The Mark and the Void

August 24, 2015
Murray’s follow-up to Skippy Dies is a protracted jab at the world of banking, a charming send-up of the financial crisis that is hilariously absent of hope. Claude Martingale is a French émigré living in Dublin and working for the Investment Bank of Torabundo. His life is not entertaining. So why does Paul, a novelist (who happens to share the actual author’s first name), want to make Claude the everyman protagonist of his next novel? With the approval of bank management, Paul begins to shadow Claude through his typical office work days. But it quickly becomes clear there’s more to Paul’s interest than he’s saying. Add to this intrigue the potential collapse of Ireland’s economy, tent cities inhabited by protestors dressed as zombies, and a mad Russian mathematician around whose equations BOT may be structuring its new Structured Products Department, and Murray’s latest quickly takes off. Here, again, the author displays much of the quick wit of his popular previous novel, but this effort also boasts a more modernist slant, with ever-blurring lines between art imitating life and life imitating art for the characters. The result is another page-turner with smarts, an absurdist riff on our economic follies, one that leaves the impression that it’s all not so far-fetched, after all.

Starred review from September 1, 2015
A darkly comic, lightly metafictional tale about a banker seeking love and a novelist seeking wealth amid the fallout from the financial boom and bust in Ireland. Claude Martingale, a well-paid analyst in the Bank of Torabundo's Dublin office, finds his routine upset when a man named Paul asks if he can trail Claude as research for his next novel. It isn't long before Claude discovers the research actually entails casing his bank, one of several moneymaking schemes Paul undertakes. Still, the two men form a cautious friendship, and Paul tries to help shy Claude talk up the Greek waitress Ariadne, while Claude tries to prod Paul back to the writing he's fled since his first novel was panned. Murray (Skippy Dies, 2010, etc.), the real and well-reviewed novelist named Paul, offers his alter ego's scams as humorous microcosm to the avaricious inventions still common in the financial world two years after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Other parallels abound. Just as fictional Paul has a delightfully profane Russian sidekick, the bank's hedge fund chief relies on a Russian math whiz and his "providential antinomies" that "monetize failure." Ariadne has a rant on Greece's financial chaos as preview for where Ireland is headed. A writer quits that trade to become an artist who turns his written pages into art within a frame. So Murray creates the novel his other Paul is meant to produce at the urging of a guilt-ridden banker and another character who asks, "when are our writers going to address the banking crisis?" The speaker is the powerful critic who slammed fictional Paul's debut. Murray manages the trick of being thoughtful and entertaining. His creative energy sends the book in many directions, making it a little loose and lumpy, but the same may be said of Dickens, with whom real Paul also shares wit, sympathy, and a purposeful sense of mischief.

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September 15, 2015
This follow-up to the highly acclaimed Skippy Dies (2010) follows sensitive Frenchman Claude Martingale, a highly successful investment banker at the innocuous Bank of Torabundo in Dublin. His personal life, though, is lacking, a fact that he becomes acutely aware of when a shambling, insensitive writer named Paul tells him he wants to shadow Claude as part of his research for a new novel about an Everyman. Paul, embittered over the failure of his debut, the first serious clown novel in decades, turns out to be more interested in robbing banks than writing about them. No matter, because Murray has a field day lampooning the global financial crisis ( If you do it in the bookies, it's a bet. . . . If you pay some 23-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it's a derivative ). Beneath the jokes, though, Murray also lays out the personal costs of the recession. This novel might not be to every taste, but for those who don't mind the financial lingo, there's plenty of humor to be found.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2015

If Murray can turn the upshot of a 14-year-old's death by doughnut into the quirkily entertaining Skippy Dies (short-listed for the Costa Novel Award and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award), then he can make darkly funny magic out of financial crisis. A topic-hungry author named Paul approaches Irish banker Claude Martingale, whose life gets a whole lot more sparkly under Paul's fictionalizing influence. But what are Paul's intentions, and what happens when Claude's bank gets way ahead of itself with derivatives trading and suspect takeovers?

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015

Paris native Claude Martingale works in Dublin as an analyst for an investment bank that's headquartered on an ecologically precarious island in the Pacific. His life is devoid of social activity or romance. Even so, an author called Paul proposes to write a novel about Claude. Paul begins to shadow him at work and is eventually joined by his associate, Igor. This mysterious duo introduces Claude to the madcap, violent underworld of Dublin's burst housing bubble, the shadow economy of Ireland's sex and service workers, and literary publishing. Claude, meanwhile, remains a character in search of his story, one thread of which may lead to the beautiful Greek baker and painter Ariadne. Will Claude pull the heist of a lifetime to reach her? Readers can only root for Claude as he subversively comes into his own while sticking it to the global banking sector. VERDICT Murray's follow-up to his incomparable Skippy Dies reinforces his reputation as one of the most surprising and inventive storytellers writing today. Morally authoritative and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is essential reading. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15; "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 9/1/15.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2015

Paris native Claude Martingale works in Dublin as an analyst for an investment bank that's headquartered on an ecologically precarious island in the Pacific. His life is devoid of social activity or romance. Even so, an author called Paul proposes to write a novel about Claude. Paul begins to shadow him at work and is eventually joined by his associate, Igor. This mysterious duo introduces Claude to the madcap, violent underworld of Dublin's burst housing bubble, the shadow economy of Ireland's sex and service workers, and literary publishing. Claude, meanwhile, remains a character in search of his story, one thread of which may lead to the beautiful Greek baker and painter Ariadne. Will Claude pull the heist of a lifetime to reach her? Readers can only root for Claude as he subversively comes into his own while sticking it to the global banking sector. VERDICT Murray's follow-up to his incomparable Skippy Dies reinforces his reputation as one of the most surprising and inventive storytellers writing today. Morally authoritative and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is essential reading. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15; "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 9/1/15.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.