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.

i am actually doing a report on rap and selected this book expecting some insight...i was surprised. it seems like some of this was even just put here to take up space; i was dissapointed, expecting something better from costello. a point of view not needed in most situations. of course, ten years ago it might have been close to adequate--now it seems totally inadequate to use in my report.

David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello are too cute by half in this book, and it is horribly out of date. (Just to give an idea, A Tribe Called Quest, who were considered an elder statesman group when they broke up two years ago, had not yet released an album when this book was published.) But most of the analysis of rap's place within popular culture remains somehow applicable to the current scene if you are willing to do a bunch of critical work along the same lines and ignore the dumber flights of fancy. Still a fun book to read and a fun book to debate. Not to be missed if you remember when LL Cool J was good and you have read anything by a master of postmodern philosophy.

costello and wallace examine rap culture and rappers as they influence our society. although at times it seems like they are being narrow minded, this book examines what shapes society and how society can react to these things. the book goes well beyond merely rap music and examines how society is influenced and how it influences. anyone who reads this and sees it as simply a look at rap music is missing the entire point of the book.

This book is more or less plotless, but engrossing to read nonetheless. One of the factors that accounts for its 'readability' is the subjects and environments that Costello writes about is a fictional milieu no one else seems to have a solid command over; and Costello does a knock-out job of bringing this slightly skewed vision of Contemporary America that is chillingly close to the real world. The novel traces the days in the lives of several men and women, most of whom are in the Secret Service, and online PC game behemoth corporation called the BigIf. Not only are the quotidian details of these lives meticulously delineated, they are mimetic in the best sense of the word; the novel's vision of America's political climate and condition of its people are dead-on, and disconcerting. The novel doesn't have a perfunctory 'build-up', but the there is a climactic event in the very end, the very last few pages of the novel. I was most impressed with Costello's handling of the event. In the hands of lesser writers, this event would have turned into an operatic coda of noise and unchecked bathos and forced epiphanies. Costello doesn't give in to such urges and remains true to his aim - which is to render a truthful writer's vision of what is going on, with this country, and with us. The writing is protean and restrained. There are moments of lyricism in the prose, but they are like a welcome breeze. My minor reservation about the novel is that Costello seems too bent on controlling all facets of the novel, and there is a constricting feeling you get from reading the book that hinders from the experience. (Kind of reminds me of Richard Powers, another great writer who's a bit too fastidious.) But it's a minor gripe that really has no significant bearing on the achievements of this book.

I bought this book largely because I remember enjoying Signifying Rappers, his collaboration with David Foster Wallace. This book, though, is much better. It's quite marvelously well-written, accurately observed, and often funny. There's not much plot: for a couple months we more or less follow Vi, a Secret Service agent guarding a nameless vice president, and her hacker brother Jens, who is struggling to build a stupid computer game for a company called BigIf. Instead of a plot most of the action comes in seeing the upsided-down and backward way various things in the novel reflect each other (e.g., Vi is involved with setting up the rules for constructing an abstract "dome" around the VP in which he can't get shot, Jens is constructing an abstract world in which his character is a shooter). Problem is (for me, anyway), Costell evokes the characters so well that you start wanting to know what happens to them, and basically this isn't that kind of novel. Still, I greatly enjoyed reading it.

This is a superb comedy of contemporary American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who finds she must get reaquainted with her computer-genius brother when she takes a respite from the paranoid turns and twists of her job.

This is a book of richly skewed characters doing their best to make sense of their lives. Costello's prose is alive with the things of our life, and is superb at demonstrating the clash between happiness material items promise and the world that denies such rewards. He is the master of setting forth a metaphor and letting it travel through a storyline just beneath the surface, operating silently, almostly invisibly, always effectively.

Their father, in the first portion of the book , is a moderate Republican insurance investigator of scholarly reading habits who happens to be a principled athiest. You cannot have both
insurance, the practice of placing a monterary remuneration on unavoidable disaster, and assurance, which has religion promising protection from evil and disaster. The children, in turn, assume careers that seem to typify the dualism their father opposed, son Jens becoming a programmer for the BigIf on line game for which he writes "monster behavior code" that attempts to outsmart human players and have them meet a hypothetical destruction.

Daughter Vi, conversely, becomes a Secret Service agent, schooled in the theory encoded in The Certainties, a set of writings that lays out the details, nuances and psychology of exxtreme protection. These are world views in collision, and Costellos' prose is quick with the telling detail,the flashing insight, the cutting remark.

On view in "Big If" are different models on which characters try to contain , control, or explain the relentless capriciousness of Life as it unfolds, constructs through which characters and the country and culture they serve can feel empowered to control their fate in a meaningful universe. The punchline is that Life goes on anyway, with it's fluctuating, undulating, chaotic dynamics that only ccasionally seem to fall into place. Costello wrests a subtle comedy of manners from the small failures of anyone's world view to suitably make their existence unproblematic.

This is a family comedy on a par with "The Wapshot Chronicle", but in an America that is suddenly global, an air that makes even the most familiar things seem alien and fantastic.

Costello is a modern master, and fans of "White Noise" and "The Corrections" will enjoy the emergence of a master.

I first came across one of the stories in this book in the Northon Anthology of Short Fiction. "Murphy's Xmas" is the sad story of a man whose life is at loose ends. His marriage splintering, his drinking is interfering with his teaching position and in the middle of this he is driving his wife and child to see Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas in DeCatur. Once home, he feels the way many young people do upon returing to the place where they grew up. An old despair, perhaps that you will never escape the place you came from (not to mention your parents' expecations) no matter how far away you move. This is not a happy book, but it is smart, evocative and understated--you either get it or you don't. I got it and I liked it. Mayonaise.