Big If

by Mark Costello

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156027798
• ISBN13: 9780156027793
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Harvest Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

One of the best books of the year

This book was hilarious and heartbreaking in turns. It's a big landscape, but specifically drawn. I am giving this to a lot of people for Christmas. You will never look a dollar bill the same way after reading this.

A great story

Yup, that's right--a great story. A story of the inner lives of some people that you might not otherwise think about--the peripheral man/woman in the dark suit surrounding the alpha dog; the programmer writing the code; the realtor selling the McMansion. The people in the shadows that you don't really notice. This is why there is no Big Action going on. If you want action you should check out a Vin Diesel movie. I'm not going to review the storyline, the meaning, the metaphors, etc....others have done it much better than I can. I just want to say that I truly enjoyed this novel. I finished it 3 days ago yet I find myself thinking of Vi Asplund and Gretchen Williams and Peta Boyle and wondering what the hell they're experiencing now..anticipating returning to the novel and then remembering that I already finished it---and I can't hang out with them anymore...maybe I just need to get a life of my own.

Fun with paranoia ala DeLillo and Pynchon

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.

1984 in 2002

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.

Women in Black

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.