I loved The Bee Sting, which I read when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023, and when my manager at the bookshop in Dublin where I worked at the time told me I’d love Skippy Dies — itself shortlisted for the Booker back in 2010 — even more, I knew I had to read it. It had been sitting on my shelves for a while, but when I finally got around to it (which, admittedly, was a while ago — I’m so behind on reviews), it proved well worth the wait.
Young Skippy, whose death is revealed in the title, is fourteen-year-old Daniel Juster, a boarder at Dublin’s prestigious Seabrook College, with far too much to bear. At home, his mother is dying of cancer, and his father, consumed by caring for her, has little attention to spare for his son. Meanwhile, at school, the swim coach is pushing him to give everything to the team, classes remain relentlessly dull, and his peers — in the throes of puberty — are as cruel and chaotic as ever. Worst of all, Skippy’s heart belongs to Lori, who is caught in a messy tangle between him and his volatile, Ritalin-addicted rival, Carl. With all this weighing on him, Skippy meets his best friend and roommate, Ruprecht, at Ed’s for a doughnut-eating competition in the novel’s opening scene — and dies.
From this tragic starting point, the narrative winds back in time, unraveling the events leading to Skippy’s death and introducing a rich cast of characters. There’s Howard the Coward, the boys’ disillusioned history teacher, teetering on the edge of a midlife crisis and pining for the new substitute teacher while lacking the courage take his life into his own hands. Ruprecht, a young genius obsessed with string theory (for heartbreaking reasons revealed over time), is both endearingly innocent and endlessly exasperating — frequently ending up with his head down a toilet. Then there’s Carl, so frighteningly unhinged that even the teachers fear him, and Lori, short for Lorelei, who dreams of pop stardom but carries all the insecurity of a fourteen-year-old girl trying to figure herself out.
Students, teachers, parents, priests — the novel shifts perspectives to give us a panoramic view of life at Seabrook, portraying each character with tender detail, in all their human complexity and imperfection. And what unfolds is an epic, sprawling narrative. Across its 660 pages, Skippy Dies encompasses the full spectrum of teenage life: the ridiculous, the tragic, the beautiful, and the painful. For the students, the physical realities of adolescence — body hair, farts, sex, and pornography — loom as large as their existential crises. The microcosm of school life, however, can't shield them from harsher realities. Beneath the novel’s sharp humor and quick pace runs a darker undercurrent: bullying, violence, and drug use are unavoidable truths that Seabrook’s administrators would rather ignore.
Quantum physics, video games, first love, celebrity culture — Paul Murray ambitiously weaves together a staggering array of themes and subplots. Yet, instead of feeling chaotic, the novel comes together seamlessly, with Murray expertly tying every thread into a cohesive whole. The sheer number of characters and narrative strands might feel disorienting at first, but having read Murray’s work before, I had no doubt he would guide me through the labyrinth of his storytelling — and that trust paid off.
The result is a gloriously funny and heartbreakingly raw exploration of adolescence. Murray writes teenagers with rare compassion and tenderness, capturing their emotional intensity without ever condescending to them. The plot, fueled by teenage energy, never loses momentum, and despite its scope I found the novel quite unputdownable.
Skippy Dies is a deeply moving and darkly comic portrait of growing up, balancing the messy, awkward joys of adolescence with a poignant depiction of how easily the most vulnerable can be overlooked or lost. It’s a novel that lingers long after the final page — funny, devastating, and utterly unforgettable.
Published by Penguin, 2010.
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