Review: "Skippy Dies" by Paul Murray

Here is a case of a book having too many things going on at once, and not really doing any of them well enough to warrant a book worth reading. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, a book that is 600 pages long that should only be about half of that, is something of an overstuffed mess, trying to mix time travel, the campus novel and a kind of modern take on Irish bullying, into a book that is not very good, but also not very entertaining, and, I cannot stress this enough, too goddamn long. It was a confusing time when I read it, and that was a month ago, so a lot of the details are even more fuzzy than when I read it the first time, so bear with me if you are reading this, I must mine the deepest trenches of my mind to try and get proper details on this novel. It starts out with Skippy, the novels main character, dying within the first few pages in a local donut shop, from either poison or choking. From there, we flash back to Skippy’s time at Seabrook Academy, with a motley crew of friends, such as Ruprecht, his overweight nerdy friend who is dead serious about creating a portal to another universe using a form of string theory, Carl, the school bully, who walks a fine line between sensitive misunderstood big man and horrible, sociopathic, porn obsessed monster. All these characters have something to do with the death of Skippy, but by the time I reached about page 300, I was kind of over it, and was left with 300 more pages for Murray to show off. Like I always say, someone may find some qualities in this book I missed, but after one reading, I cannot recommend this book. It’s not bad, just not very good.

Rating: 2/5