Skippy Dies on page 1 and we spend the next 650-odd pages on the events leading up to it and the aftermath.

This book isn’t one thing though. It has a few modes, including teenage sex comedy, mid life crisis profile, campus satire, scathing critique of the Catholic Church, and crushing story of drugs, sexual abuse, trauma and mental illness. It switches gears so quickly that it’s disarming. It made me laugh out loud, made me angry and brought me to tears. And I’ll never think about the poem The Road Not Taken the same.

My kid is in grade 10 right now. They’re an artsy type and their unique style has made them a target for small-minded schoolmates. My own high school experience was brutal. Murray captures the hell of it so perfectly, that some sections were almost unreadable, in the same way that Knausgaard’s Boyhood Island cut too close to the bone. It can be revealing to revisit those awkward, confusing days, but it is never pleasant.

It sounds like a lot, but Murray is such a skilled writer that the stylistic changes come across like welcome little twists – the perspective changes frequently, including sometimes mid-chapter.

It made me reassess The Bee Sting, his follow up novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023. This feels like the work of a better writer than that book. While I really liked The Bee Sting, it felt like someone doing Jonathan Franzen (better than Franzen, in my opinion). This one felt like a distinct talent, a fully formed author with a unique style.

Anyway. Rereading the above makes the book sound grim and dark — it’s anything but that — most of the book is joyful and charming in the same way a film like Superbad is. It’s heartfelt and surprisingly beautiful. Murray loves (most of) these characters, and by the end of the book I did too.