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A SCRAPBOOK OF STUFF I'M READING / LISTENING TO / LOOKING AT.

Jun 06, 2011

If you need some summer reading, might I suggest this very funny 672-page novel.

…the ambitious length of “Skippy Dies” allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes….One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography There’s even room for an indecent close reading of Robert Frost’s “Road Not Taken” that’s so weirdly convincing I’ll never again be able to read that poem without sniggering.

I love what Murray has to say in this Bookslut interview about modern literature’s aversion to funny:

Historically speaking the novel has always been comedic — the whole point of the novel was to undercut delusions of grandeur, whatever imperious myths a society might be telling about itself, and to try to depict instead reality in all its modesty. And to try to find some beauty too, in that modesty. And from Cervantes to Fielding to Dickens right into the twentieth century with Joyce, Beckett, Waugh, Pynchon, Amis senior and junior, you’ve got writers who can make you laugh out loud even as they’re presenting very complex treatments of what it is to be human. In the last twenty years it seems like that’s changed….The novel’s not certain what it’s for any more, and you get the impression that the literary world, or a part of it, has come to believe its only USP is that it’s not funny, or exciting, and treats only of the difficult, worthy, super-serious topics that other media don’t. Literature is the place where you’re definitely not going to be entertained, and this once very playful, very capacious form is being used to push this very narrow and programmatic concept of authenticity and of what life really is. So you’re getting this proliferation of unfunny, Extremely Serious novels about shtetls and so forth.

I read the handsome, 3-volume box set version, but it’s coming out in paperback in August. (Although I don’t recommend you wait that long to read it.)