An Evening of Long Goodbyes

by Paul Murray

Charles Hythloday observes the world from the comfortable confines of his family estate, and doesn’t much care for what he sees. At twenty-four, Charles aims to resurrect the lost lifestyle of the aristocratic country gentleman. But Charles’s cozy existence is about to face a serious shake-up.
With the family fortune teetering in the balance, Charles must do something he swore he would never do: get a job. Booted into the mean streets of Dublin, he is as unprepared for real life. And it turns out that real life is a tad unprepared for Charles, as well.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Ireland, Irish Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Paul Murray is an Irish novelist. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has written two novels: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003, and nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award) and Skippy Dies (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction).

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

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:

[...] 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 [...]

[...] 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 [...]

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.

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-read in July 2013.

Names: Amaurot:"the shadowy or unknown place," the main city in the centre of the island Utopia.
Hythloday:"expert in nonsense", the voyager who travels around Utopia.
Telsinor: The name of the fictional phone company, obvious reference to Hamlet.


Such fun!


Original review:
Part of my haul from Waterstone's in Dunfermline.

Slurp snort chortle pwaaaah! This is just so much fun! And sad! And zippy to read! But rich and complex at the same time! And I think I’ve used enough exclamation marks now!
Emphatically enjoyable. Admittedly, if I were to meet the hapless and hopeless narrator Charles Hythloday (how would you pronounce that?) then I would want to shake him. Hard. (The reaction of a mother.) He is outlandishly snobbish, self-centred, lazy, spends his time drinking and watching old movies, preferably those starring Gene Tierney, generally interfering in his sister’s love life and being blithely oblivious to the most obvious signs of chaos around him. But anyone who affords such a high rate of laughs per page and is so disarmingly honest and self-revealing will always earn sympathy, there’s the power of narration. And irritating as he is, there’s one person that I’d want to shake even harder, and that’s his dreadful mother. (The reaction of a daughter.)
Charles does mature. A bit. Too little, too late; that’s the sad part. And the complexity? Well, it’s perfectly possible to see this as more than merely the story of an individual family. Modern Ireland plays its part too. Very rewarding.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Shortest Ian Graye Review in the Cosmos

Bog Irish Lad Lit takes a turn for the better.



But Wait There’s More!

Yeats meets “Ulysses” meets “The Cherry Orchard”.

Yeats

Paul Murray quotes Yeats liberally throughout.

I don’t know Yeats well enough to comment on the significance of his poetry to the themes of this novel.

That would require research rather than "sprezzatura". (1)

"Ulysses"

There is a subtle affinity with James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.

Just watch me make my case.

There are 18 Episodes in “Ulysses” and 15 in “An Evening of Long Goodbyes” (“AEOLG”). Put this difference down to the new Irish economy.

Both novels are set in Dublin (Aha, got you there!).

“Ulysses” is set in one 24 hour period. “AEOLG” is not.

Both novels allude extensively to mythology, “Ulysses” to classical mythology and “AEOLG” to Hollywood legend (in particular, that of the actress Gene Tierney).

The comically self-absorbed protagonist, Charles Hythloday, could be a latterday wastrel version of Stephen Dedalus.

The novel could almost be entitled "A Portrait of the Bullshit Artist as a Young Man" or "A Portrait of a Young Man as a Bullshit Artist ".

Both novels concern a return to house and family, i.e., a return home (for a house is not necessarily a home).

OK, that’s about all I can come up with, without having to think about it.

"The Cherry Orchard"

Paul Murray refers extensively to this play throughout the novel.

It is the favourite play of Charles’ sister, Bel, although she stuffed up her lines in a student production.

The novel concerns an ancestral home, Amaurot (you could call it the House of Hythloday), that is insolvent and under threat of foreclosure.

The home is a symbol of the oppression of the family and the expectations of each generation for those that follow.

In a sense, a toxic home gives rise to a toxic family.

At a personal level, a family that was once apparently independently wealthy has to accommodate the new economy and the need to make new money.

One generation can only achieve its potential by breaking free of the bonds of the previous one, even if it has to commit its own follies to acquire wisdom.

Sprezzatura

(1) According to Wiki:

"Sprezzatura is ‘a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it’.

"It is the ability of the courtier to display ‘an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them’.

"[It is] ‘a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance’."

This reviewer will keep these characteristics in mind for the term of his natural life, in case they come in handy.

It’s Not Over Until the Fat Boy Slims

Beneath this fat boy of a novel is a slim athletic figure who knows his chops.

It comes across as all Lad Lit, but then reveals something more significant underneath.

Paul Murray writes with “sprezzatura”, so much so that it’s easy to infer that nothing much is going on beneath the surface.

I almost gave up on the novel numerous times, until I got to the last 100 pages, when I decided I was almost at the bottom of the slippery slide, so I might as well stay on and finish the ride.

I’m glad I did. I’m also glad I read it before “Skippy Dies”.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[leah · Rating 2 out of 5]

devastated to be giving a paul murray book 2 stars because i famously love the bee sting and skippy dies, but this one just didn't work for me. i don't need a book to have a lot of plot, but i do think murray's plots are always so well crafted that it was a shame this book didn't really have one. it has murray's trademark humour and great characters, but i spent most of the book just waiting for something to actually happen, but alas. two of his books are my all-time favourites so i'm excited for whatever he writes next.

[David Lentz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"An Evening of Long Goodbyes" is that rare character-driven novel rich in wit and humor accompanied by periods of endearing poignancy and an engaging story line. Paul Murray can really write and his themes seem to come from his own experience in Ireland as a TCD man and impoverished as an English tutor, like Joyce, in Barcelona to blend his life among both the upper and working classes. Charles is a man born into the upper-class of Dublin in a family whose financial fortunes are currently in a state of rapid decline. Charles has a fond sensibility and even an obsession for the troubled actress, Gene Tierney. His father is enriched until his death as a wealthy inventor of make-up and perfumes which transform women by virtue of their masks into daunting figures of power. Consequently, after living a life of ease Charles is compelled to see what it's like to struggle economically just to survive. The twists and turns of life in reversals of fortune inevitably seem to bring out the true character of a person in that s/he either rises or falls after a series of catastrophes like a kind of Irish Job amid the height of the economy of the Celtic Tiger. In the case of Charles we are pulling for him to get his life together to become a real human being with a grown-up sense of responsibility to his family and friends who desperately need his support. Murray writes effortlessly and convincingly in both high and low society settings. The best parts of the novel for me turn up when Charles is paired against his social antithesis, Frank, who deals in the low-end salvage business: he's a tough guy with a big heart. The interplay between these two polar opposites synthesized some high caliber, comic wit. Other characters emerge as undocumented aliens living in Ireland as refugees of the Croatian War. The dialogue is stunning in its verisimilitude both high and low. Murray states that as a Dubliner he was influenced by Joyce and Beckett: how could he not be? The influence of Beckett is easy to see as the main character is overwhelmed on many occasions by disasters shot like lightning bolts from the gods and by epic self-inflicted wounds. His hardships prove instructive and his transformation through his suffering fortify his character until we ache for him as one disaster after another befalls him like a script from Beckett and the theater of the absurd. When confronted with the beastly hardships of life, Charles longs just to escape into a romantic ideal but life won't let him linger long in this treacherous self-imposed place of false refuge. Existence is constantly dragging him outside his refuge to get knocked down, beat-up, mugged, struck by explosion so that he wanders bruised and bandaged and about the head like a mummy to be chastened for his inability to deal with harsh reality. Charles is the first-cousin of every protagonist of the novels of that other Irish genius, JP Donleavy. Murray presents us with two endings focused upon the fate of his actress sister, Bel, including one "with the endless dreams of seaweed braided arms, the countless glimpses of her in clouds, billboards, the faces of strangers... where people disappear only to reappear elsewhere, with French accents and false mustaches, where everything is constantly changing and nobody ever dies." He evokes in a dream the living persona of Yeats who is liberally quoted throughout the novel. There is high intelligence in the writing of this first novel and great craftsmanship, which strongly suggest that Murray may well enjoy a prolific future as a novelist. I certainly hope so: this novel was a real joy to read and leaves me eager to explore his other work.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The quickest way to thin out a shelf of great novels is to restrict yourself to the funny ones. Instead of alphabetizing the bounty that pours in every year, you'll be left casting about for a small vase to hold up the two or three contenders from each decade.

We've got plenty of good humorists in America, but looking for a really substantive comic novel could turn the National Book Award into one of those obscure mathematics prizes that grows dusty waiting for someone to find the last digit of pi.

Perhaps because they got an earlier start or the weather is so bad, the British Isles always seem to have produced more serious comic novelists than America (but we still have more Krispy Kremes). The latest writer to join that pantheon of wit is Irishman Paul Murray. His debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was a finalist for The Whitbread First Novel Award last year, but it lost to Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre's rancid satire of the Columbine tragedy, which also won the Booker Prize in a depressing suspension of literary taste.

Murray follows the well-trod path of comic novels narrated by pompous windbags. (Which reminds me, to be fair, I should acknowledge the Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Confederacy of Dunces in 1981. But in that rare exception, the prize arrived long after the author had killed himself, which muffles the laughter somewhat.) Murray's narrator is Charles Hythloday, a penniless young aristocrat who seems to have wandered out of a Noel Coward play in his dressing gown. At 24, Charles has abandoned college and taken to the chaise longue to sip cocktails, watch old movies, and stand guard against anything modern that might threaten the eternal stability of his ancestral estate.

Between his incurable laziness and his infuriating superiority, there doesn't seem to be much to admire about Charles. He's a double-wrapped egotist, protected from the world by the walls of his mother's decrepit mansion and by his impenetrable sense of privilege. He's the kind of snob who accidentally knocks down the overworked cook while she's carrying his late-night snack and then generously tells her to go off to bed and get some rest -- as soon as she's cleaned up the floor.

"To the casual observer it may have looked like I was living a life of indolence," he says. "It was not true, however, to say that I did nothing.... I saw myself as reviving a certain mode of life, a mode that had been almost lost: the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history. The idea was to do whatever one did with grace, to imbue one's every action with beauty, while at the same time making it look quite effortless."

We meet him at the moment that his convincing simulation of effortlessness is disturbed by a series of challenges:

First, the bank is about to repossess the house by collecting on mortgages that Charles didn't even know his late father had taken out. For months, he's been stuffing collection notices into a spare drawer.

Second, his theatrical sister, who hates the house and is determined to escape it, has brought home the latest and lowest in a line of lovers whom Charles loathes. (His objections to her previous boyfriends sound suspicious: One wore socks with sandals, another was "so Scottish.")

And finally, his glacial mother returns from rehab filled with the fervor of tough-love and self-help lingo, determined that Charles should get a job. "A job!" he thinks, stunned by the audacity of that suggestion. "This was the thanks I got for trying to save a few shreds of family dignity." But his mother is immovable on this point, and Charles storms out of the house, sans allowance.

As wittily as Murray satirizes his bombastic hero in a crumbling castle, some of the best scenes in this novel focus on the equally inane working world that Charles plunges into, hoping perhaps to find something paying six-figures in that information-technology revolution he's heard rumors about.

Clueless as Charles is, his acidic sarcasm provides a delicious commentary on the vacuous cant of employee motivation efforts, the venal world of temp agencies, the slave conditions of immigrant workers. His awful experiences in a "yule log" factory are enough to convince us that he may be right: There is something dreadful about modern culture, so consumed with getting and spending.

There's plenty of zany slapstick mixed in here, too: explosions, dueling, opening-night disasters, dinner-party brawls, a drunken postman hiding in the bushes. For reasons I won't ruin for you, Charles spends most of the novel with his head entirely bound in gauze like some dashing version of "The Mummy Takes Manhattan." But the serious currents of Murray's novel come in like the tide, so gradually that we hardly notice until it's too late and the laughter catches in our throats. Deep down, Charles loves his sister very profoundly, very tenderly, and what he's really trying to preserve -- the delight of their childhood -- seems all the more beautiful and tragic once he understands that it's irreparably shattered.

Long Goodbyes is probably too long by 100 pages, as though Murray thought he'd only have this one chance to get everything in. But he needn't have worried. As a searing critic of contemporary life, a searching observer of sibling relations, and particularly a comic writer, he's at the beginning of a long, witty career. Tuck this one in your robe to pursue some valuable leisure of your own.

Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.

[Kelly Kramer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've finally learned to put a book down when I don't like it, but I have not yet learned to immediately cull it from my shelves. As a result, I'm hit with pangs of guilt whenever I walk by. Until this past weekend, this one was still politely clearing its throat at me any time I said, "Hmm, what should I read next?" It's finally out of my house and on its way to seduce and disappoint the next reader.

There's promise here, there really is, but the rest of it was so hard to enjoy that had to give up on those few promising nuggets. If every time I hang out with you, you're enjoyable for about 5 out of 60 minutes, my self-esteem is eventually going to forbid me from continuing the relationship.

[Boyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

An absolute mess of a plot--especially near the end--and generous helpings of melodrama do not outweigh the fact that Murray's picaresque novel is wildly funny at the sentence level and in several whole sections as well. Some of the best parts are those in which the layabout wastrel Charles is ejected from his stately home and, in an exceedingly improbable move, takes refuge in a hovel with his sister's loutish ex-boyfriend. Naturally the lout turns out to have a heart of gold etc., but luckily not until readers get their money's worth out of him. Murray makes a few obligatory points about the new Ireland vs the old Ireland, but you don't get to cook up a story this implausible and then have people take you seriously.

There are some very creepy incestuous overtones here, and furthermore why Gene Tierney? She's just not camp enough. Still, a good tune-up for SKIPPY DIES.

[Kimmy C · Rating 4 out of 5]

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%.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another compulsively readable novel from Paul Murray! As in Skippy Dies , Murray pulls you in with comedy before surprising you with poignancy. This book, being more frequently humourous, doesn't have quite the emotional punch of Skippy Dies; the conflicts have lower stakes, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing—the darkness seeping into Charles's life doesn't have the oppressive grimness of the horrors affecting the characters in Skippy Dies. Indeed, the problems that Charles encounters, which might be minor conflicts for another protagonist, are given weight because of what we know about Charles's character.

This brings me to the novel's greatest strength: Charles Hythloday. Simultaneously self-unaware and a bit self-absorbed, Charles makes the perfect unreliable narrator, obsessed with imbuing his life and the people around him with literary meaning even when an objective reading of the situation would resist it. His desire to ignore ugliness and prettify the past and present drives his actions through the entire novel, and defines the question at its centre: What happens when we deny reality? Charles barricades himself in his crumbling family home (he leaves it in body but not in spirit, regarding its new inhabitants only as temporary invaders), cutting himself off from the pulse of life his sister longs for, and never truly connecting with people until they violently jolt him into it.

He's a fascinating character, likeable despite his absurd disconnection from the real world, his ignorance often equivocal: when is he truly blinkered and when is he shielding himself from pain? That ambiguity is what makes him so intriguing a narrator. Charles engages in self-examination only when he can control exactly what he finds, turning people into archetypes and objects into metaphors, arranging his life into linear narration. When he approaches the truth, he shapes it into something more pleasing and then looks the other way. His burying of the past is most obvious when he recalls the more troubling episodes of his childhood; while most of the story is told with a running commentary, the memories that most bewilder him are written as straight-forward recollections, as though they are too dark and confusing for even Charles to make sense of in any positive way.

Paul Murray's strong grasp on characterization also inspires the novel's greatest comedy. Murray has a knack for using unusual turns of phrase to make ordinary moments spectacularly funny, and these lines are bolstered by their uniqueness to the character delivering them. Charles's funny moments are moments that could only happen because of Charles, because of the way he views the world and the way he expresses himself. No other character in the novel would react with the same indignation to a postman "[sauntering] off whistling across the lawn, which is not meant to be walked on except by the peacocks". This is a perfect scene to showcase Charles: his protectiveness of his home, his belief that he lives a stylishly wealthy life (the peacocks, which Charles is supposed to care for, are neglected and mangy, but he forgets this when he's around someone he considers inferior), his ignorance of reality (the postman has just delivered more bills that Charles will ignore without a glance). Character is what gives An Evening of Long Goodbyes its biggest laughs as well as its deepest pathos.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn’t even close to Skippy Dies.
If you’re here because you loved Skippy, don’t come expecting it. It’s like if you read Infinite Jest and expect Broom to be some comparable marvel. Sorry. Not happening.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes is nice though. It’s pleasant, relaxed, silly. Charles’ narrative vision is so obscured we hardly get a clear picture of the horrible conflict underlying this meaty novel.

Instead we get quips!

It’s a tremendously uneven novel. Murray said he didn’t want to shoehorn his characters into a specific genre, but it ends up feeling like they wander about for vast portions of the text without a real sense of how they’re supposed to behave. They act the way they’re supposed to act (ie: consistently), but they’re put into some very odd (and often quite dark) situations that make their behavior seem out of place...perhaps this was for effect, but it read disjointedly to me. Perhaps what enhances this sense of fragmentation is that the novel jumps from problem to problem without feeling like much gets developed or ever really resolved. Sure, restoring Amaurot to its former glory (or at least regaining a seat) is Charles’ main conflict, but what about Bonetown and the rent? What about Bel’s relationships? What about the Yugoslavians? What about Droyd? I could go on.


And none of this is to say that AEoLG is unpleasant. It is a very nice read. Charles Hythloday reminded me of many of my favorite misanthropic narrators. He’s Holden Caulfield, Lucky Jim, and Ignatius Reilly all rolled into one. If you like any of the narrators from any of those books, AEoLG will probably appeal to you in some way. Charles is witty and candid but much like Ignatius or Holden, it’s equally fascinating to see what he’s missing.

Just don’t go in thinking this is Skippy Dies.
Cause it ain’t.
3.5

[Alex Sarll]

Astonishingly good - perhaps even better than its much-praised successor, Skippy Dies. Charles Hythloday is the cheerfully oblivious heir to a declining mansion outside Dublin; a modern Bertie Wooster, except not quite so oblivious as to be unaware of the barbarians at the gates. Except that Bertie and co. never had that distressing meeting with the bank. And so Charles, for all that he is perfectly aware "People don't get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it because they have to, and then use whatever's left over to buy themselves things that make them feel less bad about having jobs", is cast out into the cold. And for a book published in 2003, Murray is impressively prescient about the hollowness of the pseudo-boom, in Ireland more than anywhere. "The whole thing'll come crashing down...and all anyone'll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese." Yes, the lampooning of the slums and the bullshit pseudo-radical artists and the weasel words of commerce is a little heavy-handed at times, but only in the way that Hogarth or Scoop was heavy-handed, never in the way that makes one cringe at decent sentiments clumsily expressed. Excellent stuff.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book. The endpaper likened it to A Confederacy of Dunces, but this is the FAR BETTER book. The style and construction are similar, as is the main character's rather loose connection to what the world at large calls "reality". Though far from being actually idiotic, Charles is much more of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. There is no Jeeves to constantly put Charles right, so he makes his own mistakes and learns important lessons in life. At times you can get lost in the nonsense, but that's the point. It's nonsense. The things that are real, not the masks and chicanery are what come through at the end and have real meaning.

[Stephen Coulon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young aesthete finds himself destitute after his grand family’s fortunes fall through. However, his unwillingness to abandon his life as a cosmopolitan flâneur drives him towards ironically great deeds as he attempts to recover the one great love of his life: his family’s impractically decadent ancestral mansion. After so many dreary and cheerless books lately, I’ve finally fallen upon a genuinely hilarious and heartwarming tale. Murray’s wit is on par with (and echoes the works of) Wilde, Wooster, Toole, and Hornby, and his remarkable mastery of English diction pushes his style towards virtuosity. Concise characterization and memetic dialogue smoothly glide the narrative through bemonocled high society and betracksuited hoi polloi with equally familiar wagishness. Of equal importance to Murray’s polished and playful wit is a hallmark he shares with other great satirists, a warm affection at the heart of his approach. Just behind the banter and mockery lies a charitable embrace of humanity and all its ludicrous foibles. The best book I’ve read in 2021 so far.

[Briana · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Annie Tate Cockrum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Murray’s debut and my third read from him. He undoubtably is great at writing a complicated family dynamic and taking his time with it. Unlike The Bee Sting and Skippy Dies this only had one point of view - Charles a man in his early twenties who doesn’t have a lot of direction. We follow him as his living situation and family dynamics begin to shift, and he is thrust from an Ireland of a bygone era into a more modern one. There are many moments where I felt like we were in the mid 20th century when in fact it is set at the turn of the 21st.

I found the book to be very funny throughout which made me think of something Caoilinn Hughes said at her First Light Books event - paraphrasing here but she said that she was grateful the history of Irish literature has humor baked into it and that humor is taken seriously in Irish writing.

Here’s to humor and to Ireland!! Up the banner!

[Annie Prins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and sensitive but really witty too
4.5/5

[Dani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, the good news is that Paul Murray has gotten lots better in the 20-or-so years between writing this and The Bee Sting. This was a bit too gaudy and silly for me.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ✨

Love how Murray writes and the characters he creates. I especially liked how he threaded Yeats and Gene Tierney throughout the novel. Hit a bit of a lag in the middle but glad I persevered.

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bertie-Woosteresque protagonist in complicated plot. Like the Bee Sting, long and complex narrative with a very satisfying conclusion. I love this author.

[Emily Rollason · Rating 2 out of 5]

valuable lesson learnt: don't judge a book by its cover. the greyhound hardly features :(

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murray is a fantastic writer, and this first novel of his is an incredible accomplishment--made me laugh, cry, all that.

The thing is...I read it after I read his second novel, "Skippy Dies," which is just about one of the best novels I've ever read (made me both laugh and cry harder). So I think reading "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" made me both more charitable toward Murray but also a little disappointed that his first novel isn't as good as his second. No real surprise there, though.

This novel is told entirely in the perspective of Charles Hythloday, a spoiled 24-year old who wants to recreate the world of living as a gentleman, without having to work or really do anything at all. He is, in a word, insufferable. That makes the first hundred or so pages of the book a little tedious as his ignorance is both hilarious and annoying.

Then things turn serious, but there are so many turns and little pieces that the plot feels like so many frayed bits of string keeping together a tattered clothesline. But still, the ending was heartbreaking, surprisingly so.

Do I recommend this book? I recommend you read "Skippy Dies" first, decide if you love Murray as much as I do, and read this next to keep your spirits up until he published a third novel.

[Meinarva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as "Skippy".

[Mils McGuire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paul Murray is one of my favourite authors and a beautiful writer but I found this hard to get through. It has moments of brilliance and humour but the detestable characters and confused narrative outweigh them.

[Cian Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts well, finishes very well but sags significantly in the middle. Much of what makes his two most recent novels so outstanding, is, however, on display in this debut.

[John Cullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off strong but started to meander and then go completely off the rails. Overall enjoyable but at times, directionless.

[Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like that was a really long haul. I didn’t find the characters sympathetic or believable and it just went on and on.

[natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book, since it’s the third Murray book I’ve read and I was obsessed with the first two. I found it extremely funny and I really enjoyed reading it, but it was a bit long and meandering for me. I think I may have DNF’d if it wasn’t an author I already had established I loved!