Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius. Daniel "Skippy" Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls' school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest. A fatal doughnut-eating race and the ensuing tragedy will explode Seabrook's century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light, until teachers and pupils alike discover that the fragile lines dividing past from present, love from betrayal—and even life from death—have become almost impossible to read ...

Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair. It is a Friday in November, and Ed’s is only half full; if Skippy makes a noise as he topples to the floor, no one pays any attention. Nor is Ruprecht, at first, overly concerned; rather he is pleased, because it means that he, Ruprecht, has won the race, his sixteenth in a row, bringing him one step closer to the all-time record held by Guido ‘The Gland’ LaManche, Seabrook College class of ’93.

Apart from being a genius, which he is, Ruprecht does not have all that much going for him. A hamster-cheeked boy with a chronic weight problem, he is bad at sports and most other facets of life not involving complicated mathematical equations; that is why he savours his doughnut-eating victories so, and why, even though Skippy has been on the floor for almost a minute now, Ruprecht is still sitting there in his chair, chuckling to himself and saying, exultantly, under his breath, ‘Yes, yes’ – until the table jolts and his Coke goes fl ying, and he realizes that something is wrong.

On the chequered tiles beneath the table Skippy is writhing in silence. ‘What’s the matter?’ Ruprecht says, but gets no answer. Skippy’s eyes are bulging and a strange, sepulchral wheezing issues from his mouth; Ruprecht loosens his tie and unbuttons his collar, but that doesn’t seem to help, in fact the breathing, the writhing, the pop-eyed stare only get worse, and Ruprecht feels a prickling climb up the back of his neck. ‘What’s wrong?’ he repeats, raising his voice, as if Skippy were on the other side of a busy motorway. Everyone is looking now: the long table of Seabrook fourth-years and their girlfriends, the two St Brigid’s girls, one fat, one thin, both still in their uniforms, the trio of shelfstackers from the shopping mall up the road – they turn and watch as Skippy gasps and dry-heaves, for all the world as if he’s drowning, though how could he be drowning here, Ruprecht thinks, indoors, with the sea way over on the other side of the park? It doesn’t make any sense, and it’s all happening too quickly, without giving him time to work out what to do –

At that moment a door opens and a young Asian man in an Ed’s shirt and a badge on which is written, in mock-cursive, Hi I’m, and then, in an almost unreadable scrawl, Zhang Xielin, emerges behind the counter, carrying a tray of change. Confronted by the crowd, which has risen to its feet to get a better view, he halts; then he spies the body on the floor, and dropping the tray, vaults over the counter, pushes Ruprecht aside and prises open Skippy’s mouth. He peers in, but it’s too dark to see anything, so hoisting him to his feet, he fastens his arms around Skippy’s midriff and begins to yank at his stomach.

Ruprecht’s brain, meanwhile, has finally sparked into life: he’s scrabbling through the doughnuts on the floor, thinking that if he can fi nd out which doughnut Skippy is choking on, it might provide some sort of a key to the situation. As he casts about, however, he makes a startling discovery. Of the six doughnuts that were in Skippy’s box at the start of the race, six still remain, none with so much as a bite gone. His mind churns. He hadn’t been observing Skippy during the race – Ruprecht when eating competitively tends to enter a sort of a zone in which the rest of the world melts away into nothingness, this in fact is the secret of his record-nearing sixteen victories – but he’d assumed Skippy was eating too; after all, why would you enter a doughnut-eating race and not eat any doughnuts? And, more importantly, if he hasn’t eaten anything, how can he be –

‘Wait!’ he exclaims, jumping up and waving his hands at Zhang. ‘Wait!’ Zhang Xielin looks at him, panting, Skippy lolling
over his forearms like a sack of wheat. ‘He hasn’t eaten anything,’ Ruprecht says.

‘He isn’t choking.’ A rustle of intrigue passes through the body of spectators. Zhang Xielin glowers mistrustfully, but allows Ruprecht to extricate Skippy, who is surprisingly heavy, from his arms and lie him back down on the ground.

This entire sequence of events, from Skippy’s initial fall to the present moment, has taken perhaps three minutes, during which time his purple colour has faded to an eerily delicate eggshell blue, and his wheezing breath receded to a whisper; his contortions too have ebbed towards stillness, and his eyes, though open, have taken on an oddly vacant air, so that even looking right at him Ruprecht’s not a hundred per cent sure he’s even actually conscious, and it seems all of a sudden as if around his own lungs Ruprecht can feel a pair of cold hands clutching as he realizes what’s about to happen, though at the same time he can’t quite believe it – could something like that really happen? Could it really happen here, in Ed’s Doughnut House? Ed’s, with its authentic jukebox and its fake leather and its black-and-white photographs of America; Ed’s, with its fluorescent lights and its tiny plastic forks and its weird sterile air that should smell of doughnuts but doesn’t; Ed’s, where they come every day, where nothing ever happens, where nothing is supposed to happen, that’s the whole point of it –

One of the girls in crinkly pants lets out a shriek. ‘Look!’ Jigging up and down on her tiptoes, she stabs at the air with her finger, and Ruprecht snaps out of the stupor he’s fallen into and follows the line downwards to see that Skippy has raised his left hand. Relief courses through his body.

‘That’s it!’ he cries.

The hand flexes, as if it has just woken from a deep sleep, and Skippy simultaneously expresses a long, rasping sigh.

‘That’s it!’ Ruprecht says again, without knowing quite what he means. ‘You can do it!’

Skippy makes a gurgling noise and blinks deliberately up at Ruprecht.

‘The ambulance is going to be here in a second,’ Ruprecht tells him. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

Gurgle, gurgle, goes Skippy.

‘Just relax,’ Ruprecht says.

But Skippy doesn’t. Instead he keeps gurgling, like he’s trying to tell Ruprecht something. He rolls his eyes feverishly, he stares up at the ceiling; then, as if inspired, his hand shoots out to search the tiled floor. It pads blindly amid the spilled Coke and melting ice cubes until it finds one of the fallen doughnuts; this it seizes on, like a clumsy spider grappling with its prey, crushing it between its fingers tighter and tighter.

‘Just take it easy,’ Ruprecht repeats, glancing over his shoulder at the window for a sign of the ambulance.

But Skippy keeps squeezing the doughnut till it has oozed raspberry syrup all over his hand; then, lowering a glistening red fingertip to the floor, he makes a line, and then another, perpendicular to the first.

T

‘He’s writing,’ someone whispers.

He’s writing. Painfully slowly – sweat dripping down his forehead, breath rattling like a trapped marble in his chest – Skippy traces out syrupy lines one by one onto the chequered floor. E, L – the lips of the onlookers move soundlessly as each character is completed; and while the traffic continues to roar by outside, a strange kind of silence, almost a serenity, falls over the Doughnut House, as if in here time had temporarily, so to speak, stopped moving forward; the moment, rather than ceding to the next, becoming elastic, attenuated, expanding to contain them, to give them a chance to prepare for what’s coming –

TELL LORI

The overweight St Brigid’s girl in the booth turns pale and whispers something in the ear of her companion. Skippy blinks up at Ruprecht imploringly. Clearing his throat, adjusting his glasses, Ruprecht examines the message crystallizing on the tiles.

‘Tell Lori?’ he says.

Skippy rolls his eyes and croaks.

‘Tell her what?’

Skippy gasps.

‘I don’t know!’ Ruprecht gabbles, ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry!’ He bends down to squint again at the mysterious pink letters.

‘Tell her he loves her!’ the overweight or possibly even pregnant girl in the St Brigid’s uniform exclaims. ‘Tell Lori he loves her! Oh my God!’

‘Tell Lori you love her?’ Ruprecht repeats dubiously. ‘Is that it?’

Skippy exhales – he smiles. Then he lies back on the tiles; and Ruprecht sees quite clearly the rise and fall of his breast gently come to a stop.

‘Hey!’ Ruprecht grabs him and shakes him by the shoulders.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’

Skippy does not reply.

For a moment there is a cold, stark silence; then, almost as if from a united desire to fill it, the diner explodes in a clamour. Air! is the consensus. Give him air! The door is thrown open and the cold November night rushes greedily in. Ruprecht finds himself standing, looking down at his friend. ‘Breathe!’ he shouts at him, gesticulating meaninglessly like an angry teacher. ‘Why won’t you breathe?’

But Skippy just lies there with a reposeful look on his face, placid as can be.

Around them the air jostles with shouts and suggestions, things people remember from hospital shows on TV. Ruprecht can’t take this. He pushes through the bodies and out the door down to the roadside. Biting his thumb, he watches the traffic fleet by in dark, impersonal blurs, refusing to disclose an ambulance.

When he goes back inside, Zhang Xielin is kneeling, cradling Skippy’s head on his lap. Doughnuts scatter the ground like little candied wreaths. In the silence, people peek at Ruprecht with moist, pitying eyes. Ruprecht glares back at them murderously. He is fizzing, he is quaking, he is incandescent with rage. He feels like
stomping back to his room, and leaving Skippy where he is. He feels like screaming out, ‘What? What? What? What?’ He goes back outside to look into the traffic, he is crying, and in that moment he feels all the hundreds and thousands of facts in his head turn to sludge.

Through the laurel trees, in an upper corner of Seabrook Tower, you can just make out the window of their dorm, where not half an hour ago Skippy challenged Ruprecht to the race. Above the lot, the great pink hoop of the Ed’s Doughnut House sign broadcasts its frigid synthetic light into the night, a neon zero that outshines the moon and all the constellations of infinite space beyond it. Ruprecht is not looking in that direction. The universe at this moment appears to him as something horrific, thin and threadbare and empty; it seems to know this, and in shame to turn away.

Do you think the word 'epic' should be used to describe Skippy Dies?
Hearing the word “epic” makes me think of things like the lliad, or Paradise Lost.  Or a really long drum solo in a Led Zeppelin song.  In short something that is very long and lofty and kind of hard work.  Skippy Dies is long, definitely, but there are very few heroic Homer-esque deeds.  And there are a lot more jokes than Paradise Lost.  And I guarantee there are no drum solos. 

The book's called Skippy Dies but of course it's not just about Skippy -- do you think of any of the characters as being the protagonist, or main character, or even just the character the reader might have most sympathy with? Or was there one who you felt closest to when you were writing the book?
It sort of moved around – initially I did think of Skippy as the main character, and then Ruprecht, who’s his roommate, later on.  But there are so many characters, and they’re all important.  Eventually I realised the book was really about the school – it was the story of Seabrook College, told through the experiences of this group of kids.  And it was about friendship, which in my head became a kind of counter-force to the controlling influence of the school, which is trying to mould the boys in a very particular way.  I felt quite paternalistic about all of the characters, but there’s one kid in particular, called Geoff Sproke, who I especially liked.  He’s this quite goofy but very earnest and kindly-natured boy.  He talks in a zombie-voice quite frequently and he has a phobia about jelly.

Do you identify more with the boys in your novel or with their teachers?
When I began the book I thought I’d better put in an adult character, in case readers felt at sea with all these 14-year-olds. So there’s a man called Howard, who’s teaching history but really is very uncertain about where he should be in his life.  As the book progressed I enjoyed writing his parts more and more.  That said, I think as a writer you identify with all your characters, even the antagonists that you know everyone is going to hate.  Ultimately the story is told mostly from the boys’ point of view.  But the effect their teachers have on them, for good and for bad, is a fundamental part of it.  I’ve never taught, but I have a couple of friends who are teachers, and I have great respect for them.  It’s a hard job.  But a good teacher can change your life.   

Do you think of Skippy Dies more as a tragedy or a comedy?
I didn’t expressly set out to write either a comedy or a tragedy – I don’t think life really works that way.  I had these characters’ voices in my head and I wanted to tell their story and stay true to them.  That said, I had a fair idea early on of how it was going to end, so even when I was working on a funny scene my conception of the book was as something quite dark.  For readers who don’t know where it’s going to go I suppose it might seem an out-and-out comedy, for a while at least.  I don’t think that there’s a whole lot of humorous literature out there, so when people read something funny they can be surprised when it goes another direction.  But the mixture of comedy and darker material would reflect my experience of life more honestly than something totally comedic or unremittingly bleak.  When things are at their worst, we make jokes to help us through; conversely, at times when we’re supposed to be without a care in the world, we can find ourselves feeling very anxious and lonely.  That’s the way we’re made and in the novel I wanted to represent that. 

Some of the teenagers in the book undergo some quite traumatic times -- eating disorders, drug abuse and so on -- do you think that the events that the book describes are quite universal and representative of ordinary teenagers' lives, or do you think of what happens in the book as being related to the very specific circumstances and environment these teenagers live in?
In Ireland, where the book is set, we had this huge economic boom for about a decade.  Suddenly there was money everywhere, and a whole generation of kids grew up who were used to having their every whim indulged, who had never known a time when just putting food on the table was a real struggle.  You might expect these kids to have been super-happy and confident, but in fact there was a significant rise in things like self-harming and eating disorders.  It’s always been hard being a teenager, because it’s a time of life when you’d rather be anywhere than in your own skin, but lately all kinds of sinister forces have gathered to try and squeeze as much money as they can out of teenagers’ sense of placelessness and that hasn’t helped.  Neither has the materialistic, status-obsessed lifestyles pursued by the older generation.  The kids in this book are from a fairly wealthy background and some of the problems they have would be associated with that background.  Teenagers from poorer backgrounds would have different problems.  But I think the causes of those problems ultimately are the same. 

Teenagers are interesting to write about because everything with them is very much on the surface.  They live on a somewhat operatic scale, because they are very emotional, and because they haven’t yet learned how to cover up those emotions like adults do.  For that reason they can appear different to us and their behaviour sometimes seems extreme.  But it’s important to remember that, whatever they do, they’re taking all their cues from the older generations.  They’re entering a world that we created and if it’s making them depressed and hate their bodies and get eating disorders that seems to me to say something very disturbing about what kind of a world that is.

Were there any parts that you found difficult to write?
I find writing pretty difficult at the best of times, but some things made this book especially tricky.  The fact that there were so many characters, the fact that a lot of things have to be held back from the reader for long portions of the book, the fact that Skippy himself is quite withdrawn and reclusive, which made his story harder to tell.  Some of the book’s pretty dark – there’s one boy called Carl who’s really quite disturbed, and his sections can get quite violent and strange.  Friends of mine who’ve read the book say to me that the Carl-sections must have been the hardest parts to write.  But I really enjoyed those parts, whatever that says about me. 

Is it, to your mind, very much an Irish novel?
To be honest, I’m not sure what an “Irish novel” is.  Ireland’s very big, but Dublin is still pretty different from, for instance, the wilds of Donegal.  And South Dublin is quite different from North Dublin.  And Seabrook, which is the fictional suburb where the school is located, would be different from other, less wealthy parts of South Dublin.  So I don’t know how much it tells you to say this is an Irish novel.  I had a bunch of characters and I wanted to tell their story as faithfully as I could; I didn’t want to make any grand statements about the state of the nation or anything like that.  I don’t think anyone would want to read six hundred pages of my opinions about the state of the nation, not even me.  And I don’t think you need to know or care about Ireland to read Skippy Dies.  I remember my editor saying to me a long time ago, when I told her I was starting this book that might well end up being quite weird and long, that the beauty of a novel set in a school was that everyone’s been to school, so whatever their background is, readers will be able to connect with it to some degree.  And I hope they do.

Is Seabrook anything like the school you went to?
Well, I suppose inevitably I drew on my memories and associations to some extent, in terms of the basic layout of Seabrook, for instance.  My old school is what the word “school” means to me, after all. But I think things have changed enormously since I left, even leaving out enormous macro-events, 9/11, the war in Iraq and so on.  The Internet, for instance.  Bebo is huge in Irish schools.  Alcopops.  Cocaine.  Mobile phones.  Big Brother.  All of those things have had a sizeable effect on the way kids interact and view themselves.  From the outside looking in, it does seem more confusing to be a teenager now than it ever was before. 

Who are your influences?
That’s a hard question.  “Influences” I kind of think of as belonging to an earlier part of my life – the writers who made me want to write, who opened my eyes to the possibilities of writing.  Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon was probably the most important book to me in that regard.  When I read it in college it was like a bomb going off in my head.  The writing was just astonishing, and brought in all kinds of things – rock music, cartoons, a giant octopus – things that I related to but had never thought could belong in “literature”.  He just tears up the rule book.  Other influences – Beckett – ‘Waiting for Godot’ captures the mixture of comedy and tragedy with absolute perfection.  It’s astonishing.  The late David Foster Wallace was colossally important to me, of course.  David Lynch – Twin Peaks started when I was fifteen or sixteen and just blew me away.  Nick Cave similarly.  I suppose I was always attracted to these maverick figures who pursued their own visions and refused to compromise. 

That said, influences are exterior things that you hide behind because you’re not quite fully-formed.  Eventually you have to ask yourself what it is that you have to say, what it is that you can bring to the table.  I’m still inspired by anyone who tries to do something true in his or her own way.  As you get older you realise how much courage and tenacity it takes to stick to your guns in this particular field, and that’s how writers would influence me these days.  But obviously I want to be careful not to rip anybody else off, so actual aesthetic influences would probably come from outside the world of books though.  I listen to a lot of music, and I’d hear particular acts or songs and think, this is the kind of mood or tone or state I’d like to evoke.  All art aspires to the condition of music, as the man said.  So in a strange dreamy way I can’t really explain that would inform how I’d imagine the world of the book, though I don’t know how much it affected the actual plot or the technical business of writing.

Can you tell us what you're working on now?
I’m going to be smart and not say anything about it, other than that I hope it doesn’t take me seven years.