I went from abandoning two novels on Stephen King's Reading List Part II, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and The Dirty Secrets Club by Meg Gardiner, to giving a shot to one more, Big If by Mark Costello. I finished this one. Wit, character and research go a long way with me, even in the case of books like this, where those elements become indulgent and prove to be an awkward substitute for a story.I struggled through the cryptic title (science fiction? romance? self help?) and cover design, with both print and digital versions doing a miserable job of trying to prepare me for what I was going to read, but Costello quickly grabbed me by the back of the neck with his pure energy of writing. Most of Big If is set in present day New Hampshire and follows Vi Asplund, a Secret Service agent in her mid-twenties who has moved up to Protection, where she joins a detail guarding the unnamed Vice President of the United States as his presidential campaign swings through the Granite State. Vi's home state.Vi's older brother Jens is a computer programmer putting his PH.d and his genius to use writing code for BigIf, a violent and cheesy multiplayer video game which their father, an atheist insurance adjuster named Walter, disowned as amoral shortly before he passed away suddenly. Neither Jens or Vi cope with their father's absence well, throwing themselves into work with creeping nihilism.Jens is married to a childhood sweetheart Peta, now a real estate agent jumping through hoops held by the stunningly rich and staggeringly unhappy software wives combing New Hampshire for their dream home. Jens finds himself increasingly distracted and unable to complete the code for the newest monster in BigIf, a high school shooter. They have a young son they'd like to spend more time with.Vi, a college athlete who joined the Secret Service essentially following in her father's footsteps by providing protection, has no social life, no home and no direction. Her early career in the bureau's Criminal Division, busting Russian counterfeiters, surrounded her with the most irredeemable people on the planet, but a transfer to Protection proves equally hopeless, with upper level management or emotional burnout the two paths that lay ahead.A sample of the writing that hooked me on page 11 of 315: "Walter Asplund believed in many things, the dignity of humankind, the Genius of Democracy, the sanctity of contract, The Origin of Species, the mission of the bloodmobile, the charts devised in Hartford, poplin suits in summertime, brown bread with baked beans, little oyster crackers (with chowder, not with oysters), baseball, tennis, The New Yorker, travel hats he purchased from the back of The New Yorker (which he sometimes wore to baseball games), the pleasures of night skiing with his children on the bunny hill in Rye. He believed, that is, in almost everything but God. He declined to serve the Rotary, and announced the reason why, and after that he was known in Center Effing as the Atheist and his kids were known in school as the Little Atheists."Wow. Costello is a writer of precision, wit and social conscience. He knows the worlds of the Secret Service, of a tech startup, real estate and presidential campaigning backwards and forwards. As the above passage indicates, he can tell you every item in the pockets or purses of every character he introduces and at first, I was amazed by this. Then as this level of intensity continued and continued, my amazement turned to fatigue and fatigue turned to repulsion and soon, I just wanted the novel to end.Big If introduces other characters. Vi's boss Gretchen, a single mother whose son has started asking questions about his father, a hotshit LAPD detective. One of Vi's peers is a senior agent named Tashmo from the Reagan days whose infidelities have finally caught up with him. A fellow agent named Bobbie, whose sexual misadventures could fill a phone book, has premonitions that an assassination attempt will be targeting her.The novel loses one star for drifting away from Vi to instead catalog nearly everything the reader could possibly want to know about other characters in clinical detail. Any one of these characters could've been the protagonist of their own novel, but that would require a plot of some sort, which Costello resists to his detriment. The novel loses another star due to the absence of a story. Costello is doing embedded reporting on Americans in the here and now, on the edge of something -- violence, disillusionment, nervous breakdown -- but this isn't part of the background, it's background, foreground and the entire set. I was impressed through about 100 pages and then got impatient with all the lists and anecdotes.This is a guarded recommendation with the caveat that you enjoy literary fiction and are not expecting a strong story. I liked the ending but even there, Costello might have done his job too well, leaving me with a sense of exhaustion and nihilism. I admired the writing but can just barely recommend the book.
Mark Costello’s novel Big If is populated with some of the most interesting, most contemporary, characters. Walter is a moderate Republican atheist working in insurance. He has the habit of crossing out GOD in his dollar bills so that the statement reads IN US WE TRUST. He has two children: Jens, who has grown up as a software programmer, writing code for and pondering the morality (or immorality, or amorality) of the monster game he has developed; Violet has grown up to work in the Secret Service. Vi is assigned to the VP, who is running for president and will have to go to the Democratic primary in New Hampshire to jog (surrounded by security), eat at a McDonald’s (surrounded by media), and shake hands with the common people to get their vote. Jens’s wife, Peta, is a realtor assigned to manage a supposedly boring building now being attacked by a group of violent right-to-lifers. Gretchen, Vi’s superior, has separated from his douchebag boyfriend, but his son has found the boyfriend’s address by Googling himself, and now wants to spend time with his father. Before Lydia married Secret Service agent Lloyd Felker, her talent agent said, You’re not supposed to marry your own agent. And I’m your agent! He’s not that kind of agent, Lydia said, and her talent agent said, Oh my god, is he a literary agent? How will you be able to feed yourself?Big If, published in 2002, was a finalist for the National Book Award. I wonder what novel it came up against. Costello’s novel was funny and touching and relevant enough to have won.
Do You like book Big If (2003)?
Set over a matter of days before a presedential election, Costello explores the past and present of brother and sister Violet and Jens Asplund, Jens' wife Peta, Vi's coworkers Gretchen and Tashmo. Vi, Gretchen and Tashmo are Secret Service bodyguards protecting the current VP running in the presidential race; Jens is a software designer for a violent teenager's computer game, and Peta is a sucessful real estate agent.Costello does a great job playing these different characters' lives off each other. The mind tosses the comparisons and contrasts and similarities in a way that feels completely nature and realistic - we know people like this, we've had the same struggles, but Costello portrays they're edgy jobs w/ compassion.Really good - where did this guy come from?!; what a novel ought to be: compelling characters, interesting and believable connections, excellent descriptions of locations from bar to neighborhood. My only complaint (and I felt this more than once) was the very slight hint Costello gives of believing his reader isn't quite paying attention - he reminds the reader (annoyingly) of things he's already more elegantly exposed previously, just to make sure we don't miss the relevance of what he's describing next. Completely unnecessary - a book this well written doesn't need to worry that the reader's lost interest.
—Holly
Big If might contain the most astute cultural observations ever committed to the pages of an assassination novel. OK, that's a joke, because when you hear "assassination novel", you're probably expecting a by-the-numbers, plot-driven tale of brilliant but flawed gunmen, hard-boiled government agents, smuggled rifles and escape routes. By choosing to mostly ignore plot and focus instead on his characters, Costello gets away with both exploding assumptions and taking us all on a messy, beautiful journey through the lives of every key player involved in a plot against a presidential candidate. The mundane and tragic drama behind secret service agents, Internet moguls, real estate agents, housewives, children, spouses, and lovers all unfold during the thick of primary season, in New Hampshire, where the landscape is torn up by GOTV vans and phone surveys every four years. Costello uses the anxiety around presidential primaries as a fitting metaphor for American obsessions with power, violence, status, and work, and he leavens his ominous, thoughtful story with plenty of off-key humor. I'd consider this book a "must read", during primary season, or any season for that matter.
—Brendan
Fiction. Though this book will tell you it's about the United States Secret Service, it's really just about some people who happen to work for the USSS and a couple more people who happen to know those people. It's about people. One of those people books where nothing much happens. You meet all these people, you get their flashbacks, you learn about their problems, and then the book is about that. Will Gretchen ever connect with her son in any meaningful way? Will Peta ever get Lauren Czoll to make an offer on a house? Will Jens get fired from his computer programming job because he refuses to write the code for Monster Todd? Will Jens' sister Vi whatever it is that that Jens' sister Vi whatevers?It's a slow book with a meandering path and a lot of characters. I liked the writing; it's basic, but clever, and Costello would frequently surprise me with a wonderful bit of detail. But I spent the majority of it wondering what the hell year it was. The book was published in 2002 and maybe back then it was clear that the VP running for president was Al Gore, but ten years down the line, that's not clear at all. What's clear is that there's a weird gap between the Reagan administration and the present time in the narrative, like time stood still for Bush senior and Clinton and only started up again during the 1999 primaries. I had to piece together evidence, a concert shirt from 1998, a mention of the school shooting in Springfield, until then I didn't even know what decade it was, was convinced this was taking place immediately following Reagan's term. Timelessness is not an option when you're dealing with history.Three stars. Follows a lot of different characters who are nevertheless connected in some way. Slice of Life with some Secret Service Excitement, but mostly what I liked about this was the writing.
—Punk
