‘So much of adult life is dissembling. Younger people are more open to experience, more protean. In adulthood, you make different mistakes which tend to be less dramatic. Your vulnerabilities stay the same but are more heavily concealed.’ Or to quote Dickie, in his last year of college: ‘He felt powerful, that is, he felt light, and in charge, and free, and expansive: he felt the future – which for so long he’d thought of as immutable – he felt the future amorphous, ethereal, waiting for him to decide its shape.’ As Rooney Writer Fellow, Murray gets to be back on campus experiencing something of that free, expansive, amorphous student culture: ‘I don’t have to do anything specific. I come in and work in my office and I attend meetings and events. There are 35 PhD students connected to the Long Room Hub and every Wednesday there is a coffee morning in which two of them from different disciplines present their research. It might be on ‘dark tourism’, or on papyrus rolls in the Chester Beatty, or on sharia law, or cybercrime. Every time I hear a presentation, I'm struck by just how rich it is. These are really talented people, and so dedicated. When it was my turn, I spoke about the Metaverse, which I'd written an article about for New York Magazine . I found it daunting. I’m used to doing presentations but not in front of such an expert audience.’ Murray is helping to convene a symposium in the Long Room Hub on what it means to be a 21st century individual. ‘It will be fluid. We’ll invite people with different kinds of expertise - neurology, psychology, literature - to participate in a conversation, maybe a round table discussion with an invited audience.’ He isn’t planning on confronting dissembling adult life any time soon. He is currently working on a Young Adult (YA) novel which he is testing out on his 12-year-old son. ‘He says he wants to be paid.’ It is set in a fantasy world and will be shorter than his other novels. ‘With YA, it can’t be more than 80,000 words.’ He doesn’t think he writes best as a ‘minimalist’ – ‘for me, things get interesting when it’s maximalist and different elements spark off each other’ – so, as with Skippy Dies , he will probably end up writing far more than he uses. He will not be ‘cosseting’ his teen readers. His model, as ever, is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow : ‘I think kids enjoy encounters that adults are trying to keep them away from.’
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