Middle Murphy

By Mark Costello

Book Overview

These stories mark the return of Mark Costello's now-legendary creation Michael Murphy, the character who first appeared in the acclaimed collection The Murphy Stories. Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the Washington Post Book World, "Murphy is a Midwestern cousin of Donleavy's Ginger Man, but much more human and troubled. . . . It is a remarkable achievement, the presentation of a complex, suffering, self-conscious, and very lyric personality as he endures his own being."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252063198
• ISBN13: 9780252063190
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

One Man, Dispossessed

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.