An Evening of Long Goodbyes : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: "A Box of Nuts Chewing the Rag"
Review: In "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" Paul Murray has conjured up a delicious assortment of nut cases, whetted with an ever-flowing array of alcoholic beverages, who crack frequently along a chewey Squirrel Nut Zipper plot.

Visit each of these characters, laugh at their amazingly illogical takes on life, love and especially themselves, but avoid staying long enough to catch anything they suffer from.

Rating:
Summary: Not true to itself
Review: The writing is graceful, light, and compelling. I couldn't wait to turn the pages to learn more of Charles, his family, and today's Ireland examined and revealed through tender humor. However, the book is more than just humor, and this is where it fails. When the book is written as humor, it is most successful. Unfortunately, the author, Murray, shifts from humor to a type of melodrama toward the end that doesn't work as well. Short-listed for the Whitbread Award? Fine and good. The beginning deserves the recognition of such a respected award. However, the disappointment of the ending rates the book a 2.

Rating:
Summary: An Improving Book
Review: This book really hit the spot for me. If Bertie Wooster were to wander into the world of "TrainSpotting", this would be the result....A witty, moving mixture of P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Nick Hornby, Irvine Welsh, and Stephen Fry. Like Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster stories, this book is written in the first person, which makes it possible for every sentence to be funny. Ranks very high among the wine and spirits. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Evenings Spent Laughing Out Loud
Review: This book was addictive. I nearly had to go to hospital with ruptured stomach muscles from all the laughter. Pay up your medical insurance before you read it!

Rating:
Summary: Some wickedly funny writing in its first part
Review: Twenty-four-year-old Charles Hythloday resides at Amaurot, his family's estate some ten miles outside of Dublin, with his sister Bel, an aspiring actress, and their Bosnian housekeeper Mrs. P. Charles wiles away his days in apparent indolence and drunkenness, mourning a love affair gone sour, watching Gene Tierney movies into the night, overseeing the construction of a folly on the property. But to Charles's mind his purpose in life is a serious one: he means to revive "the contemplative life of the country gentleman, in harmony with his status and history." For the first third of An Evening of Long Goodbyes Charles is thus an amusing anachronism, a Wodehousian character thrust into a less polite modern world. This makes for some wickedly funny writing, both in dialogue and narrative. (Out to a seedy pub with Bel and her Golem of a boyfriend Frank, Charles looks around with some unease at his fellow drinkers. "Was I the only one in evening wear?") But one senses that Charles's retreat from society is motivated by an underlying sadness.

Unfortunately, Charles's idyllic lifestyle cannot last. Events conspire to push him out of Amaurot and into productive society, where he engages in activities--paying work, for example--that were previously unthinkable. Charles grows as a human being, developing empathy, for example, and he is eventually compelled to confront the imperfections of his childhood at Amaurot, which he had long glorified.

While Charles's development is interesting to watch, he becomes a less interesting character as he changes from a wry commentator on a society that is alien to him to a productive participant in that society. The book, too, loses charm as it moves from the farce of its early pages to the melodrama of Charles's post-Amaurot life. Still worth reading, a lighter book that kept Charles in tails and gimlets would surely have garnered five stars.

Debra Hamel -- book-blog reviews
Author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece