This is the last you'll hear from me

about Paul Murray and Skippy Dies.

Probably not actually.

Anyway, he read here tonight, and we sold a ton of his amazing book, and if you weren't there (every seat was filled, folks stood on the stairs, it made me so happy) then you missed out big time. I mean, Amy Sedaris might smell like whatever Zoe said she smells like in her last post, but young Paul Murray is the real deal in the world of storytelling, and to see this many people come out to see him, well, it makes me think that there are some surprises left in the old world.

I just had a pair o' pints with him and a few other good folks after the reading, so you'll forgive me if the foregoing seems gushy or the forthcoming seems abrupt, but
read
the
book.

We have nothing else to say to each other until you do.

And if you have read the book and did not come out tonight, you missed him reading the chapter about the beginning of the Halloween Hop, where Skippy sees Lori in the white dress and Dennis dresses up like the Automator. And he read it beautifully, we laughed and laughed.

Night.

putcher blinkeron

Since finishing the glorious novel Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, I've been stuck in that classic, but usually not this long-lasting, conundrum of what-the-hell-do-you-read-after-you've-just-finished-the-best-book-you've-read-in-years. In the past few years I have gotten in the happy habit of picking up a book about Buddhism every time this happens. Which is a lot. I've really only been reading either the best books I've ever read, or Buddhist texts. It's been good.

I've been soaking in the words of Chogyam Trungpa, and the last few days have been involved in the practice of snapping myself into the present moment, which activity, if you are a beginner like me, needs to take place about 59 times per minute. It's been working though, and the pains in my neck have disappeared, which tells me that my head has been trying real hard to hang onto my body, or the other way around. That means something, but I won't dwell on it.

Anyway, whether driving the car, trying to get Jackson to dress himself so we can get to school on time, eating ice cream, or riding my bike, I have been working with the idea of just doing that.
I have always told people, with a feeling of pride, of separateness, that while I may be a bookseller, or a father, or whatever, I am a painter, and my mind is almost always otherwise engaged, working on the next steps of the painting at home in the studio. It seemed like a good thing, a sign that I AM AN ARTIST, despite all the time that I spend doing other things.

Now I'm realizing that it is not. The fact that while I am helping someone find a book I am worrying about how I will preserve the soul scrape of green bird wings in the center of the painting while I attempt to convert the whole canvas into a whirlpool of oily black clinging hands searching for a hold as time smooths the contours neither makes me a better painter or a better person. It just makes me a person who does one thing while he thinks about another.

It's a good thing that I've been working on this, this present-ness. I am on the bike. I am on the bike. I am on the bike going downhill with a car before me and a car behind. The car before me turns into my path without signal or warning and I instantaneously slam on the brakes, front first followed by rear, and now compensation for the fishtales, one, two, three, the bumper of the car is right at my front wheel, I bear down hard on the brakes and my bike does what it will, and I leave it to spin over my head as knees slam into tar, hands shoot out to stop face from smashing and I know right away that I am ok.

I know it could have been a lot worse, and I think that being there, right there right then, might have very well been the thing that kept it from being worse. But so were the nuns who stopped to offer help, two separate cars full of them several minutes apart. Seriously, here I am engaged in the Buddhist method of existing in the now, of dealing with reality as it is just now, and it keeps me from grievous bodily injury. A moment later, multiple representatives of Christian compassion extend warm hands and offers of healing and water.

I don't really know what to think of it all, but I won't be dwelling on it.

I am just writing this sentence.

I want to stay here.

My downstairs neighbor just told my wife that she should get another job.
She said that having a teenager live rent-free in our apartment with us, in exchange for taking care of our children while we are off at our full-time jobs, is a luxury, and that we should be paying for child care like everyone else does, so if we can't afford to do that now then she should just go out there and get, you know, another job.

The person who takes care of my two beautiful children is in danger of being pushed out of our lives, the pawn in some pathetic little condo association flare-up. Our landlords are backing us up 100%, and we will now,
oh it feels sweet (and awful) to be saying this,
be staying there out of spite.

You know, for the kids.


For the kids. If you are a thinking person in America today, you probably have either a lot of ideas, or else absolutely none, about what is right for the kids. No lie, kids are in a tough spot. Our expectations for our children are at the same time astronomical and in the gutter. Directives concerning the emotional, mental, and physical health of children are ricocheting pinballs, and parents are stranded out there under the observation glass waiting, and by now needing, to get whacked with it over and over by the Parental Panic Industry whose various hands are tapping out a diabolical rhythm with the paddles.



With all of that on my mind, there's one more problem with which I'm wrestling today, and it's right here in this store. Nobody has bought a copy of a certain young Irishman's novel. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray is an honest, compassionate look at the world kids find themselves in today, and how they make sense of it. So there's a lot of unnecessary medication, prescription drug abuse, an ocean of pornography, startlingly casual sex acts, eating disorders, bullying, and celebrity fetishes. Behind that there's parents trying to buy off or coerce their kids into growing up into what they consider to be the right sort of person, the sort who will make them feel like they themselves haven't turned out to be the wrong sort of person. There's the fear - and actuality - of sex abuse by the teachers (the setting is an Irish Catholic boys' school), and the blind greed of the administration, willing to risk the education of a generation of young minds for the cause of maintaining the brand image of the institution. There are disturbing World War I historical revelations, and deep thought about the topography of the universe, and illicit schoolboy science experiments that attempt to reach parallel universes and beyond the grave, and for much of the book you're bouncing around inside the head of: a sociopath, a sex symbol, a geek, a cynic, a sweet naive boy, a tortured genius, and a young teacher whose stunted maturation and inability to take risks have brought him back to the site of his own troubled schoolboy years, and will introduce him to worlds of hurt. They will all have opportunity to change everything, but only some will find the way.

The narrator is supremely confident in his rendering of these characters, and the questions he puts to them via the unfolding of his plot are the questions that we are all asking all the time.
How can children comprehend the world and themselves when we are relentlessly surrounding them with ways to wall themselves off from everything? And now that we're worried that they're each capable of going off at any second and shooting the place up, how can, or should, teachers really connect with them? And is love, which floats in the margins of every page in this book, a force that can puncture the bubble of unreality we each construct around ourselves?
Or is it, as one kid puts it:
"...love, if it exists at all, does so primarily as an 'organizing myth', of a similar nature to God. Or: love is analogous to gravity, as postulated in recent theories, that is to say, what we experience faintly, sporadically, as love is in actuality the distant emanation of another world, the faraway glow of a love-universe that by the time it gets to us has almost no warmth left."

It's a marvelously good book to read. It will make the final cut if I can only take five books with me to a desert isle,
or to a new home.

I want to stay reading this book forever.

Skippy Dies
by Paul Murray

Skippy Dies.

by Paul Murray.
longlisted for the Booker Prize.

It better win.

I am being pulled inexorably through this story of a Catholic boys' school (with all of the wonderful narrative potential that that implies). It is the most thoroughly modern piece of storytelling that I have encountered. This Murray guy has boys pegged, girls pegged, their teachers pegged, their moms and dads pegged, and he has their drugs and their sex pegged, their curiosity and their stifling boredom pegged, and beyond those things, those things that he has control over, he has me nailed to the wall with the most compulsively enjoyable yet chilling book I have read since...I can't remember one like this.

It's the best fictional study of the modern teenager you will read. I want to read it again and I'm not even halfway through. I'm reading these pages, and as a father I find myself hoping that my boy will be something like this character, that my daughter will find her way to not becoming like that one, and that both of them will either avoid or be strong enough to stand up to that one.
And I am thankful I don't have to go through it again, but at the same time I would give anything to go through the chapter I just read.
His first kiss.
Paul Murray is faithful to each and every character in his story. When a writer achieves this level of imagination, compassion, and focus...this book needs to be read.
It's coming into the store soon.