skippy is always trying to spy on with his roommate's telescope? Seabrook is the world in miniature, and its gates threaten to burst from the hugger-mugger of cruelty, scandal, and materialism teeming within. It takes Skippy's tragic death and a sequence of events both hilarious and horrifying to recover the consolations provided by sympathy and friendship. Whether these will be enough to redeem Seabrook remains anyone's guess, though Murray suggests that a fleeting sense of grace may be all we can hope for and more than we deserve. Verdict: Murray's second novel (after An Evening of Long Goodbyes) is almost flawless, a gift for fans of character and plot. In addition to his masterly use of James Joyce and Robert Graves throughout, Murray has created a social realism that holds its own with that of Dickens. Skippy Dies deserves to be widely read and loved. —J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman
Library Journal


(Starred review.) An extremely ambitious and complex novel, filled with parallels, with sometimes recondite references to Irish folklore, with quantum physics, and with much more. Hilarious, haunting, and heartbreaking, it is inarguably among the most memorable novels of the year to date. —Michael Cart
Kirkus Reviews