Skippy Tries

There is a very good 350-page book inside the 700 pages of Paul Murray's new novel, Skippy Dies, but I am not sure the rewards of excavating it are worth the effort of digging. As a reader, I expect that sort of paleontological work to be done by some back-office Max Perkins. I just want to see the T-Rex, unearthed and already assembled, in the museum.

The good and interesting story is that of the eponymous character, Daniel "Skippy" Juster, who gets knocked off in the first chapter before the dull magic of the extended flashback abracadabras us back in time to see How It All Happened. It is a trick straight out of Tarantino, whom I believe to have ruined narrative across all media in the Anglophone world by misunderstanding just what's going on in Rashomon and then popularizing that misunderstanding for a whole generation of stunted men, and it serves in the same capacity and to the same effect as having John Travolta blasted off the crapper in the first act of Pulp Fiction, which is to say none and none. Skippy's story, untangled, is lovely and sad. He is a shy, quiet boy. His mother is dying from what may be Hodgkins or some kind of luekemia--the book is pointlessly oblique about these sorts of details, as if opacity were a fundamental principle of limited-view narration, a minor but annoying flaw. His father is overwhelmed. He is in love with a self-involved girl. The boorish, uncomprehending and incomprehensible adult world around him is, in the chapters told from his point of view, well-drawn, as is his mute passage through it. His friends, mostly other boys boarding at Seabrook College, a Catholic boys' school, are fine secondary characters. The problem is that no supporting cast is allowed to be secondary. Murray fell in love with his fiction, obviously, and no priest, janitor, or cornerstone escapes his crypto-Joycean pen.

Spoiler alert. Skippy drifts along, getting bullied, falling in love, and taking mysterious pills prescribed to someone else. His girlfriend was probably using him to get to another boy. She breaks his heart. He overdoses and dies. It is revealed that the pills came from a teacher who molested him, but not the teacher that you long ago stopped expecting it to be because the TWIST was so obviously a set-up. These may be the stuff of cliché, but they are a fine skeleton for the tragically abortive bildungsroman that Murray obviously set out to write. (Scott Heim's novel, Mysterious Skin, treads similar territory over a far more reasonable length and to better effect.) The evokation of boyhood consciousness, despite the frustrating opacity previously noted, is extremely well done; the boys are smart and savvy, but indisputably young, on the verge of adulthood but still children, with the tools to communicate but not yet the ability. Murray is empathic almost to a fault with his boys, and his way of imbuing their tiny struggles with the world-changing importance with which the boys themselves imbue them is the mark of a rare writer's gift.

But the adults are just awful, by which I mean that they are awful people awfully drawn. The headmaster, a gibberish-spouting management type straight out of office-based sitcoms is broadly lampooned, so broadly that when he suborns something terrible near the novel's end, it comes off as slightly impossible and wholly out of character, a buffoon redrawn as a monster for the sake of plot. An ascetic priest (one of the book's better jokes: he is a French teacher named Father Green; in French, Père Vert) is given his own chapter to muse on the nature of sin and dregde up Shocking! secrets that are mostly used as a red herring. The main adult character, Howard, a failed, twenty-something broker and former student who's returned in modest professional disgrace to teach history after some cryptic financial screw-up, is the worst of all, cursed with a case of quarterlife anomie sraight out of a Zach Braff movie . . . or worse, that movie's soundtrack. His total lack of personality or motivation results from his reality: he is a framing device metastasized into a character. He is supposed to be our adult window into the environment of the school; a confident authorial voice would've been just as well, but perhaps a bit too Victorian for Murray's taste. Howard is the prime example of an author overcommitted to detail. In a noble effort to avoid drawing hastily, he overworks the canvas. Howard is excruciatingly boring. His little love affair is dull. His failures as a teacher unenlightening. His complicity in the monstrous act toward the book's conclusion utterly unmoving, because his character never suggests anything otherwise. I will not go through the list of other characters. The dramatis personae runs into the millions, billions. It is exhausting.

Which is all a shame, because Murray is a supple and intelligent writer; poetic but not fucking "lyrical," thank god, who ruined his own book by wandering too widely. What is it about English-language authors, males especially, that causes this furious bloat, this apparently incurable urge to the agglomerative and the expository? Our critics, the popular bad ones anyway, seem to equate length with moral and literary seriousness of purpose, so there's one explanation. Frankly, I blame ambition--curiously enough, a concept, emotion, desire that Murray self-consciously skewers (and skewers and skewers) in Skippy Dies, and yet in the end a black hole he hadn't the velocity to escape.