[tt] TLS: Stephen Burn: Software as God

[Premise Checker]

Stephen Burn: Software as God
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,2180-23194-1907253-23194,00.html
The TLS 	April 09, 2004

BIG IF. By Mark Costello. 315pp. Atlantic Books. Paperback, Pounds 10.99. 
- 1 84354 217 X

In Big If Mark Costello focuses on the edges of high-pressure media 
events, exploring the zone where immaculate televised images of 
celebrity-existence bleed into the anonymous dangers of the surrounding 
crowd. The novel is loosely plotted around the threat of assassination 
facing an unnamed vice- president as he travels through the local crowds 
on the campaign trail. But Costello shows only a passing interest in 
either this potential target or his lurking assassin.

Instead, he is much more engaged by the lives of those positioned between 
the celebrity politician and the crowd: the secret service agents who 
linger at the margins of the main event.

Costello's fascination with life on the margins is signalled in the 
novel's opening sentence. The story begins in a New Hampshire town called 
"Center Effing", but the centrality implied by this name is qualified by 
Costello's initial description of its location between two other 
landmarks: "the ocean and I-95".

The centre, here, is not central because it is the pulsing heart of 
events, but because it is centrally located between two other places.

And as the town is split so are the people.

The ocean and its concrete counterpart, the interstate highway, introduce 
the poles of nature and artificiality that divide each of Costello's 
characters.

His agents, in particular, live a kind of half-life, stretched between 
their "natural" roles at home as husbands, fathers, or mothers, and their 
official roles at work, erecting an artificial zone, free from accident, 
around their official charges. They are unable to occupy either half of 
their lives fully, and have to labour under the pressures of a split 
existence.

Big If is a carefully constructed novel that mixes civilian and political 
concerns, and it has already gained recognition in the United States, 
having been nominated for the National Book Award in 2002. It is 
Costello's second novel (his first to be published in Britain), and it is 
tempting to see the author himself as a figure on the margins of a more 
famous literary crowd.

Costello's friends include the prominent novelists Jonathan Franzen and 
David Foster Wallace, and he co-wrote a book about rap music, Signifying 
Rappers
(1990), with Wallace. Big If has some thematic similarities with Wallace's 
Infinite Jest (1996), and The Corrections (2001) by Franzen. It is, 
however, a notable individual achievement with its own idiosyncratic 
method of organization.

It does not have a single protagonist at its centre, relying instead on a 
large cast of characters; Costello wanted the novel to imitate the 
experience of immersion in a crowd, with different faces appearing and 
disappearing in the line of sight.

Its most developed emotional core emerges from the story of children 
trying to grow up under the shadow of influential parents. Costello's 
family drama concentrates on the Asplunds -particularly Vi (an agent), and 
her brother Jens (who works as a computer programmer) -as they try to come 
to terms with the legacy of their father, Walter, an atheist who works as 
a claims adjuster for a Connecticut insurance company. In most respects 
Walter's private life is a conventionally quiet, suburban affair, but his 
atheism and honesty drive him obsessively to delete the word "GOD" from 
the slogan "IN GOD WE TRUST" on all the banknotes that pass through his 
hands. But because Walter is not a nihilist he is uncomfortable with this 
deletion. We must, he thinks, believe in something, so he eventually 
alters the slogan to read "IN us WE TRUST". This substitution haunts and 
puzzles Vi in later years. She thinks:

she knew that he hadn't meant that we trust in the U.S., the United 
States, a unit of community meaninglessly large. No, he'd just meant that 
we should trust in a small town, in the people of a town, or maybe just 
the people that you know.

As Vi interprets it, Walter's belief is really an attempt to establish 
some reliable foundations by which to live and, as such, it resonates with 
a number of other secular belief- systems in the novel. Jens, for example, 
becomes a computer programmer after his scientific explorations lead him 
to "the true God: software". And the agents have been primed to believe in 
a set of principles called "The Certainties" that are the product of the 
extended labours of the protection-theorist Lloyd Felker.

Each group of characters wants something to invest in, but Costello 
reveals the hollowness of each of these frameworks of belief. In 
particular we are shown that Walter's faith, as glossed by Vi, is an empty 
one. In Mark Costello's novel the people you know, the people of a town, 
are especially difficult to judge, and likely to betray you. Husbands and 
wives, best friends and co-workers, are rarely reliable in this book. The 
wide-angled lens of Big If provides a large picture in which the 
narratives of the different characters are carefully interlinked to reveal 
disappointment and a world of rotten connections.