Big If: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mark Costello (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2002

A scary, funny novel—a riff on recent history and the American obsession with assassination.

It's winter in New Hampshire, the economy is booming, the vice president is running for president, and his Secret Service people are very, very tense. Meet Vi Asplund, a young Secret Service agent mourning her dead father. She goes home to New Hampshire to see her brother Jens, a computer genius who just might be going mad—and is poised to make a fortune on Big If, a viciously nihilistic computer game aimed at teenagers. Vi's America, as she sees it in the crowds, in her brother, and in her fellow agents, is affluent, anxious, and abuzz with vague fantasies of violence. Through a gallery of vivid characters—heroic, ignoble, or desperate—Mark Costello's hilarious novel limns the strategies, both sound and absurd, that we conjure to survive in daily life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Substantial insider detail and highly developed, creatively drawn characters help make Mark Costello's Big If a highly memorable work. Struggling to find her place in the Secret Service, Vi Asplund has accepted the high-stress position of guarding the vice president during his New Hampshire primary run. Her brother Jens, co-creator of the realistically brutal computer game Big If, can cash in his lucrative stock options soon if his increasingly troubled conscience and mental imbalance don't overwhelm him first. Both are reeling from the death of their father Walter, a respected insurance-adjusting atheist. Vi's boss Gretchen, a single mom, is trying to maintain unity among her team as well as a connection to her troubled son. Her diverse crew includes Tashmo, a veteran agent with an overactive libido, and Lloyd Felker, a revered protection theorist and creator of The Dome, the Service-implemented area of safety.

While Jens reluctantly bows to pressure from his superiors to create human-like monsters for Big If, Felker's mysterious disappearance heightens apprehensions among the team, who are increasingly uncertain about their ability to protect the vice president against a dense and volatile public. Costello offers a remarkable level of accessible and fascinating governmental information, and he's rendered his cast with inventive depth, such as Tashmo's fixation on Ronald Reagan and the woman on the Land O'Lakes logo, or Walter's habit of crossing out the word "God" on every dollar bill. Big If is a rare novel: a complex examination of conflicting American ideals that's also accessible, fun, and totally worthwhile. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly

Costello's second novel, the first under his own name (he published Bag Men as John Flood), may well be the literary discovery of the season. Organized around the presidential campaign of an unnamed vice-president who is barely glimpsed, Costello shines the plot light on the man's Secret Service guard. In Costello's America, the citizenry has given up on politics except as sort of a minor holiday; passionate political commitment belongs primarily to potential assassins. The Dome (the Secret Service's nickname) is headed by Gretchen Williams, a black single mother from L.A. haunted by the specter of riots. Her crew contains two veterans of the Reagan years: Lloyd Felker (a protection intellectual and the founder of the Dome) and Tashmo, a '70s-style philanderer suffering through the waning of his adulterous impulses. There's also the diva of Protection, beautiful, horny Bobbie Niles, and heroine Vi Asplund. Vi comes from Center Effing, N.H., where her father, Walter, was an atheist Republican insurance adjuster. Vi joined the Dome after Walter died (the compliment at his funeral from an arson squad cop was that no one could read scorch marks like her father ), and Jens, Vi's brother, works for Big If, an interactive fantasy role-playing game company. Jens is suffering a crisis of cyber faith: his code is beautiful, but the end products are literally monsters. Costello moves easily between riffs, with a truly magical feeling for insider's knowledgehow a cop sits at a bar, how a real estate agent spiels a sale, how an insurance adjuster analyzes damage. Costello might be this season's Jonathan Franzen, a dazzling literary novelist with popular appeal.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (June 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393051161
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051162
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #260,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Women in Black, May 22, 2002

By 

Grant Barber (scituate, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Big If: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Partly comic, partly serious, and certainly different., June 18, 2002

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Big If: A Novel (Hardcover)

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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Americana Done Right, December 13, 2002

By 

"50cent-haircut" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Big If: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.