Customer Reviews

Big If

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

With this book blurbed by Franzen and Foster Wallace you know sort of what you're in for: verbal brilliance, unusual settings, darker humor. Costello does not disappoint. His novel about Vi, a Secret Service agent assigned to an unnamed Vice President in the midst of a Presidential campaign, also tells of Vi's larger family, her collegues, their 'down time' lives, and a refracted view of America. While Costello seems to fit right into a certain subcategory of novelists (afore mentioned Franzen and Wallace--what category would that be labelled I wonder?) he isn't a clone. He has a more narrative driven, accessible novel here, one where you get to care about some of the characters; certainly he is very very talented with the language; quick wit.

Often described as a light-hearted "riff," rather than a satire, this novel of government and politics casts an eye on the Secret Service and its all-too-human agents. Working to protect an unnamed Vice-Presidential candidate on a pre-primary visit to New Hampshire, the assigned agents are also dealing simultaneously with their own insecurities, quirks, and numerous dysfunctions. As this wry novel evolves, the reader discovers that the differences between those we employ to protect us and those we want to be protected from may be very slim, indeed.

Half a dozen Secret Service members, their spouses, parents, children, and lovers; an equal number of computer programmers for Big If, a multiplayer war game on the Web; and the Vice-President, his staff, and campaign workers constitute a huge cast of characters, but each is so idiosyncratic, and the minutiae of his/her daily life so completely articulated, that the characters are memorable, if not fully developed. As Costello expands his scope beyond that of the campaign, he pokes fun at child-rearing practices, prison work-release programs, the real estate market, the expectations of newly-moneyed trophy wives, the addiction to violent computer games, and even the get-out-the-vote efforts of campaign volunteers.

The reader must be patient with this novel. Plot is not a major concern, as the book meanders through the lives and backgrounds of multiple characters. Vi Asplund, the main character, receives only slightly more emphasis than other characters, and conflict and dramatic action are minimal, dependent more upon the characters' past histories than upon new events. Delightful metaphors ("a tall, soft sofa of a boy," "a snippy poodle kind of sneeze") are sprinkled throughout, but they are sometimes buried in long lists of detail. The humor often feels self-conscious. This is a most unusual novel, one which defies the conventions and pushes the boundaries, and I suspect that few readers will remain neutral about it. Mary Whipple

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.

This is a superb comedy of contemporary American life involving a low-level Secret Service agent who finds she must get reacquainted 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, almost 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 atheist. You cannot have both insurance, the practice of placing a monetary 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 Big If 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 extreme 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 occasionally 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.

Mark Costello is a federal prosecutor from Boston whose first book was Bag Men, published under the name of John Flood. With Big If, he writes a novel that defies easy classification. Big If is politically suspenseful, humorous, domestic, and literary, with a few elements of near-futuristic science fiction. Like George Orwell (who wrote about British society in 1948 and disguised it slightly to come up with 1984), Costello writes with a great deal of insight into contemporary culture.

As the Vice President makes his way around the country on the campaign trail, the Secret Service people who protect him each deal with their own monsters and visions of potential disaster. Gretchen, a survivor of the L.A. riots of 1965 and 1991, has to balance the pressures of single motherhood with her highly demanding job. Tashmo's having marital problems dating back to his days with Felker on the Reagan team. Always alert for potential assassins, Vi is in conflict with her brother Jens, a programmer who designs monsters for a web-action survival game called Big If. Bobbie just wants to make it through the campaign alive so she can land another wealthy husband. As in Lawrence Kasden's 1992 movie Grand Canyon, the unexpected strikes again and again, keeping the reader glued to the page.

The result is a funny, suspenseful, and truthful book of great interest to anyone who grew up American in the last 50 years, whether you're usually drawn to political suspense or not.

Mark Costello is clearly an accomplished wordsmith, using his skill to create an edgy, appealing style. I only wish he had used his talent to create at least one character that I cared about, for better or worse. As it was, half way through this book, I was wishing to drown myself in the characters many pools of self-pity. At least that would have brought the book to an end. Pages are wasted on non-action, such as describing in detail the technical aspects of a computer game that really has nothing to do with the plot. Wait a minute. This novel doesn't really have a plot. For me, the Big If was a big waste.

Many of the previous reviews either rave or absolutely rant about this book, but I think both are unfair representations for potential readers. The books proponents note that Costello writes well and provides interesting "insiders" perspectives of campaign politics from a secret service agent's point of view, the operations of an Internet business, and modern family life. He really does do a good job of describing the lives of the characters and weaving their narratives together. As for the naysayers, they are correct that the story has no plot and you never really care about a particular character and when the book is done, it isn't something that leaves you wanting more. I am sure this was intentional by Costello, but for my money and I think many casual readers, it is not really what they want. I will not remember Big If in a year, I do not want Costello to come out with a sequel to quinch my thirst for this story, and it isn't the first book I'll ever recommend to any friend. It was worth the short time it took to read, but it would be a better library book, one you don't have to pay for and won't take up space on your shelf for more than a month because you won't want to read it again in the future.

I'm still suffering post-Franzen blues: nothing much measures up to "The Corrections," Franzen's blockbuster National Book Award winner of a year ago. He's been a busy fellow recommending other books, but one can't trust him in that regard. He hit a homer with Adam Haslett's "You Are Not a Stranger Here" and struck out with the maudlin, formulaic "Lovely Bones." Now, with Mark Costello's novel about the Secret Service "Big If," Franzen settles for a bloop double inside the left-field foul line.

And it is indeed a book out of left-field. I disagree with other reviewers who identify Vi and Jens Asplund as the novel's protagonists because the book actually has no protagonist. We are kept off-balance, in a good way, by the surprising depth Costello plumbs of a variety of characters. The director of Vi's Secret Service squad momentarily seems like a very important character but fades into a subsidiary role. Jens's wife, Peta, off in the fringes throughout the novel, suddenly takes over for 20-30 pages. Vi (think Jody Foster) is mostly a ghost haunting the edges of the novel. And Lloyd Felker (think Scott Glenn) is fascinating but almost never physically present. And so it goes.

Apparently, Costello is determined that the novel will live out its theme: the conflict between the "Certainties" of life and the "un-Certainties" that plague us all. The Secret Service lives by its reliance on a core of "Certainties" created by its genius protection theorist/agent, Lloyd Felker, only to discover nothing's really all that certain. Jens writes computer code for an interactive internet war game, BigIf, and learns also how uncertain life can be, although his codes rely upon certainty. And as readers we too must not depend upon the certainties of narrative fiction: there is no central character here just a group of folks we get to know in greater or lesser depth; there is no carefully orchestrated plot through most of the book but then at long last apparently there is. There is, ultimately, only the BigIf mixture of happenstance and fate, and the book just ends because, after all, life itself isn't carefully plotted either.

"Big If" is an acerbic view of American culture, politics, marriage, even real estate, often funny, often engrossing. But always distant and cold. And it is in that coldness that "Big If" is unable to achieve greatness. While "The Corrections" too is full of social commentary and satire, it is also full of humanity and heart. Not so in this novel. Worth a read, with scaled down expectations, "Big If" is a fine accomplishment but not deserving of its National Book Award nomination.

Some people quickly looking at a description of this novel, Big If by Mark Costello, may mistake it for a book driven by suspense. After all, it has secret service agents, a world wide computer program simulating war, and a whole host of potential assassins. Those readers looking for a novel of suspense, or even any of form of a narrative driven approach to the novel, will be dismayed but, if they stick with it, they will be very richly rewarded and often delighted and moved. The author gives the reader a rich tapestry of minor and major characters and moments in their life. I marvelled that there was not a single character that did not interest me. There are no conclusions in any pat sense in the lives of these peopel only snapshots of a weekend. This book is a marvelous creation that should be enjoyed for these fascinating and pertinent characters. It is a wonderfully written moment in our time.

Beautifully written book that goes nowhere fast. If it hadn't been so seamlessly written, I'd never have wasted several hours of my life on it. He could have done better with a little effort, too bad.