I can't put my finger on why, but I found this book to be boring.

Dnf. Started off well but by the middle it was floundering and I couldn’t convince myself to finish it.

I gave up.
I lost it when another array of characters were suddenly introduced without a plot.
It was after 145 pages that I came here when I found out that the main character's mission would be to find a real job.
I first read the Bee Sting, which I loved. Then Skippy Dies, it was good but you need patience, and I can clearly see how the author has improved. I am aware that he takes his time to deliver but this one is too much waiting. In 145 pages I laughed just a couple of times, and that was it. It felt like a cheap telenovela where some new character you don't care about is introduced to add fluff drama in half a season while the writers figure out what the plot is.
I might watch a TV adaptation.

This book is hilarious. Its only problem is it took me twice as long to read as it might have...because I had to read each paragraph 2 times, once to myself, once to a friend.

What's fascinating is that about 1/2 way through it, the book starts to deconstruct itself. It starts out hilarious, fun, brilliant, with an incredible love of language. . . and then, what do you know? It becomes realistic.

Fabulous.

It was one of the three-four books that made me realize that if I read fiction, I prefer unrealistic fiction. If I want realism, I'll read non-fiction. Truth telling is for non-fiction.

This book sucked me down into an abyss, and I’ve barely just now escaped. It’s certainly set my Goodreads challenge back weeks. I kept going and going; five pages before bed, sometimes three. A streak of 20 while dividing my attention between it and Grey's Anatomy. Talk about inertia in a plot!! Plot? Where?

After the brilliance of Skippy Dies, I was expecting so much more - or at least, given this was Murray's first novel, some parallels. Some of the complexity; the careful and clever layering of theme. A lot more poignancy and a lot more humour. All of it was lacking here.

Perhaps it’s that I just can’t relate to the rough metaphor Murray was going for: the clash of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Irelands embodied by the characters. I don’t have a dog in that race. Protagonist Charles’s vision of himself as an aristocratic Yeats, rambling about a drafty country manse pining for a time that never was (and his sister), was weird and jarring. The moments of parody were too few and far between to sustain the shtick. And also, maybe this novel’s time has come and gone – Ireland’s economic fortunes have waxed and now waned; the dynamic tension between old and new seems passé.

The stuff that did seem compelling - e.g., the conflicted, incestuous relationship between Charles and his sister Bel - went unexplored (perhaps because of the constraints of first-person narration - a narrator who is delightfully obtuse and clueless about the interpersonal goings on around him, and certainly his own inner motivations).

If I had to put my finger on it, the troublesome narration led to a lot of this novel’s problems – poor characterization, a lack of detail to get us invested in the characters (Bel and her mother? Bel and her father? The neighbour, the Bosnian housekeeper, Mirena, etc. etc.) Their life stories seemed interesting, important – but not to Charles, and therefore, the reader gets short-changed. ETA: That’s it exactly – Charles is the least interesting character in the book, yet he’s the one we’re stuck with.

Such a shame – I think there might have been a great story in here somewhere. Maybe someone else has found it.

By the end of Skippy, I forgave it all its flaws. I’m thankful I read Skippy first, because had I not, by the end of this one, I wouldn’t have bothered.

In Murray's debut you can see elements of what I love most about his later books, especially Skippy Dies. However in the dog track hall of fame, Santa's Little Helper > An Evening of Long Goodbyes.

Good black humor, entertaining, deadpan main character

Very silly but clever nonetheless. Annoying at times, hilarious at others

odd and compelling

Though I felt the reveals to be a little flimsy, compared to the lushness of his narrative to that point, Murray will delight you and break your heart ( not to mention Google Gene Tierney to exhaustion).

Paul Murray’s first effort, this reads a bit like a rough draft of Skippy Dies. Some of it is excellent, especially everything to do with Frank. It’s about 15% too long. The sibling relationship at the center of the story is hard to pin down. But on the whole, this is an ambitious, funny, sad book, and you can see within it what Murray is about to become.

I loved this!!

witty account of an eccentric brother and sister and their fall from pseudo-aristocracy