Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: Beautifully written book that goes nowhere fast. If it hadn't been so seamlessly written, I'd never have wasted several hours of my life on it. He could have done better with a little effort, too bad.
Rating:
Summary: Really enjoyed it, but it didn't quite hang together
Review: I bought this book largely because I remember enjoying Signifying Rappers, his collaboration with David Foster Wallace. This book, though, is much better. It's quite marvelously well-written, accurately observed, and often funny. There's not much plot: for a couple months we more or less follow Vi, a Secret Service agent guarding a nameless vice president, and her hacker brother Jens, who is struggling to build a stupid computer game for a company called BigIf. Instead of a plot most of the action comes in seeing the upsided-down and backward way various things in the novel reflect each other (e.g., Vi is involved with setting up the rules for constructing an abstract "dome" around the VP in which he can't get shot, Jens is constructing an abstract world in which his character is a shooter). Problem is (for me, anyway), Costell evokes the characters so well that you start wanting to know what happens to them, and basically this isn't that kind of novel. Still, I greatly enjoyed reading it.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I picked up this book thinking I was going to get great inside dope on the secret service and a compelling plot. While Costello certainly includes some great nuggets here and there, overall he's more concerned about trivial, everyday occurances that don't advance the story. By the end of the book, I was left with a big "is that it?" feeling. Skip it or borrow it.
Rating: 
Summary: Post-Franzen Blues
Review: I'm still suffering post-Franzen blues: nothing much measures up to "The Corrections," Franzen's blockbuster National Book Award winner of a year ago. He's been a busy fellow recommending other books, but one can't trust him in that regard. He hit a homer with Adam Haslett's "You Are Not a Stranger Here" and struck out with the maudlin, formulaic "Lovely Bones." Now, with Mark Costello's novel about the Secret Service "Big If," Franzen settles for a bloop double inside the left-field foul line.And it is indeed a book out of left-field. I disagree with other reviewers who identify Vi and Jens Asplund as the novel's protagonists because the book actually has no protagonist. We are kept off-balance, in a good way, by the surprising depth Costello plumbs of a variety of characters. The director of Vi's Secret Service squad momentarily seems like a very important character but fades into a subsidiary role. Jens's wife, Peta, off in the fringes throughout the novel, suddenly takes over for 20-30 pages. Vi (think Jody Foster) is mostly a ghost haunting the edges of the novel. And Lloyd Felker (think Scott Glenn) is fascinating but almost never physically present. And so it goes. Apparently, Costello is determined that the novel will live out its theme: the conflict between the "Certainties" of life and the "un-Certainties" that plague us all. The Secret Service lives by its reliance on a core of "Certainties" created by its genius protection theorist/agent, Lloyd Felker, only to discover nothing's really all that certain. Jens writes computer code for an interactive internet war game, BigIf, and learns also how uncertain life can be, although his codes rely upon certainty. And as readers we too must not depend upon the certainties of narrative fiction: there is no central character here just a group of folks we get to know in greater or lesser depth; there is no carefully orchestrated plot through most of the book but then at long last apparently there is. There is, ultimately, only the BigIf mixture of happenstance and fate, and the book just ends because, after all, life itself isn't carefully plotted either. "Big If" is an acerbic view of American culture, politics, marriage, even real estate, often funny, often engrossing. But always distant and cold. And it is in that coldness that "Big If" is unable to achieve greatness. While "The Corrections" too is full of social commentary and satire, it is also full of humanity and heart. Not so in this novel. Worth a read, with scaled down expectations, "Big If" is a fine accomplishment but not deserving of its National Book Award nomination.
Rating:
Summary: Great Character Development, Nearly Nonexistent Plot
Review: If you're looking for a page turner about secret service agents, look elsewhere. But if you're interested in a well-written collection of barely connected anecdotes, you'll enjoy this book. Despite the surprising lack of plot, I was fascinated with the characters and disappointed when the story ended. Tack on another 100 pages or so of actual plot, or at least an ending that didn't feel like an afterthought (the key character in the climax is one you learn almost nothing about), and the book would have been outstanding.
Rating:
Summary: A Borrower
Review: Many of the previous reviews either rave or absolutely rant about this book, but I think both are unfair representations for potential readers. The books proponents note that Costello writes well and provides interesting "insiders" perspectives of campaign politics from a secret service agent's point of view, the operations of an Internet business, and modern family life. He really does do a good job of describing the lives of the characters and weaving their narratives together. As for the naysayers, they are correct that the story has no plot and you never really care about a particular character and when the book is done, it isn't something that leaves you wanting more. I am sure this was intentional by Costello, but for my money and I think many casual readers, it is not really what they want. I will not remember Big If in a year, I do not want Costello to come out with a sequel to quinch my thirst for this story, and it isn't the first book I'll ever recommend to any friend. It was worth the short time it took to read, but it would be a better library book, one you don't have to pay for and won't take up space on your shelf for more than a month because you won't want to read it again in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: 1984 in 2002
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Art Without Heart
Review: Mark's clever as a wizard but just as cold. For fans of technique only, those to whom concerns for the characters don't matter, but being post-modern and just plain edgy is as good as it gets. Steve Vai plays more notes than Mozart, but never played a memorable tune. Costello's so wound up in "being a writer" that he forgot to make his readers give a damn. Maybe next time, because a good book's probably in there somewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Woven Character Studies
Review: Some people quickly looking at a description of this novel, Big If by Mark Costello, may mistake it for a book driven by suspense. After all, it has secret service agents, a world wide computer program simulating war, and a whole host of potential assassins. Those readers looking for a novel of suspense, or even any of form of a narrative driven approach to the novel, will be dismayed but, if they stick with it, they will be very richly rewarded and often delighted and moved. The author gives the reader a rich tapestry of minor and major characters and moments in their life. I marvelled that there was not a single character that did not interest me. There are no conclusions in any pat sense in the lives of these peopel only snapshots of a weekend. This book is a marvelous creation that should be enjoyed for these fascinating and pertinent characters. It is a wonderfully written moment in our time.
Rating:
Summary: Americana Done Right
Review: This book is more or less plotless, but engrossing to read nonetheless. One of the factors that accounts for its 'readability' is the subjects and environments that Costello writes about is a fictional milieu no one else seems to have a solid command over; and Costello does a knock-out job of bringing this slightly skewed vision of Contemporary America that is chillingly close to the real world. The novel traces the days in the lives of several men and women, most of whom are in the Secret Service, and online PC game behemoth corporation called the BigIf. Not only are the quotidian details of these lives meticulously delineated, they are mimetic in the best sense of the word; the novel's vision of America's political climate and condition of its people are dead-on, and disconcerting. The novel doesn't have a perfunctory 'build-up', but the there is a climactic event in the very end, the very last few pages of the novel. I was most impressed with Costello's handling of the event. In the hands of lesser writers, this event would have turned into an operatic coda of noise and unchecked bathos and forced epiphanies. Costello doesn't give in to such urges and remains true to his aim - which is to render a truthful writer's vision of what is going on, with this country, and with us. The writing is protean and restrained. There are moments of lyricism in the prose, but they are like a welcome breeze. My minor reservation about the novel is that Costello seems too bent on controlling all facets of the novel, and there is a constricting feeling you get from reading the book that hinders from the experience. (Kind of reminds me of Richard Powers, another great writer who's a bit too fastidious.) But it's a minor gripe that really has no significant bearing on the achievements of this book.
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