PAUL MURRAY reads from his new novel MARK AND THE VOID, with MATTHEW SPECKTOR

The Mark and the Void (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

Presented in partnership with The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mark and the Void is Murray's newest and funniest novel yet.

What links the Investment Bank of Torabundo, www.myhotswaitress.com (yes, with an "s," don't ask), an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a six-year-old boy with the unfortunate name of Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB agent?

The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray's madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original breakout hit, Skippy Dies. While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But Paul's plan is not what it seems--and neither is Claude's employer, the Investment Bank of Torabundo, which swells through dodgy takeovers and derivatives trading until--well, you can probably guess how that shakes out.

The Mark and the Void is the funniest novel ever written about the recent financial crisis, and a stirring examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art and commerce.

Praise for Paul Murray

“Darkly comic . . . thoughtful and entertaining. [Murray’s] creative energy sends the book in many directions . . . but the same may be said of Dickens, with whom [he] also shares wit, sympathy, and a purposeful sense of mischief.”—Kirkus Review (starred review)
 
“Murray’s 2010 novel Skippy Dies earned the Irishman worldwide acclaim as a writer enviably adept at both raucous humor and bittersweet truth. His new novel, perhaps the funniest thing to come out of the Irish economic collapse, follows Claude, a low-level bank employee who, while his employers drive the country steadily towards ruin, falls in with a struggling novelist intent on making Claude’s life worthy of telling.”—The Millions, “Most Anticipated” Fall 2015 book preview
 
“Murray’s latest quickly takes off. . . 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 not all so far-fetched, after all.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Brilliant.”—Ben Paynter, Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“[Murray] is brilliant at creating a cast of banking types at once hilarious and awful. For long periods, The Mark and the Voidis a boisterous office sitcom, just as Skippy Dies was a knockabout school comedy. But, as with Skippy Dies, his ambitions go well beyond slapstick. There’s no disguising his anger at the banks and politicians who have brought Ireland to this position. But neither is this a simple diatribe. Murray refuses to excuse the Irish people for letting this happen to themselves . . . In Murray’s complicated narrative, not all bankers are bad, just as not all artists are virtuous . . . From the opening page [Murray] advertises a plot that, for all its real-world relevance, is impossible to take seriously. And yet, such is his panache that through the chaos emerges a tale of complex truths and authentic humanity.”—Neil O’Sullivan, The Financial Times
 
“This is it, at last: a fine work of fiction set in the present day that kicks all those asses that so urgently need to be kicked. Twenty pages in and I wanted to tour the nation’s nine remaining bookshops with Murray and shout from the back: ‘That’s what I’m talking about, people; this is what a real novel should be. Fuck all that ersatz pap you’ve been sold; read this! …The Mark and the Void is the best novel I have reviewed by someone of my own generation writing on this side of the Atlantic. It’s unabashedly intelligent, it’s ingeniously inventive, it’s richly alive in language, thought and character; it’s read-the-whole-page-again funny, and hugely entertaining and philosophically engaged with the great questions and circumstances of our times. It is the answer to the question of what a serious and seriously talented contemporary novelist should be writing.”—Edward Docx, The Guardian, Observer
 
“Serious and impressive. Fans of Skippy Dies and Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, will not be surprised to hear that it is very funny, its author’s fluency spooling out in joke after joke . . . There is profundity beyond the laughter, not least in the book’s depiction of the bleak emptying-out of a country. . . Murray does an excellent job of exposing the Ponzi schemes and endless recapitalisations of failing institutions as the simple confidence tricks gussied up by gobbledegook that they really are.”—Alex Clark, The Guardian
 
“It was a tall order for Paul Murray to come up with a follow-up to 2010’s Skippy Dies, a novel which I declared in my review to be the funniest book I had read all year. . . I should not have worried about Murray maintaining form.  The Mark and the Void is a hilarious, blade-sharp satire on the banking system featuring vividly drawn characters, and it is, once again, the funniest book I’ve read so far this year. . . A joy from start to finish.”—Leyla Sanai, The Independent
 
“Murray is masterful at capturing the cynicism of the banking world, the way its staffers, who keep landlines “for when I need to find my mobile”, indulge in vacuous bar-room chat like debates on “whether a boom or a bust is a better time to be rich”. His prose is peppered with enlightened digressions on art, anthropology, geometry, philosophy and the origins of the corporation in Europe’s Middle Ages. There are moments while reading The Mark and the Void that are almost dizzying, as Murray careers down the side-street of another subplot. In the hands of a novelist with a heavier touch, they could be confounding, but not in Murray’s. He’s written a notable satirical novel. Few can nail the mystifying ways of the Irish as precisely.”—Richard Fitzpatrick, The Irish Examiner
 
“Murray masterfully builds the tale into an extravagant and rewarding whole, with genuine hilarity floating atop the sobering currents of social commentary. This is a gamble that more than pays off.”—Laurie Grassi, The Toronto Star
 
“With The Mark and the Void, Paul Murray has done the impossible: he’s written a novel about international finance that not only isn’t dense, boring, or annoyingly didactic, but is, in fact, a hilarious page-turner with a beating human heart that nonetheless provides real insight into the ongoing economic crisis. To put all of these elements in a pot and alchemically produce something so brilliant and cohesively constructed, one might assume Paul Murray is a witch. I think he’s simply a great writer.”—Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen and What’s Important Is Feeling
 
“People always tell me, ‘If you love Paul Murray so much, why don't you marry him?’ Now thanks to recent legislation in his native Ireland, I finally can. And so should you, reader. The Mark and the Void not only monetizes the death of the novel, but makes us believe in its resurrection. Praise the Lord for Paul Murray's big brain and tender heart.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure
 
“The Mark and the Void is Murray’s best book yet—a wildly ambitious, state-of-the-nation novel, and a scabrously funny yet deeply humane satire on the continuing fall-out of the biggest financial crisis in 75 years.”—The Bookseller

Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies, his second novel, was long-listed for the Booker prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, the Paris Review, Tin House, The Believer, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.