AN EVENING OF LONG GOODBYES by Paul Murray
ISBN: 0812970403
Format: Paperback, 448pp
Pub. Date: September 2005
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
How can life get any worse? First, Bel brings home this string of imbecilic and uneducated men and she’s trying to become an actress. Can you believe that? This is the same girl who forgot her lines to The Cherry Orchard on stage after studying them for months. Father is long passed and I can only look at his portrait for guidance in his study. Mother can’t handle her nerves, the poor thing, so she’s up at Cedars to get the drinking cleared up. Now, Bel has brought home this miscreant named Frank and all I want to do is drink a gimlet and watch an old Gene Tierney movie in my dressing gown in the drawing room of my beloved Irish home, Amaurot. See, Father has made money in cosmetics and there used to be models all over the place when we were young. Now it’s just Bel and I; poor Bel who’s such a fragile thing with a striking beauty. She has father’s blue eyes and mother’s autumn leaf hair. Sometimes I find myself staring and she has to push me out of her room while she changes. But our sense of security falters, thanks to Bel not checking the string drawer with the bank’s letters and we become involved with all sorts of crazy things: Balkan refugees, Irish gangsters, wretched telecommunication types with their talk of synergy and communication, dog racing, and that awful theater troupe that moved into our home with that Marxist playwright at the helm.
But, it is an entertaining turn of mad cap events, and it’s hard not to laugh at and be highly amused by our story. It also seems that some chap, Paul Murray, has recorded our lives in a wonderful book called AN EVENING OF LONG GOODBYES. He seems to be quite accurate, unfortunately. But there is always a gimlet and an old film to take my mind off of it. And if you’re by the Folly, watch out for that renegade flying gargoyle.
