Big If: A Novel
by By Costello, Mark
Category: Fiction , Literary

It's winter in New Hampshire, the economy is booming, the vice president is running for president, and his Secret Service people seem very, very tense. Mark Costello's funny, unsettling novel, a riff on recent history, tells the story of five Americans - bodyguards and soccer dads and campaign volunteers - longing for security in the crowd lines and in their own lives.Vi Asplund and her brother, Jens, grew up in a village on New Hampshire's coast, children of an atheist insurance man. Their early memories are of morning drives to scenes of damage - a paper train derailed, a farmhand with one foot, a home burned because someone ran too many Christmas lights from the socket by the tree.Upon her father's death, Vi becomes a Secret Service bodyguard ("Insurance and protection," she says, "a metaphor so obvious, it felt like destiny"). Returning home the day before the primary, jittery and strung out from a thousand crowds, Vi confronts her troubled brother, a software genius poised to make a fortune on BigIf, a state-of-the-art computer game whose monsters he designs. Vi's America, as she sees it in the crowds, in her fellow agents, in her brother, and in BigIf, is affluent yet anxious, and warily abuzz with vague assassination fantasies.