Growing Pains

Skippy Dies: A Novel

By Paul Murray

Faber & Faber

661 pages

An abundance of colorful and entertaining psychodynamic characters decorates the novel Skippy Dies. Paul Murray's delightful tragicomedy is set in Dublin's Seabrook College during one catastrophic autumn in which Skippy drops dead during a doughnut-eating contest. What follows is an energetic, hilarious, and heart-wrenching novel that depicts the beauty, heartache, and pain that define growing up.

The cast of spirited teenage boys, hypercritical school administrators, doughnut-shop workers, bumbling teachers, ascetic clergymen, chaotic parents, infatuated girls, and assorted psychopaths is intricately knit together through a variety of themes. Murray (a Trinity College graduate) artfully incorporates quantum physics and Irish folklore with plot elements involving drugs, pornography, bullying, molestation, stalking, and psychopathology.

Skippy's sudden death is the novel's catalyst. The sensitive 14-year-old boy is described as looking like a kangaroo and is anxious, introverted, and genetically predisposed to mental illness. While trying to avoid chaos at home, Skippy is objectified by the school system that was meant to protect him and tormented by his drug-dealing psychotic rival in love. The narrator poignantly captures Skippy's angst, saying that "half of him [is] battling to become visible, the other half just wanting to disappear."

Among Skippy's protective factors are his incredulous friends, including the corpulent genius, Ruprecht. Struggling with feelings of loneliness, Ruprecht intellectualizes everything and obsessively attempts to contact an 11th dimension through string theory. Stuffing his face with doughnuts when he's not playing the French horn, Ruprecht appears stuck in the oral stage of development. After Skippy's death, an unlikely relationship between Ruprecht and Lori, the deceased's love interest, leads to surprising insights and hope for this young group.

Skippy Dies superbly highlights how it's not just the kids who are trying to make sense out of the world. Howard "the Coward" Seabrook's loser-like history teacher thought life would be "a sense that it's not just a bunch of days piling up on top of each other." His dissatisfaction precipitates a number of poor choices, and Howard consistently proves that he is worthy of his nickname. Skippy Dies is a flawless novel about growing up in which each character reaches a kind of peace and slowly comes to the realization that this world is the one they need to make the best of.