Mark Costello Charts the IF-Switches and WHILE-Loops
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Vi Asplund, a Secret Service agent, returns to her childhood home to protect the vice president as he campaigns in the New Hampshire primary. Jens, her brother, still lives in Portsmouth, writing code for a wildly successful computer game. If Mark Costello's second novel makes such exotic vocations seem oddly familiar, it's because his characters deal with conflicts common to us all—conflicts about options and probabilities, risk and security.
 A 2002 National Book Award finalist, Big If is especially timely in these days of heightened security and suspicion. But readers expecting a traditional thriller—a reasonable enough assumption, given the spotlight on federal agents and the fact that Costello's first book, Bag
Men, was a police procedural—won't find the standard hooks and shoot-outs here. Instead, Big If stakes its roots in recognizable, workaday concerns.
The author explains, "A lot of people in the book are struggling with this issue of Is what I'm doing worthwhile? Have I sold out? Am I just drifting down the stream of life or am I doing something that matters? This is the basic question we ask about our work."
Adrienne Miller noted in her Esquire review, "The pacing here is superb, and the novel unfolds with kind of jittery anticipation, even if nothing much, well, happens."
Nothing is supposed to happen, not if these Secret Service agents are doing their job. Big If is often funny, satirizing the heady days of technology IPOs or America's electoral process, and as Miller aptly notes, the story rushes forward from the start. Nothing much happens, yet always the threat lingers that something—something bad, perhaps even tragic—will happen, so bit by bit, the book accrues a ceaseless, mounting tension: At any moment, a good day's work can go straight to hell.
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"The pacing here is superb, and the novel unfolds with kind of jittery anticipation, even if nothing much, well, happens.... A wonderfully detailed book that's altogether rich and enriching, human and humane." Adrienne Miller, Esquire
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"Cinematically sharp sequences, dead-on dialogue, poignant and painful insights, lean prose, vivid imagery, jaw-dropping surprises." The Wall Street Journal
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"Each flash of magical dialogue, every rumination a wild surprise.... Independence Day is a confirmation of a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer." The New York Review of Books
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"It is in documenting such epidemic evasiveness and apprehension, such lack of connection to the natural world and to technology, such bewilderment, that White Noise succeeds so brilliantly." Jayne Anne Phillips, The New York Times Book Review
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"[Munro's] genius, like Chekhov's, is quiet and particularly hard to describe, because it has the simplicity of the best naturalism, in that it seems not translated from life but, rather, like life itself." Mona Simpson, Atlantic Monthly
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"A dynamic writer of extraordinary talent – Mr. Wallace brings us, time and again, to hidden, mythic places that are strange yet oddly familiar. He succeeds in restoring grandeur to modern fiction." Jennifer Levin, New York Times Book Review
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"In its gorgeous, sweeping scope and the sympathy of its tone, it owes more to Tolstoy than to Pynchon, but ultimately the novel offers up pleasures that are utterly Franzenian; a sense of exhilaration permeates The Corrections which is, in part, the exhilaration of a writer who has broken free of his masters." Poets and Writers
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Bazarov and his friend Arkady, two members of the generation of young Russians, confront and dispute with Arkady's father, Nikolai Kirsanov, and Nikolai's brother, Pavel, about everything: art, science, love, marriage, progress, history, wealth and poverty.
Dave: Big
If begins in New Hampshire, in the household of the Asplund family when Vi
and Jens are children. It starts in a fairly traditional manner, but it doesn't
follow a path readers might expect.
Mark Costello: The idea of the book was to create something that would
be, itself, like a crowd. In a crowd, if you people-watch, you're immersed in
one person for a moment, then that person disappears and someone else captures
your attention. I wanted readers to get that oceanic feeling.
It was a hard thing to think about because the traditional novel, we're told,
has a main character and an arc: a first, second, and third act. All this. Which
isn't wrong or bad, but I think if the book were done this way it would be reassuring
in a way that I didn't want Big If to be. I wanted it to have a more
wide-open feeling.
It's up for grabs who's the main character, just as it's up for grabs who's
going to be a bad guy, if anyone is. Ideally, I like to walk the line of intense
immersion in character. You care about Vi, you spend time with her, and you
care about some of the other people in the book, but no one ever quite takes
over. Sort of like a crowd. You have to look at it as a group thing.
Dave: No one character takes over, it's true, but we spend a lot of
time within the "Dome" of the Secret Service team, with Vi and Gretchen and
Tashmo and the others. If the novel has a center, it seems to be located there.
Costello: Physically, in terms of pages, I think it's pretty close
to being even between the two sides, the Secret Service agents and the civilians.
There's a rope line down the middle, figuratively, in the novel. I've never
actually counted the chapters, but I think it's pretty close to half and half.
I do think, particularly the way the book has been read, that the Secret Service
stuff ends up feeling dominant. That's one thing that surprised me when the
book was published and I started talking to readers because that's not how I
saw it. But what those agents do is so stark that it generates an immense amount
of tension, just having a Secret Service agent on the page. And yet I wanted
to steer clear of any idea of them as heroic, or classically heroic characters,
because with the material there is that risk. If you had a little too much of
them? They don't scale walls or do any kind of derring-do stuff. They're just
yuppies, basically. I wanted to be careful not to overdo it.
Dave: Maybe part of the reason why that side of the novel stands out
is that as readers we're unaccustomed to seeing their world in such mundane
detail. The book has received lots of praise, and I think a big part of the
reason is that the Secret Service world feels real. The lifestyle is foreign
to us, but the conflicts it imposes are familiar.
You were a prosecutor for five years, but you were never a Secret Service
agent, right?
Costello: No, I didn't carry a gun.
Dave: How did you get inside that world?
Costello: As a prosecutor, you work with the agents. I became friends
with a couple of them, and I would talk to them about What's it like when
you're out there doing this protection? That was years before I ever thought
about it as a potential piece of fiction. I was just interested, as anyone else
would be.
That was my starting point. And the thing that struck me about the agents
that I knew was that they were just plain, real people. Flawed. People living
in a bureaucracy like anyone else. They had the same family problems anyone
else had. And yet they had all committed to this idea that they would give their
lives for a protectee.
This was back in the Clinton days, and the agents that I knew were by and
large Republicans who hated the Clintons. Hated them. And not for any good reason.
One friend was guarding Hillary Clinton for a while; he didn't like her because
she was a strong woman, basically. There was nothing credible about it. And
yet, this is someone who's committed to die for her.
Fiction writers are interested in what makes people tick, how people live
with contradictions in their personality, how they make it work. That to me
was a big contradiction: How could you be a regular person and yet have committed
to this idea that you're going to die, if necessary, for someone you don't even
like?
Also, in so much of what we do, in terms of the general wariness and the practical
paranoia and the sense of insecurity that everyone feels more and more, we aren't
so different from these agents. Obviously, there's a difference in the stakes,
but emotionally, in terms of the vibe, it's not that different.
Dave: When Richard
Ford was here, he talked about the role of vocation in character development.
In almost all his stories and novels, you know what the characters do for a
living. Their jobs define them. That's definitely the case in Big If.
We see these people through their work life.
Costello: One of the things I love about Richard Ford as a fiction
writer over the last twenty-five years is that his characters aren't all astronomers
and florists and classical violinists. If you go to Powell's and check out a
lot of the novels, so many of the characters have explicitly beautiful or theoretical
occupations. It's almost as if work is what sex used to be: the thing that fiction
doesn't go to. Ford just puts a stick right in that. There aren't a lot of other
writers who do that, but work is what consumes people's lives, and fiction has
to go there. There has to be some sort of an epic—I hate to use that
word—fiction in how a realtor balances her schedule and picks her kid
up at a soccer game, or something like that, because that's what people are
doing now. They're not astronomers and orchestra conductors.
Dave: In Big If and certainly in Bag
Men, many of the characters cannot or, in some cases, choose not to
bring their jobs home. Their work life is an almost separate existence.
In Big If, many of the Secret Service agents don't seem to have
much of a home life; they just don't have time for it. This creates a closed
world around the characters.
Costello: I think it's true of all the characters, not just the Secret
Service agents but the computer programmers and realtors, too. I think that's
true of ninety-nine percent of the people out there. And I think it has a lot
of implications for us in terms of alienation and how you don't feel connected
to your work because you save yourself for your home life. But it's a dominant
fact.
It's hard to write fiction about disconnection. Fiction is naturally about
connection, how this reflects that and so forth. It was hard to
find a way to write about the disconnect between work life and home life.
Dave: Jens can't come to terms with his occupation. His father put
a seed of doubt into his mind about whether it's a worthwhile endeavor, and
now Jens is really starting to struggle with it. Meanwhile, he has no outlet
to talk about his issues. He's bottled up, and I think he's completely normal
in that way.
Costello: Jens is a computer programmer who writes code for games.
It's not a typical occupation, perhaps, but his problem is a very common one:
he's not sure how to know whether he values what he does and whether he's wasting
his life. He's very smart and skilled at what he does. The code he writes, as
code, is beautiful, but the end product, what the viewer sees on the screen,
is hucksterism; violent stuff. The problem with Jens, as you say, is that he
doesn't have any way to work that through because he's proud. And he sort of
has this macho attitude, which says, I'm going to deal with it. He has
a wife, Peta, who is a good woman and a sensible woman, not a perfect person
but certainly a good wife, but he doesn't want to talk to her about it because
he's going to deal with it himself. In a way, to me, Jens is one of the real
tragic characters in the book.
A lot of people in the book are struggling with this issue of Is what I'm
doing worthwhile? Have I sold out? Am I just drifting down the stream of life
or am I doing something that matters? This is the basic question we ask
about our work. People have different ways of dealing with that question.
Jens never quite has the clarity to engage with it. A lot of his mental energy
is put into very artfully finding ways to shout under the table. It's often
comic with Jens—for instance, when he goes into the voting booth and
he can't make up his mind; he's in there for twenty minutes. It's funny, but
there's also something very sad about someone with all this verbal dexterity
and a powerful imagination, using it to block out the truth that he doesn't
want to face.
Dave: That intersection of tragedy and comedy is evident elsewhere.
It's the same kind of thing with Lloyd Felker's theories about sporting goods
and public safety. On the one hand, any insight you can provide to reduce the
risk of public violence is worthwhile, but that doesn't mean it's not funny
when Felker is orating about those scenarios.
Costello: It's comic and it's sad, but it's one of the things that
interests me: looking at different ways that people find and create meaning.
Dave: Jay
McInerney, writing about Big If in the New York Times Book Review,
used White
Noise as a point of comparison—and it's true, Felker's speech reminded
me of the DeLillo character who goes on at length about the sociological messages inherent in supermarket produce displays. Experts get talking, and
it becomes a kind of comedy. A comedy of exhaustion.
Costello: That character in White Noise is amazingly funny,
and there's even a sliver of genius and legitimacy to what he says, but when
the paragraph is over you step back and say, "Boy, that guy is both nuts and
irrelevant."
This guy can go into a supermarket and you'd think it was Ralph
Waldo Emerson in the Massachusetts woods or something. And it's plausible,
for so long as the paragraph lasts, because the guy isn't a dummy. If he were,
it wouldn't be so sad. If he were an idiot, it wouldn't be sad. What's sad is
that in this country you have immense amount of mental energy being put into
this great wasted effort and a lot of people who are not connecting with real
issues: How do I live? Am I living in a way that makes sense? Am I living
in a way that connects back with me? Or am I being driven by the culture forward?
Dave: The plot of Big
If is centered around a political campaign, but we don't hear about any
of the issues. Half the novel's characters are protecting a vice president you
never name. That part of the story occurs entirely off-screen; none of it is
the subject of the book.
Costello: Right. I thought the politics would be a great backdrop,
but I definitely wasn't interested in making the politics important because,
again, it's about the disconnection. You have all these Democratic messages
that say, "You're empowered. You're important. You run things." Meantime, the
people—the computer programmer, the dads, the soccer moms, the suburban
housewives—they're just trying to get along and hang onto their jobs.
This big cultural message is just washing over us.
Dave: How did you make the leap from Bag
Men, a crime novel, to Big
If?
Costello: With Bag Men, my first novel, I wanted to come up
with a very strong structure, a structure that would carry people forward with
a lot of narrative drive. It's essentially a complex police procedural. It was
a natural enough thing for me to write because I was a working prosecutor at
the time. It's set in Boston in 1965, with the start of the Sixties and Vatican
II, a lot of that liberalization. I wanted to get a little bit into what it
would be like to be in a very conservative place, a police department, the Suffolk
County DA's office, while the whole world was changing around you. Again, to
look at a character who wasn't a dumb person, but who didn't understand what
was happening. And in structure, it was, as you say, a procedural.
When Bag Men was published, I had a contract for a second book with
Norton. I had embarked on writing another book that was also pretty conventional
in structure. I was a good bit of the way through it, and I felt like, in a
way, I was a little bit like Jens: I was servicing the structure. It wasn't
serving me; I was serving it.
I had a minor character, sort of a walk-on, this young, burned out Secret
Service agent named Vi Asplund. I became interested in her and the idea of this
fallen angel. Very quickly she was more interesting to me than the other characters.
I had worked the New Hampshire primary a bunch of times, starting in 1980, and
I wanted to write something about New England—that's where I'm from—
and the money coming in at that point, changes in my own family, and the break-up
of a lot of traditional stuff that's gone now. And I thought, Well, why not
have this agent come back to New Hampshire for the primary?
Basically, that was two hours of thinking. Three Cokes and ten cigarettes
later I had abandoned the old novel that was three-quarters of the way done.
I basically embarked on a new book, for better or for worse.
Dave: You decided not to service the structure. So you looked to your
character for direction?
Costello: I had a character. I knew she was going to be a young, somewhat
burned out character. I knew she was from a town in New England not unlike Winchester,
Massachusetts, where I come from. I knew she was going to go back to see her
brother, who would be her last family member left. That's more or less where
I started. As I imagined her world—What would her childhood be like?
What kind of childhood would you have to have to be attracted to this kind of
work? - I started imagining people around her. From there, I got deeply
into her dad and her boss, but it started with Vi.
Dave: You went to college with David
Foster Wallace, right? What were you guys up to back then?
Costello: We wrote a lot of comedy, National
Lampoon-type humor. It was Amherst College in Massachusetts, and we had
a humor newspaper that we ran. Rather than sit around discussing Flaubert
or anything like that, we were joke writers. We had a blast. We were also pretty
geeky guys, as well, but in terms of writing, what I remember is writing a lot
of jokes and trying to make each other laugh at four o'clock in the morning.
Dave: These days, are you still in touch? Would you say that you're
part of a community of writers?
Costello: Dave's an old friend. We're still in touch. I have some friends
who are writers, and there are times when you really need to have a conversation
with another writer, someone you trust. But then you have to make your own decisions.
There's a lot of pressure on writers to succeed, and there's a lot of competitiveness.
Law enforcement is supposed to be a dirty, tough world, and it is, but I found
it easier to trust people in that world. That might reflect my dark, Irish Catholic
personality, but there's a lot of competition between writers. So I won't say
that I have some type of Bloomsbury
association. I have a few writer friends, but my friends tend to be cops and
people like that.
Dave: The escalating McSweeney's
phenomenon has been interesting to watch. A real cult following has built up
around it. It's like the stamp of cool. Name recognition and brand association.
Which is nice if only in that it's not being driven by the marketing budgets
of national chains and publishing conglomerates.
Costello: The McSweeney's school tends to be—I wouldn't say
it's the absolute avant garde of American fiction because there's fiction out
there being written without verbs—but it's not mainstream fiction. It's
very funny, it's outrageous, it's transgressive. Not real big on narrative,
necessarily. They often couldn't give a damn about the arc of character, but
in general there's a great verbal energy to it. It's a lot of great writing.
There's a huge amount of great fiction being written right now. I think it's
human nature that people need some sort of brand name to make some sense of
it all, even on the fringe. Otherwise, you go into a bookstore, and everyone
has great blurbs. How do you separate one from the next?
I really like that kind of writing, but I don't think I would ever be counted
in that school. The thing about it that it makes me wonder is whether you can
ultimately write great fiction without having a fundamental un-ironic commitment
to the character on the page. I wonder if great fiction can exist in that atmosphere.
Again, the energy and the sarcasm and the complexity of perspective, that's
all great—and it's a result to having culture shoved down our throats
—but you go back and read Turgenev,
and you won't find any tricks. He's never trying to attract attention to himself.
It's just a very simple story about a son screwing up his father's business
in the Russian countryside in the 1870s, and it's incredibly powerful.
Dave: Who does that for you nowadays, among contemporary writers?
Costello: I love Dave
Wallace's writing. I love many of those writers. Susan Daitch... A lot of
them. But if you want to talk about the old school, the simple writers that
are working now, I think large parts of The
Corrections—John
Franzen, I'll disclose, is another friend of mine—but I think large
parts of The Corrections are verbally dexterous and very elusive and
very smart and funny; there are tonal shifts within one sentence. It's all very
complex and artful, but what makes it go is a pretty simple commitment to a
character and what happens to this character. It does what fiction is better
at than any other art form, which is convincing you to accept the terms of this
person's life as real and meaningful for you.
I love Alice
Munro. When I lose faith in fiction and I'm having a bad day—Why
would anyone read a fake story to try to find meaning? What the hell is that
about?—I go back and reread her stories. I find her to be deceptively
simple. Her storytelling tone? those stories are lit up from inside.
For some reason, since finishing Big If, I've read mostly short fiction.
I'm not entirely sure why that is. Ever hear of a guy name Steve
Almond?
Dave: Sure. My
Life in Heavy Metal.
Costello: Right. There are some really strong stories in there, including
the first one, which is a wonderful story. He's another Boston guy.
Dave: He has some big fans here at Powell's. And I agree about Alice
Munro: you read a paragraph or a story, and it changes the way you think about
what fiction can do. Reading Munro can be overwhelming for me sometimes. How
can one person write so many great stories? How can she do it so consistently?
They're all completely convincing.
That's what the best fiction does: it affects you deeply despite everything
you know. It makes you care about—and invest a great deal of time in—
lies.
Costello: It's the trick of fiction. When a fiction writer wants to
make you feel the pain of character x, there can be, if it's not artfully done,
a certain amount of self congratulation involved: Look at me, I'm superior.
I see this person who's being treated badly by their boss; I am morally superior
to the bad characters in my story. That's cheap. That's weepy, bad, and
a waste of time. But I defy you to find a single mawkish line in Alice Munro's
fiction. It's incredible. So when we're talking about inviting you in and getting
the reader to accept the terms of a fake life as real for the purposes of the
reading, the key is to make sure it's never mawkish, it's never for the sake
of glorifying the writer's superior moral sense. It's all about accepting things
on their terms. Like any great art, that requires inborn talent but also an
incredible amount of craft.
Alice Munro must be an incredibly careful writer with an incredible ear. And
that's what really blows me away. Chekhov
is another one. You're three sentences into a Chekov story and you feel like
you know the soul of rural Russia. Then you go back and look at the sentences
and he's just talking about how the doctor kept his horses. One horse was kept
in the great stall and one was kept in a smaller stall. He always rode the bad
horse because he didn't want to hurt the good horse. That's the paragraph, and
somehow you feel like you inhabit this other time and place. Only fiction does
that.
Dave: As compared to movies, say.
Costello: Someone once said that movies ate fiction, that movies came
along and became the dominant middle class narrative medium. There's no doubt
that's true, but a lot of the best movies are just doing stuff that was invented
by novelists in the nineteenth century.
I'm forty years old—that's mostly bad, being forty—but one thing
that's not is going back to read books that I first read in my twenties. I feel
like I catch so much that I didn't the first time.
Dave: Are you working on something now?
Costello: I'm working on a bunch of things, a bunch of short stories.
It's time to start another novel. I'm feeling a little resistance to that, but
that's just typical post-novel feelings. Certainly I won't take on anything
big until Little League season ends.
Dave: Coaching, I hope?
Costello: The Tribeca Indians. That's my son's team.
Dave: Has it started?
Costello: We're 1-0, with two rainouts. These are seven-year-olds,
by the way.
Dave: What else? You mentioned earlier that you were surprised how
much readers connected with the Secret Service agents, that part of the plot.
Now, as you're out promoting the paperback, do you still hear questions that
surprise you?
Costello: Well, sure. It depends who's asking. People at readings tend
to ask different kinds of questions than I might get in an interview, but I'm
always surprised by the persistent myth, or the assumption, that one's fiction
is full of thinly veiled references to one's own life. At readings and in interviews,
I almost always get the question, "Were your friends in the Secret Service mad?
There's a womanizing agent, a burned out agent? Do they get mad at being depicted
in this way?" Or, "Which character are you most like in the book?" Questions
of that nature.
It's always dumbfounding to me. It was so hard to will these characters into
being. To think it might have been as simple as, Oh, I think I'm going to
make this one like my uncle Fred. What would Uncle Fred do? He always had that
pipe and he wore that ascot and he duck-walked? If only it worked that way,
I'd be writing a book every twelve months.
And yet it's like they circle around to be true, in a way. My daughter is
five years old and sometimes I'll turn around and call her Vi. So in a way they
circle around, when they're done, to have a real life to them. But people seem
to need to believe that if I get them to care about Vi it's because there's
a line that can be drawn between Vi and some person in the real world. It's
such a disconnect from the way writers see it, or from the way it works for
me.
Mark Costello stopped in at Powell's on May 1, 2003, the day after I returned from a trip to meet six childhood friends in Las Vegas. We talked a bit about gambling—Vegas versus Foxwoods, craps versus blackjack—as we climbed the stairs past the patch of wall that visiting authors sign. (As a rule, they sign at the end of the visit, so on the way up we bypassed the wall quickly and without comment.) Costello hails from Winchester, Massachusetts. I grew up in Framingham. Which should help explain his "another Boston guy" reference to Steve Almond.
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