Skippy Dies reviewed by Renée

Here is the first review we have rec'd from Renée Levine : Renée Levine begins with Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

People read book reviews for two reasons, as far as I can judge that. One is to find out what the book is about, the other is to find out if it is worth their while, if they will enjoy it or learn something from it or, happily all of that.
To get the former, you google it; to get the latter, you must get to know the reviewer.
I am an opinionated reviewer. I have likes and dislikes and can only justify them by telling you that I have strong personal opinions.
Meanwhile, I have made a commitment to Penelope, owner of the Red Wheelbarrow in Paris, to review along with her, the list on the Booker Favorites for this year. Thus the first review of
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.
The novel is set in a private boarding school in Dublin for boys and opens with the death of Skippy as he is engaged in a donut eating contest with his roommate, Rupert. From there the book travels back a few years and with beautiful displays of glorious language, the author offers you the background for this rather grim opening. He shows with much humor, linguistic fireworks, spectacular and funny descriptions the mise en scene to give you a view of adolescent boys stuck in the prison like atmosphere of hormone driven boys made frantic by sexual urges, drug phantasies and professors of dubious qualities. As they wait for their food served by a server who is “ladling scrambled eggs like some kind of giant infection from a steel vat,” they squabble and argue and harass one another without end.
“The tang of adolescence , impervious to deodorant or opened windows, hangs heavy, and the air tintinnabulates with bleeps, chimes and trebly shards of music as two hundred mobile phones banned during the school day, are switched back on with the urgency of divers reconnecting to their oxygen supply. From her alcove a safe elevation above it, the plaster Madonna with the starred halo and the peaches-and-cream complexion pouts coquettishly at the rampaging maleness below.”
Those two quotes should give you an impression of the funny and the pathetic, the soft and the ludicrous of this novel so rich in imagination and description.
Now the personal: I found it of no interest. I am not really interested in male adolescent dreams nor realities and boarding school settings don’t do it for me, no matter how talented and amusing and also sad, the presentation is offered.
Language gets A plus; humor gets an A; plot gets a B. The rest is an opinionated C minus from me. Which means that I did not enjoy that many pages on the subject and I surely did not learn from it. But it was also not meant for me. Murray has a devoted public to whom this is written and who will surely love it because of its fabulous talent for language since that public is interested in the story.