{"id":24841,"date":"2011-12-21T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=24841"},"modified":"2019-01-01T18:41:29","modified_gmt":"2019-01-01T23:41:29","slug":"paul-murray-on-%e2%80%98that%e2%80%99s-my-bike%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/21\/paul-murray-on-%e2%80%98that%e2%80%99s-my-bike%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Murray on \u201cThat\u2019s My Bike!\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Murray, author of <\/em>Skippy Dies<\/a> and <\/em>An Evening of Long Goodbyes<\/a>, wrote \u201cThat\u2019s My Bike!,\u201d a short story published in the Winter issue of <\/em>The Paris Review. The story opens with a group of friends gathered at a none-too-salubrious pub in Dublin\u2019s Northside on Christmas Eve. Murray spoke to me from his office at the Oscar Wilde Center for writing at Trinity College in Dublin, where he is a writing fellow.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The last time I was in Dublin for Christmas was in 2007, right before the crash. The Christmas displays along Grafton Street and in all the shopping areas were absolutely ghastly. Everything had blinking lights and moving parts. Is this still the case?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s this shop called Brown Thomas, which is the oldest department store in Dublin and it\u2019s very swanky and expensive. Historically, when it used to be called Switzer\u2019s, they had these famous windows with Santa Claus and mice making ballet shoes and so forth, and it was all mechanized, and the kids would go into Dublin and look at the windows. That was something your parents would bring you to do. Then, when the boom came, they stopped having child-oriented windows and started having these really nasty Helmut Lang soft-cyber-porn-type windows with a bunch of emaciated blue mannequins wearing just a giant watch and staring bleakly out of the windows. Everything was about excess and consumption. The idea that children had any part of Christmas was shunted to one side because the store just wanted to get the adults in there to spend money.<\/p>\n

And would the adults make pilgrimages to gaze at the watches?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They wouldn\u2019t even stop at the windows, they would just pile into the store. I remember being in there and hearing a couple next to me saying, \u201cI just don\u2019t know what to get her.\u201d And the woman said, \u201cPearls, you can\u2019t really go wrong with pearls.\u201d And I remember thinking, \u201cWho are you people?\u201d It was beyond parody. And these were people who worked in normal sorts of jobs. <\/p>\n

Ireland did go over the top.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think on some level it was because they were afraid. David McWilliams\u2019s book on that period tells how much alcohol was consumed during the boom, and it is just staggering. Dublin has always been a booze-intensive city. But for those ten years it was almost like people were literally afraid to stop partying because\u2014this is obviously very pop psychology\u2014they felt on some level like this was wrong. Just keep fucking doing it, keep the pedal absolutely to the floor, because we know when this stops it\u2019s going to be horrible. Now people are complaining about the relentless austerity measures, but it\u2019s not like Greece, where they are on the streets with petrol bombs. It\u2019s just moaning on the radio and then people sort of roll over. So you wonder if there isn\u2019t some Catholic sense that we deserve this, that we\u2019ve been bad boys.<\/p>\n

That said, I was just in town and there are lights and people everywhere. I don\u2019t know if they are buying anything, but it\u2019s not all hair-shirty.<\/p>\n

I heard that midnight mass had been cancelled in Dublin because people were getting plastered before arriving and playing cards in the back. I remembered that when I got to the part of your story when women are charging into the pub to drag out their husbands to what you call \u201ceight o\u2019clock midnight mass.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s exactly that. Midnight mass was mayhem, with people coming out of the pub and going into the church and passing out. I presume that there are still some around the country, but a lot of masses now happen at a more respectable hour. It\u2019s still called midnight mass, but it might happen at eight o\u2019clock, before everyone is too drunk to pray. It\u2019s quite an Irish solution.<\/p>\n

I guess in Ireland if things are going well you head to the pub, and if things are going badly you head to the pub. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Guinness had this full-page ad several years ago in The Irish Times<\/em>, and it was just a series of black-and-white pints, twenty-four in all, and under them was written, GOING TO THE MATCH, YOUR TEAM LOST, YOU LOST YOUR JOB, YOU GOT A NEW JOB, YOU\u2019VE FALLEN IN LOVE, YOU\u2019RE JUST A BIT BORED.<\/small> The message was, whatever is happening in your life requires a pint.<\/p>\n

I remember seeing a photograph of Flann O\u2019Brien holding court in a pub in Dublin.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My friend David lives in Sandymount, and his father was out with David\u2019s grandfather when he was just a boy, and they came across a man lying across the ground in the morning. And the grandfather says to the father, \u201cThere is Ireland\u2019s greatest living writer.\u201d And it was Flann O\u2019Brien lying there.<\/p>\n

But when you go the pub it\u2019s full of talkers and that\u2019s the lure for people like O\u2019Brien. You\u2019re there listening to all these jokes and stories flying around, and it\u2019s exciting. I was out on Wednesday night having a cigarette outside a pub, and this guy came up and talked to us about the Shamrock Rovers, who were playing over the weekend, and just the idioms that he used\u2014it sounds so poncy and writerly to say \u201cthe richness of his language\u201d\u2014but the genuine Dublin vernacular is so rich and full of humor and wit and tricks.<\/p>\n

Obviously my family didn\u2019t spend Christmas dinner in the pub, but the days just before and after we would go to some of the medium-awful places near my aunt\u2019s house that had the sort of tinsel on the cigarette machine look that you describe in your story. Does your family do something similar?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I go out with friends but right on Christmas we sort of batten down the hatches and stay home.<\/p>\n

Are you working on a third book now? Are you going to be a good boy and lock yourself in an attic and work away over Christmas?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am working on a new book. I say every year that I\u2019ll take just take Christmas and St. Stephen\u2019s day off, and then I\u2019ll be back to work. And then inevitably my lazy side takes over and I end up watching television and eating mince pies. I\u2019ve been reading Proust for what seems like a million years, so I\u2019m trying to finish before the end of the year.\u00a0Then I want to return to the twenty-first century. Proust has not quite had a deleterious effect on my writing but I\u2019ve noticed my sentences getting really long, like paragraph-length sentences, in which people keep stopping what they are doing and having extended flashbacks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Subscribe now<\/a> to read Paul Murray\u2019s \u201cThat\u2019s My Bike!<\/a>\u201d from our Winter issue.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies and An Evening of Long Goodbyes, wrote \u201cThat\u2019s My Bike!,\u201d a short story published in the Winter issue of The Paris Review. The story opens with a group of friends gathered at a none-too-salubrious pub in Dublin\u2019s Northside on Christmas Eve. Murray spoke to me from his office at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":278,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[5428,5432,1442,5434,5431,5438,5435,5437,575,5436,5440,1593,738,5439,5433,5429,5430],"class_list":["post-24841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-an-evening-of-long-goodbyes","tag-brown-thomas","tag-christmas","tag-david-mcwilliams","tag-dublin","tag-flann-obrien","tag-greece","tag-guinness","tag-marcel-proust","tag-midnight-mass","tag-mince-pie","tag-santa-claus","tag-skippy-dies","tag-st-stephens-day","tag-switzers","tag-thats-my-bike","tag-trinity-college"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPaul Murray on \u201cThat\u2019s My Bike!\u201d by Rachel Nolan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 21, 2011 \u2013 Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies and An Evening of 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