Big If

Starred review from April 29, 2002
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 knowledge—how 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. (June)Forecast:With this author's talent, his connection with David Foster Wallace (they co-wrote a nonfiction book,
Signifying Rappers) and a blurb from Jonathan Franzen, Costello is poised to capture literati fancy.

May 1, 2002
Where are the Ozzies and Harriets of today? Certainly not in Costello's second novel (after Big Men), which details the sinister/comic antics of yet another dysfunctional American family. The Asplunds live in Center Effing, NH, where the atheist father is obsessed with crossing out God's name wherever he happens to find it, especially on currency. His daughter Vi enters a career in the Secret Service, protecting the vice president as he crisscrosses the country. So much attention is given to tracking the minutiae of the VP's team that this might be regarded almost as a Secret Service procedural. The Asplund son is a ham radio nut who blossoms into a computer geek and writes monster logic software for a computer conglomerate called Big If. Costello riffs on such tried-and-true themes as software games and presidential politics and seems to be suggesting that the country gets just what its families deserve. A dust jacket quote from Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, praising Costello as a "writer of real distinction" may be enough to get this one noticed. For larger public libraries. Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2002
From the outset, Costello plunges readers into the fully realized world of Vi Asplund, a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the vice-president. As the daughter of an accident investigator, she saw things--a farmhand with one foot, a golf pro dead from lightning--that prepared her well for the tense uncertainties she faces on a daily basis. She was assigned to the unit at her own request after a boring stint in anticounterfeiting, but she is starting to suffer from the ill effects of too much stress--in particular, the emotional fallout from a disastrous stop for a photo-op in a flooded town, which claimed the life of a much-valued member of the team. Meanwhile, her brother, Jens, a computer genius who writes code for a war game, is starting to question the ethics of his creations, namely, the too-lifelike villains who are armed to the teeth. Costello's thoughtful novel" "(following" Bag Men," 1997, written under the name John Flood) eerily captures the way we seem to live now--a mundane daily routine punctuated by moments of sheer terror. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)