Skippy Dies & an American Dirt sighting

For the last week or so, I’ve been reading Skippy Dies for my Irish Lit class. As a somewhat unimportant aside, I tend to notice blurbs on the covers of books more after our discussions about them in class, and I find it absurd how many this book has—there are blurbs on both the front and back covers, inside the front cover, and on the entire first page of the book. It takes a moment to actually locate the book’s synopsis (on the inside of the back cover) considering how buried it is among all the blurbs. In looking at the amount of real estate allocated to blurbs vs. the synopsis, as well as how “desirable” that real estate is considering where readers tend to look when they pick up a book, it calls into question which might be considered more important. Personally, I’d be far more likely to select a book with an interesting summary than one with pages and pages of praise—but the placement of the blubs seems to suggest that the praise is more deserving of prime cover real estate.

In terms of the book itself, it’s pretty decent. Probably not something I’d ever pick up by myself, but once you start reading it, it’s pretty gripping. The main character, Skippy, dies (as you might have guessed) at the very beginning of the book. Then, starting with Chapter 1, we backtrack to when Skippy was still alive, learning about his life and the lives of those around him leading up to his death. It’s not a mystery per se, but you are kept in the dark for a good portion of the book as to the people, circumstances, and external factors that are connected to his death in various ways. I have to say the most fascinating thing about the novel—and perhaps this is why it feels so poignant at certain points—is Paul Murray’s ability to write pain. While emotional pain and trauma are fairly universal experiences, I think it can often be difficult to accurately get it down on the page in such a way that the reader really feels it rather than simply comprehending the character’s pain on a surface level. You can absolutely empathize/sympathize without experiencing, in the moment, the level of darkness or suffering that a character is experiencing. Murray really brings difficult feelings to life, in large part by regularly breaking linguistic and grammatical rules (e.g., sometimes he just doesn't use spaces between words). Pretty cool stuff.

I’m just going to end with this little picture that my brother sent me yesterday from our local Barnes & Noble in Western Mass. Apparently they still haven’t gotten the memo. Go B&N.