Judging a Book By Its Cover – Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

You know a book is bad when you realize that the dead character is the luckiest one in the bunch. I am exactly 18% of the way through Skippy Dies, and have been since mid-November. After 118 pages, I still didn’t care about what was going on; maybe that’s my shortcoming as a reader, maybe it’s Paul Murray’s as a writer, or maybe this little bookmance just wasn’t meant to be.

I chose the book more on my friends’ recommendations than on the cover. Frankly, the cover doesn’t give us a whole lot to work with. I originally thought Skippy was a dog. I’m not sure why, but it sounded good in my head. The US edition of the book you have, the cover doesn’t do much to dispel this idea, unless you notice the two portraits on the spine – a green boy, Skippy, and a purple girl, love interest Lori. The UK edition has these portraits, plus a pink rendition of Skippy’s hopelessly geeky roommate, Ruprecht, on the front. That cover probably would have dispelled the dog idea.

As much as I hate the notion that books and stories can be gendered, Skippy Dies strikes me as being more of a boy book. The majority of the characters are male, and most of those characters are 14-year-old boys. It’s been a while since I was 14 and I’m not a boy, so I felt disconnected from what I was reading. The book is lauded as being a heartfelt portrait of male adolescence, but I think the boys of Seabrook College are mostly troublesome brats.

After 118 pages, I didn’t feel like Paul Murray was offering anything new. The boarding school scene, both co-ed and single sex, has been explored many times. We have an entire TV network dedicated to watching rich teens piss away their money on pilfered prescription drugs (‘sup, CW?). Ugly-but-slutty private school girls are a big yawn, as are the mysteriously sexy colleagues and miserable live-in girlfriends – and by the way, these are the only female characters you’ll meet by the time you reach page 118.

The most frustrating thing about Skippy is that there are a couple of genuinely interesting things happening, but they’re buried under a lot of things that are a chore to read. The generation gap between the faculty at Seabrook offers room for exploration, especially as the school’s administrator wants to bring the school out of the dark ages of stuffy Catholic academies and into the 21st century. Daniel “Skippy” Juster is only just beginning to emerge as a sympathetic figure, but it should not take 118 pages to get to this point.

Realistically, I don’t feel like we get to spend very much time with Skippy this early in the book. If it’s going to be named after him, he should be the focus. The most interesting thing the kid gets to do is die on page 5. The rest of the novel is dedicated to the events leading up to Skippy’s death, but we’ve spent more time listening to his history teacher, Howard, piss and moan about his job and his girlfriend, and ponder whether the cute substitute teacher was kidding when she said she’d never sleep with him.

I’m sure it all gets much more fascinating as we go – in fact, I’ve been promised by my friends who loved it that it gets so much better later – but if a single damn cannot be mustered after 118 pages, it’s just not going to happen.