Really liked the first 7/8 of it, but the end. Ugh.....He reminded me much of P.J.Wodehouse at first, but off the rails at then end.

Hilarious narrator. I thought the total cluelessness of Charles might start to grate, but no. Loved it. Paul Murray is a genius!

A House Pulling The Strings

3.5 rounded up.
Somewhat overly long tale of a house, and a family, and a cynical eye on the class structure in Ireland. Charles (of course) lives a life of an elegant, privileged wastrel, until reality hits him in the face, and they (C and his sister, the aspiring actress Bel) realise that life isn’t all Gene Tierney movies and gimlets at 4, and they are in dire danger of losing the family seat, Amaurot. Charles overcomes his demographically imbued sense of entitlement by Getting A Job, although the path to this is the most amusing part of the book.
An Evening Of Long Goodbyes put me in mind of some sort of farce, although not a movie I would sit through. Amusing insights into class, friends where you least expect them, and a final tying up of the details, but I did start zoning out at around 90%.

Thirteen of my friends have read Skippy Dies with a consensus average rating of 4.5 stars. Two friends read An Evening of Long Goodbyes and gave it, on average, 2.5. This says two things: 1) I have clever, discerning friends, and 2) Paul Murray got better -- appreciably so, in fact. There may have been hints of the greatness to come in Skippy, but this, his first attempt, was honestly pretty uneven.

Charles and his sister Bel are twenty-somethings living in the well-to-do part of Dublin. She is an aspiring actress and he is a man of leisure with an undue sense of entitlement. And wouldn’t you know, conflict somehow ensues. It was not a sustainable lifestyle: Charles had put a big dent in the previously impressive wine cellar, finances don’t just take care of themselves, and the grand old manor was becoming perceptibly less grand. Their father had passed away a few years before and their mother had been away for health reasons. They had a Bosnian refugee who did housekeeping, but her foothold in the real world was not enough to do them much good.

Charles, the oblivious cad, was laughably bad. He might have been funnier still had there been any aspect of subtlety in the humor. Of course there’s a great tradition of “toff as twit” in Isles writing (think Bertie Wooster or certain Monty Python sketches), and I appreciated the attempt to accrue more, but can’t say that it was a complete success. I think the problem stemmed from inconsistency in the cluelessness. Charles narrated, which was for the most part a job well done, rife with affectation and flair. He even succeeded in telling jokes on himself (mistaken interpretations of responses to his buffoonery) without knowing they were jokes. My problem was in how he could display compelling insights into personalities at one moment and then be so callow and imperceptive the next.

What I will give credit for is the narrative voice, at least when it was at its pompous and descriptive best. Here are two examples:

n  [...] I was subjected to what he referred to, seemingly without irony, as his 'music'. Sometimes it sounded like a huge metal something -- a tank, maybe, or an enormous set of cutlery -- falling down an infinite staircase; sometimes it sounded like a hundred thousand Nazis, goosestepping through the Place de la Republique; the general idea seemed to be to capture the sound of civilization collapsing [...]n

n  [...] her expression with every passing second becoming more remote, like a Cinderella who has outstayed her time to see not only her carriage change back to a pumpkin, but Prince Charming's suitcase fall open and a whole horde of glass slippers fall across the floor [...]n

There was an element of French farce to this -- and believe me, I counted off for it -- but it also had a few weightier themes that, in part, helped to compensate. One message, if you’ll excuse my reductive shorthand, is that a friend in need is a friend indeed. This wasn’t always so obvious to Charles, unless he was the friend in need. Another prime character, Frank, who was a big lunk of a guy, rough around the edges, and Bel’s boyfriend for a time, was Charles’s polar opposite. That may not have made Frank persona grata at the country club, but it did give him street smarts, empathy for the luckless and a certain personal dynamism. Seeing the contrasts between the two was one of the better parts of the book. Redemptions were wobbly, though, and the book generally hinged on what humor there was to be had.

On its own merits, this gets maybe 3 stars. If we allow the lexically impossible and compare it to the incomparable (that is, Skippy Dies), it’s more like 2 stars. Ah, what the heck -- after a trip to Erin and succumbing to its rhetorical charms, let’s stick with 3.

It's a Dublin novel. I'd rather discard the catalogue of it as a comic book. It's realistic. Beneath the humour, some elements are so touching and inspiring that I'm very grateful to have come across the book randomly in a library.

Perhaps the funniest novel I've read in a long time. Rich in language, original in situations and witty in social critique.

I only gave this 2 stars because I actually muscled through to the end. I just wanted to see how the fiasco of their strange and bizarre lives turned out. I think this was by far one of the strangest most convoluted stories of upper class struggles I have ever happened upon! Frank is by far my favorite character and he's probably the reason I kept trudging through this book.

This book was very funny and poignant at the same time. I found the beginning in particular very amusing, although toward the end the book took a more serious turn. After the first sequence of events concluded, I wondered where the book could go from there, and was pleasantly surprised that it kept me engaged. I thought the descriptive writing was excellent -- very good at evoking particular images without becoming boring or overinflated. Also, I liked the way the ending tied together and summarized the themes of the book. I found this book enjoyable and intelligent. Definitely a recommended read.

I need a shelf like "Books that remind me of Wes Anderson movies" because this would be on it. I initially found out about Paul Murray through Skippy Dies which was on a list like that but I found out about An Evening of Long Goodbyes recently and knew I had to read it. While the language is a bit tough to get through initially, it becomes a very funny book that gets sadder as it goes on.

Charles is a contemporary flaneur who lives in an estate outside of Dublin with his troubled actress of a sister Bel. When they receive word that they're not as rich as they thought, Charles goes on a comical journey to being plunged into the "real world." Along with Bel's new boyfriend Frank, Charles gets a job and deals with a colorful cast of characters from actors to insurance people to bankers.

This book was a page-turner full of wit common with Isles writers. Despite Charles being so out of touch with reality, as someone who has dealt with prolonged unemployment, I was able to relate to him in a lot of ways. The desperation for money set in and he was in a tough spot. The book becomes more "realistic" as it goes on and the fantasy that Charles had in his head about life is turned on its head. It's a coming-of-age story for a twenty-four-year-old adult. Between it all is Charles' obsession with the Classic Hollywood starlet Gene Tierney who represents his version of the perfect Hollywood story. Watching Charles desperately try to cling to his fantasy of life is funny, endearing, and a little sad. I never rooted for him to "learn the hard way" but it was necessary for his development. The very end with Bel's suicide was sad too and it took a dark turn.

Zany. Flashes of the level at which the author would go on to write, though.

Started but not finished

An Evening Of Long Goodbyes is a brilliant novel, let alone debut novel. Absurd and hilarious but unexpectedly poignant. It threatens to lose its way two thirds of the way through it never completely comes off the rails and the final parts are absolutely breathtaking.