The Irish novelist on his wife’s response to his darkly comic new book, the ghosts that haunt his country, his love of Thomas Pynchon and distrust of Dickens
Paul Murray was born in 1975 and raised in south Dublin. He finished his first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, while doing a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. He followed this with the blackly comic Skippy Dies, longlisted for the Booker prize in 2010, and The Mark and the Void five years later. His latest novel, The Bee Sting, tracks the unravelling of a family in Ireland’s Midlands – Neel Mukherjee has described it as “generous, expansive and glorious as a cathedral”. It is also darkly hilarious. Murray spoke to me from Dublin, where he lives with his wife and son.
Reading The Bee Sting, I was impressed by your knowledge of Midlands car dealerships, gay clubs, survivalists and the interior life of teenage girls, among many other things. Which was hardest to come by?
They were all difficult in their own ways. One thing I’ve got better at as I get older is just listening to people. People have crazy lives. The stuff that happens to – quote-unquote – ordinary folks is very operatic. So I gathered stories as I went along. I’ve got a couple of friends who have connections to car dealerships – it’s a big deal to own a car dealership in the Midlands. In the 90s, when I was in college, gay clubs were starting up. Some of my gay friends were still in the closet, so for them that was a very powerful experience. It was really exciting, the idea that you could be transformed as a person.
