Big If

Mark Costello

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Signifying Rappers didn't quite prepare me for this. Big If is a somber book concerning a team of Secret Servicepeople protecting the Vice President in a time much like our own; as much time is devoted to exhaustive operational detail as is devoted to the diversely unsatisfying personal lives of the members of the detail, especially Vi Asplund, constantly drained and emotionally gaunt since the death of her father. A parallel plot involving Vi’s computer-programmer brother Jens provides the title — BigIf is a massively multiplayer online game set in a near-future post-apocalypse, for which he designs monsters.

The whole book is pretty mesmerizing, which is no doubt why the flaws I noticed seem especially disappointing after having finished the book. For a book that prides itself so much on its wealth of insidery Secret Service detail, Costello makes some very odd factual errors in other places: Maryland doesn’t have a soda-bottle deposit, thereby negating what would have been a neat flourish at the end of one scene, and baseball games typically take two-and-a-half to three hours rather than the three to four Costello specifies.

In addition, Big If has a bad case of DeLillo Syndrome: all his characters talk in the same arch, elliptical style by the end of the book, supposedly saying out loud things like “He was always calling someone on his cell phone, always being paged — he waited for the pages, called back, and was paged again, an epic game of phone tag as he walked the storied mile where liberty was born.” No one has ever spoken a sentence out loud that sounded anything like that, and especially not the character who is supposed to have spoken it, a no-nonsense chief of security detail. I don’t care how postmodern the book is (and no, it does not have a “real” ending), that sticks out a little too much.

Still, it’s a neat sentence, and indicative of Costello’s sense of humor here, sly and densely ironic. There’s stuff like that all through the book, and there are neat first-person evocations that can make you almost understand serial adultery, and deft quick descriptions of people and landscapes that instantly conjure pictures up. Also, I paid $5.98 for this book at the Olsson’s in Dupont Circle. If you like postmodern novels, for six bucks this is an excellent pickup.

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