A review by ekurt1
The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray

4.0

When I saw Paul Murray had written something new, I picked it up immediately because Skippy Dies is, in my opinion, among the greatest contemporary fiction. Perhaps because I always had Skippy in mind, this book seemed too mellow, characters tad underdeveloped. That might be one of the biggest perils of writing something like Skippy, so rough and shocking and layered - the later works will forever be compared to it, even if they have completely styles. I think the book starts out quite ambitiously and then delivers something else - don't get me wrong, this was a pleasant read but I was expecting the 'Ulysses II' the book Paul mentions and I got a nice romantic comedy.. noone is left unhappy at the end.

I realize that as readers we are extremely biased towards the big bangs - the deaths, the misery, and if we do not get that, we rarely rate a book 5 stars. You cannot get away with a happy ending if you aren't Jane Austen or a teen blockbuster author - which is quite sad because we absolutely need happy books that are readable literature but then we fail to appreciate them.