Hello, summer! This is it. If you have been waiting for your big holiday read, finally here it is: an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing. It is never a good idea to begin a review (or indeed to end one) with a round of applause unless you want to sound like a complete pushover or a total patsy, but full credit where it’s due: Paul Murray, the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy, has done it again.
He did it first with An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), which read as if a young, Irish P.G. Wodehouse were frantically rewriting A Confederacy of Dunces. He did it again with Skippy Dies (2010), a novel as long as it was good and almost as good as it was long, and which won a lot of praise and almost a lot of prizes.
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