Contingency Theory and the Need for Some Quiet
Mark Costello's "Big If" is about the futile desire for control and the insatiable need to believe that contingencies can be anticipated and met. They can't be, and aren't, in this novel about Secret Service agents and gaming programmers, both of whom desperately try to outwit ahead of time those who would foil their seemingly unfoilable plans. Blurbers went wild with this one, as nearly everybody whips out the obligatory Pynchon or DeLillo reference, Franzen and Wallace slobber, and The Economist says it should be stamped with The Great American Novel on the cover. Costello examines complex systems unfathomable to the average asshole on the street and suggests even the geniuses devising and unraveling those systems can't get their minds entirely around them, and given the warpspeed increasing complexity of modern life, that probably explains at least part of the fawning praise. But Great American Novels have plots, and this one doesn't kick in until the very end of its 350 pages. It's far more concerned with establishing character and having those folks briefly meet in its climactic scene. It works for me as a behind-the-scenes docu-drama of Secret Service agents and as an occasionally funny satire about certain aspects of modern life, but it does not exactly carry you along with its forward motion. And the frustration a computer programmer feels when he cannot anticipate how gamers will take over his best laid plans does not help me understand the frustration I feel when I can't get my 4-year old to stop screaming, "Poopyhead, poopyhead" at the top of his lungs for the third consecutive dinner. I much preferred when that programmer's wife, a real estate agent to the ultra-rich in New Hampshire, finally loses it when one of her trophy wife clients refuses to commit to yet another perfect new house. So maybe, once again, it's just my petty domestic concerns that keep me from relating to the real patterns shaping modern life. Now, if I could only figure out what Byzantine network controls my sinus cavities...