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An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Paul Murray

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Mar 20, 2017 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: novels, setting-ireland

As a debut novel, I suppose one has to commend this for attempting a high degree of difficulty. Set in late 1990s Ireland, the author has explicitly taken some of the plot and themes of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" and remixed them in the surprisingly spot-on pastiche of a Wodehouse farce. And while Chekhov's play also mixes tragedy and farce, the combination here didn't quite work for me.

The protagonist is a Bertie Woosterish 24-year-old college dropout, who lolls around his family's large c As a debut novel, I suppose one has to commend this for attempting a high degree of difficulty. Set in late 1990s Ireland, the author has explicitly taken some of the plot and themes of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" and remixed them in the surprisingly spot-on pastiche of a Wodehouse farce. And while Chekhov's play also mixes tragedy and farce, the combination here didn't quite work for me.

The protagonist is a Bertie Woosterish 24-year-old college dropout, who lolls around his family's large country mansion outside Dublin, drinking through the family cellar and watching old black and white movies, and gathering material for a proposed critical study of actress Gene Tierney. His aspiring actress sister also lives there, while their mother is in some kind of asylum and their father is dead.

The first third of the book is largely a send-up of this anachronistic mode of pseudo-aristocratic life, and while it's amusingly done at times, it does drag on a bit as the reader waits for reality to intrude. The middle third covers the hero's absurd attempt to rescue the house from foreclosure, introduces a family of Bosnian refugees to the story, and sees the return of the mother. Her return leads to a promising plotline that sees him kicked out of the house, forced to move into a crumbling shared apartment in a shabby part of Dublin. There are some decent fish-out-of-water comic scenes (imagine Wooster contending with modern world manners of his just released from jail, junkie/DJ roommate, and you get the idea). The final third focuses on the schemes to save the house by turning it into a non-profit cultural space (with the help of an Irish mobile phone company), and veers off into satire about the "Celtic Tiger" economic boom, including a subplot about immigrant workers at a bakery factory.

Behind all the comedic elements lurks the pain of a dysfunctional family, and it's that contrast that didn't work for me, especially when things get heavy at the end. The problem is that you need the frothy, shallow characters to pull off the comedy, but they can't bear the weight of real pain. There are some great scenes and some great lines, but too few and too scattered in too long a book for me to recommend it. ...more

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