FIRST FICTION

When it was published in Britain last year, Paul Murray’s first novel -- about Charles Hythloday, a Bertie Woosterish Dubliner who fancies himself a squire -- was short listed for the prestigious Whitbread Award. In addition to being, arguably, the funniest debut in years, “An Evening of Long Goodbyes” ranks alongside Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” as a stunning document of an English-speaking metropolis in flux, undergoing the multiple convulsions of a turbo-charged economy, a nascent millennium and a zippy new identity.

Charles is the kind of pseudo-aristocrat that the Irish like to call West Brit. Holed up in Amaurot, a hulking manse on the Dublin coast in the painfully charming village of Killiney, Charles -- all of 24 and a Trinity dropout (he alludes to a “brief but regrettable entanglement with higher learning”) -- is content to tipple away and lose himself in old Gene Tierney movies. He has a Walter Mitty-size capacity for self-delusion, and much of the ensuing hilarity turns on a disarmingly effective trope: Charles, as our narrator, is a harmless git whose jaunty version of the world is excruciatingly at odds with everything around him. When his sister, Bel, a high-strung actress, brings home her latest boyfriend, the decidedly working-class Frank, Charles is fascinated and repulsed, as if a hitherto undiscovered beast had entered his ken: “His head ... was what really fascinated me. It resembled some novice potter’s first attempt at a soup tureen, bulbous and pasty.”

But Charles’ tweedy cocoon of oblivion, we learn, is unraveling, as everyday objects begin disappearing from Amaurot. Could the culprit be Mrs. P, that new maid from Bosnia or wherever? Worse still, Amaurot itself may soon go missing: His father, a cosmeticist in the British fashion industry, hadn’t put affairs in order when he died, leaving the Hythlodays in serious arrears. And when Charles’ mother returns home after a stint in an asylum, she drums him out of the house. (That is, after Charles fakes his own death and blows up Amaurot’s Folly, a vaguely Yeatsian tower; a long story.)

Charles has no recourse but to move in with the dreaded Frank in a Dublin slum called Bonetown. Here, Charles experiences a very different Dublin indeed -- one of perennially late rents and limitless canned beer, of child vandals and heroin addiction, of alienating factory jobs and even more alienating temp agencies. When Charles goes in for an interview, he finds, to his satisfaction, that he’s able to leave most of the application blank. “ ‘[I]t’s fair to say you’ve never worked for a living, is that right?’ ‘Not as such,’ I admitted. It struck me that I had tended to Father’s peacocks for a number of years, but I wasn’t sure how relevant this experience would be.”

An astonished Charles, sent to work the Yule Log line at an industrial bakery called Mr. Dough, describes the strange new town that he’s always, more or less, lived in but never took notice of: “This city was composed of dead ends and blind alleys and back streets full of garbage bags, and had its own cast of inhabitants, who lived in a permanent stench of urine and decay and had to be nudged to life with a toe before one could question them.”

Meanwhile, Bel and Mrs. Hythloday are determined to transform the ailing Amaurot into that most dreaded of public institutions: a community theater. The drafty old pile was always a bit of a stage set anyway, since the Hythlodays, we discover, were never so much landed gentry as modern-day strivers, displaced, ironically enough, by a new go-go era of Irish plenty.

Murray’s evocative title refers to a luckless greyhound that Charles and Frank (ever Charles’ Virgil in Dublin’s lower circles and fast becoming an unlikely ally) encounter at the dog track; the unfortunate, emaciated specimen is immediately set upon by a vicious entry called Celtic Tiger, which happens to be the name the Irish use for their robust EU economy. Throughout “An Evening of Long Goodbyes,” every joke, every observation, every name reverberates with playful nuance and nervy significance; the end result is a gleeful tweak of the New Ireland’s proud nose.

Yet, as a drawing-room farceur, Murray is as affectionate as he is scabrous (if the novel were made into a movie, you’d expect it to be written by P.G. Wodehouse and directed by Mike Leigh); underneath both the rarefied Dublin that Charles may have lost forever and the hard-knock one he may lose himself in, there remains the beloved dirty old town that’s been there all along, the one we know from James Joyce and Flann O’Brien: “a comfortable, scuffed sort of a place, rather like an old shoe.”