Paul Murray (author)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Irish novelist Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin. He has a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Paul was a former bookseller and his first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award.
An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2004) is Murray's comic novel about a 24 year old wealthy layabout who prefers a Gimlet in hand and watching Gene Tierney in his chaise lounge in his Irish mansion than go out in the modern world and get a job.
Charles Hythloday is a Trinty College dropout who lives in with his siter Bel in their parent's estate Amaurot. Charles loves his childhood home but Bel notices it affects people, basically to be phony and two-faced, and wants out. There are two things Charles loves more than the silent film actress Gene Tierney is his home and his struggling actress Bel, who he has a slightly incestous affection for, and they can't be parted. Bel brings home all these men that Charles doesn't approve of, recently there is Frank, a loutish working class Architectural Salvager.
Their father was worked as a chemist for several well known cosmetics companies. But ever since he passed away a few years ago and recently their mother went to a clinc for rehab to curb her drinking, Charles has had free reign to do nothing. He begs to differ because he is building a Folly in the backyard and perfecting the sprezzatura, to act like a gentlemen in a graceful manner and make it look like your doing nothing at all. Charles is about looking to past and wishing men still wore top coats and women still wore white gloves.
But the jig is up when the bills pile up and the bank is threatening to reposses the house. But Charles comes up with a plan with help from the nefarious postman/private detective to blow up the Folly and fake his death and take get the insurance money to save Amaurot and move to South America, where in dream he converses with W.B. Yeats, but the plans goes awry when he finds out that his Bosnian maid, Mrs. P, has her children living in the Folly. Where Charles meets the one-legged beauty, due to a landmine, Mirela. The bomb is stopped by Frank or so we think, but the Folly explodes anyway and a large stone gargoyle falls on Charles's head and puts him into a coma for a few weeks.
When he wakes up his mother has come back, the finances are settled and Bel has turned Charles' beloved home into a theatre for her awful troupe lead by a Marxist playwright Henry. Charles moves in with Frank when his mother forces him to a get a job and he does at a factory making sure the Yule Logs are straight in a Latvian factory. Charles tries to begin a play to get back into his beloved home, but things get worse when a telecommunications company named Telisnor, with a nod to Shakespeare's Hamlet, buying Amaurot and making sure there is a cell phone in every production.
Charles comes home to the night where the Telisnor president has dinner with the Hythlodays to celebrate their merger. But Charles is only concerned with talking to Bel about her upcoming trip to an acting workshop in Russia in Chekhov's home town, because The Cherry Orchard is her favorite play. But he has a talk with Bel and everything seems to be fine and then the next morning she dies, by driving her car into a wall and breaking through the windsheild and flying into the ocean. Whether it was suicide, because she was a very worried and uptight person. It also could have been that the old car, of her father's, that she was driving? It is a mystery.
