Customer Reviews

Middle Murphy (Sunsinger Books Illinois Short)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This powerful follow-up to The Murphy Stories convinced me in no uncertain terms that Costello is one of the greatest short story writers of this century. Middle Murphy actually brackets the previous story collection by following Michael Murphy from his childhood trauma of doing his first friend his first favor and receiving his first punch, to a completely dispossessed man throwing his own first punch in a compelling and defining act of self-reification. Costello uses his familiar style of color iconology (reminiscent of Garcia Lorca) and his phenomenal poetic sense--recreating a painful specificity of voice--translates high energy moments into whirls of confusion and a constantly throbbing sense of iterative loss. All that, coupled with his ability to create complete unreliability in his narrator while leaving all the clues for the reader to decipher this coded language continue to remind me of Joyce's Stephen Daedaelus and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. Perhaps the final testament to Costello's skill is that Murphy, for as self-destructive and despicable as he is, remains a sympathetic character who the reader can't help but cheer while watching in horror as he shreds up his life. It the Mid-Western American Tragedy at its finest.