Murr, Naeem 1965-

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Murr, Naeem 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born in London, England; permanent resident of the United States; son of Samir and Eileen (a teacher) Murr. Education: Attended Stanford University; Syracuse University, M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Chicago, IL. Agent—c/o Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group, 41 Madison Ave., 36th Fl., New York, NY 10010. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, teaching assistant, 1993; Pembroke College, Oxford, England, creative writing teacher, 1995; University of Houston, Houston, TX, fiction instructor, 1996-97; freelance writer, 1997—. Writer in residence, Lynchburg College, 1998; visiting professor of creative writing, Northwestern University. Writer in residence at Western Michigan University and University of Missouri.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Award for Best Story, Gettysburg Review, 1993, for "Benjamin," and 1995, for "The Writer"; Margaret Bridgman Fellow in Fiction, 2003; Stegner fellowship and Scowcroft fellowship, Stanford University; Raymond Carver prize for poetry; New York Times Notable Book, for The Boy; Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, for The Perfect Man; Lannan Residency fellowship; Guggenheim fellowship.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Boy, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

The Genius of the Sea, Free Press (New York, NY), 2003.

The Perfect Man: A Novel, William Heinemann (London, England), 2006, Random House Trade Paperbacks (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of stories and novellas to literary journals. The Boy has been translated into six languages.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet and fiction writer Naeem Murr achieved critical acclaim for his first novel, The Boy, published in 1998. The novel recounts social worker Sean Hennessey's search through the London underworld for his lost foster son, Durward, an orphan who Sean believes may be his natural son. The boy has proved to be emotionally disturbed, manifesting several different personalities during his stay with the Hennesseys. After wreaking havoc in Sean's family, Durward runs away, disappearing into London's mean streets. Parallel to the narrative of Sean's search is the story of Theresa, a former nun who runs the orphanage where Durward once lived and who sees the boy as a kind of Messiah figure. At the same time, however, other narrative strands show the demonic side of the boy, who destroys Sean's family and prompts the "fat man" who adores him toward evil actions.

Many reviewers praised Murr's ability to evoke a nightmarish world in which good and evil exist in constant conflict. For example, Reba Leiding, writing in Library Journal, praised Murr's "rich, literary style." Hans Johnson, in the Washington Post Book World, wrote that "Murr traffics in images so capably that the novel's space becomes a kind of magnetic field, alluring, almost confining." Writing in the New York Times Book Review, novelist Margot Livesey admired Murr's ability to make Durward a fully believable character: "Much of the impact of The Boy depends on Murr's ability to make this beautiful, bisexual, charismatic Messiah-Satan credible, and to a large extent [Murr] does." Though Livesey found some of Durward's extraordinary behavior difficult to accept, she considered the character richly drawn and emotionally believable. Livesey observed in her review "Murr's dark energy, his sharply intelligent prose, his genius for the unexpected, [and] his keen sense of atmosphere."

At the same time, however, some critics who admired Murr's descriptive abilities faulted The Boy for exaggerated prose and dependence on cliché. A Publishers Weekly reviewer, for one, deemed the novel "overwrought," noting that the characters "seduce each other and explain themselves with operatic gusto: they seem to communicate in arias." In the Times Literary Supplement, contributor Lesley McDowell observed that "for many reasons, The Boy is a disturbing novel, although perhaps not as disturbing as it should be." McDowell likened Murr's central theme, the erotic attraction of an older man to an innocent youth, to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Admiring the ambiguity with which The Boy opens, McDowell noted that the reader does "not know whether the boy is a con artist … or whether Sean is guilty of abusing the child put into his care." Yet, as the narrative becomes more simplistic, wrote McDowell, the complex themes break down. "Possibilities that the boy is a projection of Sean's, that Sean may be presenting us with an untruthful account, fail to engage here in the way the novel might have seemed to suggest." McDowell concluded that "the novel's suggestion that the irresistibility of the boy is one with the irresistibility of evil is unexamined. And for so disturbing a subject, perhaps examination is needed more."

The grandiloquent prose that seeps into The Boy can also be found at times in Murr's second novel, The Genius of the Sea, in which social worker Daniel Mulvaugh finds solace from his wrecked life in the sea tales of an old man who is fraudulently accepting government checks. Amos Radcliff is living in the same flat where Daniel grew up, and when the social worker visits Amos in an effort to expose him for taking welfare checks when he is not eligible for them, the location brings back strong memories and guilt over the things he never said to his mother and a childhood friend before they died. Daniel is also plagued by guilt over his wife's nervous breakdown, feeling that he in some way caused it. However, Amos's riveting tales of his younger days in the merchant marine, intertwined with a tragic tale of love and murder, sweep Daniel away and threaten to drag him from the more painful, but more relevant realities of his life. Reviewers of The Genius of the Sea were especially impressed with Murr's blending of the stylized tales of the old sailor with the modern drama of Daniel's personal dilemmas. "Murr draws the reader in with natural storytelling ability and uses great literary style to perfect the atmosphere," Jeanine K. Raghunathan commented in Library Journal. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that the novel "is full to bursting with ripe, powerful imagery, and he has an almost uncanny sense for the mechanics of group conversation." Although a Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that the character of Daniel was not fully drawn, the reviewer also commented that the novel is "a queer, mesmerizing hybrid of a book … [and a] notable, highly original work."

According to a contributor to the I Me My Web site, Murr's third novel, The Perfect Man: A Novel, "is a strange but compelling read that unfolds with unexpected twists and turns and makes for some engrossed reading." Mark Kamine, writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted the author's "well-wrought characters and refreshingly clear prose." The story revolves around a young Indian boy named Rajiv Travers, or "Raj," who is sent by his globetrotting father to live with an uncle in Pisgah, Missouri. Although a sedate rural town on the surface, the residents of Pisgah have many secrets. Raj soon finds himself being cared for by his uncle's mistress after his uncle commits suicide the day after Raj arrives.

The coming-of-age novel follows Raj as he makes friends with Annie and Lewis in a town full of German, Russian, German, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Nevertheless, Raj's dark skin makes him different, and he must fend for himself with most of the other local children. In the meantime, the reader is introduced to a wide cast of characters who eventually reveal Pisgah's dark underbelly, which includes not only racism and adultery but also murder and incest. "Murr deftly balances narrative and dialog to give us a highly literate and eminently readable novel," wrote Chris Pusateri in the Library Journal. In a review in Booklist, Carol Haggas called The Perfect Man "a sumptuous tapestry teeming with hauntingly indelible characters."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2007, Carol Haggas, review of The Perfect Man: A Novel, p. 23.

Books, May 6, 2007, review of The Perfect Man, p. 9.

Kirkus Reviews, March 14, 1998, review of The Boy, p. 359; April 1, 2003, review of The Genius of the Sea, p. 500; March 1, 2007, review of The Perfect Man, p. 6; April 1, 2007, review of The Perfect Man.

Library Journal, April 1, 1998, Reba Leiding, review of The Boy, p. 124; May 1, 2003, Jeanine K. Raghunathan, review of The Genius of the Sea, p. 156; May 15, 2007, Chris Pusateri, review of The Perfect Man, p. 81.

New York Times Book Review, July 19, 1998, Margot Livesey, review of The Boy, p. 13; June 10, 2007, Mark Kamine, "Strange Land," review of The Perfect Man.

Publishers Weekly, April 6, 1998, review of The Boy, p. 58; April 28, 2003, review of The Genius of the Sea, p. 43; March 26, 2007, review of The Perfect Man, p. 65.

School Library Journal, September, 2007, Shannon Peterson, review of The Perfect Man, p. 229.

Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 1998, Lesley McDowell, review of The Boy.

Washington Post Book World, June 7, 1998, Hans Johnson, review of The Boy, p. X5.