Skippy Dies By Paul Murray

9.3/10 dropps

While competing in a donut-eating contest with his obese, hyper-intelligent roommate Ruprecht, Skippy dies. The novel subsequently reverts back in time to the beginning of the fall semester at the Seabrook College for Boys, a fictional Irish boarding and day school. Author Paul Murray then slowly introduces us to a slew of extraordinary principal and supporting characters.

For the novel’s first two thirds, the central plotline revolves around Skippy and his quest to win the heart of the girl he loves, Lori. Lori attends the all-girls school next door and plays frisbee on its front lawn. When she gets out of school she runs around with Carl, a drug-dealing, borderline-psychopathic bully (and Skippy’s main rival for her affections). Skippy’s primary group of friends mostly includes fellow boarders: the aforementioned Ruprecht, the sarcastic Dennis, the sincere Geoff, and the foolish Mario. Also central to the storyline is Howard, a history teacher at Seabrook, who is something like an adult version of Skippy. Howard has problems of his own: he has an American girlfriend he no longer cares for, a new substitute teacher he’s fallen hopelessly in love with, and still he must contend with the constant pestering of the cold acting principal, “the Automator.”

There is a plethora of characters with whom to become entangled in the novel, but Murray never shies away from providing us with a very good glimpse into each of the character’s minds. Even with the ominous prologue forecasting Skippy’s doom, Murray never fails to forget that the majority of his characters are fourteen year-olds and hence there is a lot of drama and humor to be mined from the story.

In fact, the novel is often so hilarious that if the last third of the novel had continued in the same tone as the previous two, I would likely have felt inclined to give Skippy Dies a higher rating than any other novel I’ve reviewed.

Skippy Dies is split up into three sections, each as long as a 220-page novel. While the first two lead up to Skippy’s death, the final section is often unbearably dark because it covers the timeframe between Skippy’s death and the end of the term. His passing leaves many characters irrevocably changed and, in some cases, broken. How the school collectively comes to terms with Skippy’s death and the circumstances that caused it is thrilling, and what follows is even more so.

Skippy Dies is one of those books that’s so good, readers will have trouble putting it down, even at its daunting length. Paul Murray applies cliffhangers shamelessly, but the craftsmanship is such that you’ll find that as long as you’ve got some free time, you won’t care.

-John Jamieson