Anywhen You Want It

When Mark Costello's books made their way to me I braced myself for my kinda blast.

Bag MenThe sleek packaging; the sly, wry titles; the Fed henchman background, all seemed to point to a new pulp presence. Costello's debut, Bag Men (Harvest/Harcourt $14; originally published in '97 under the nom de guerre John Flood), didn't disappoint either. Here was a Turow for hipsters, set in the then but written decidedly - decisively - in the now. In one fond sitting I had found one fierce new voice in pulpdom.

Then I turned to Big If (Harvest/Harcourt $14), and, as Big Ifis too often the case when my imagination gets too far ahead of itself, I discovered I was gladly mistaken. This cat had more than one slick, nicotine-stained trick up his rolled sleeve. I had set out to shake the hand of a pulpist; I was gripped by a pulpiteer.

Yeah, yeah, I know, literally speaking a "pulpiteer" should be "a person concerned with pulpits," but the only literal thing in this hard life is literature, by which I mean of course fiction, and that's a whole different sort of literality. By my own twisted etymological reasoning a "pulpist" is "one who's versed in the art and engaged in the practice of pulp" (literally: "a person pursuing, using, or concerned with pulp"), while a pulpiteer takes pulp to a whole new pantheon, say, one who pushes from pulp's hard-boiled, matter-of-fact platform (the pulpit - get it?) to stage bold new raids on the imagination. By this mad reasoning, Ed McBain (in his beloved 87th Precinct), Donald Westlake (doin' wise-ass Dortmunder), James Lee Burke (writing somber, noble, fallible Robicheaux) are pulpists. Denis Johnson (stripped to his soul), Chuck Palahniuk (flipped to the gills), and, on occasion, Don Delillo (the stick to the stuck) are pulpiteers. To the former, pulp is a device ("plan, scheme, trick"); to the latter it's a weapon ("means for gaining an advantage in conflict"). Both come loaded, and both are remarkable in their own right. I'm here to remark about the latter.

And that's one Big If. If Jonathan Franzen's Corrections were stacked against the house; if Dickens had been schooled in the New, New Journalism; if Henry Bromell's swell Little America had occurred in the super-sized homeland; if Guarding Tess was rewired by Richard Price; and if Balzac had made meta for the masses (didn't he?). If the Human Comedy was a dot.comedy (isn't it), and men and women of letters were our own best conscience (why aren't they?). If all these ifs were but-free and boiled-hard, we'd be close to the gist of Big If.

I shouldn't spoil the story - taut, crisp, and beautifully duplicitous as it is - but I will cut to the core of its characters, which Costello renders to a Pickwick quick. The Apslund family - stoic daddy Walter; lean, green thumb Evelyn; prodigal square son Jens; straight, strong Vi - are a clan formed of New Hampshire granite whose second generation is shape-shifted by events of the day. Boy wunderkind Jens contracts the dot.com virus and succumbs to the false promise of filthy lucre (he writes "monster logic" for BigIf, a massive, multi-layer Web war game that Dad deems at once "immoral" and "amoral"). The very Vi shoots the moon via the protection racket (she's a Secret Service agent attached to the unnamed Vice President's campaign detail). Among those in their unstill, small cosmos are "Caliphobic" detail queen Gretchen Williams, the light blue-blooded real estate mesmerist Peta Boyle, a virulently adulterous "dude" named Tashmo, a hyper chronic betting man dubbed O'Teen, and the shadow Moss Property line, "middle-class conquistadors, [with] storms on their foreheads, lightening in their eyes, and pork chops on their minds." There's more - much more - (multitudes, remember?), but those are much of the inner hard core.

Almost. Ultimately responsible to the core are two primaries - systems G-man Lloyd Felker and NASA washout Vaughn Naubek - for whom the bells must toll. Egghead Felker, creator of a literal, virtual shield called The Dome, and author of its near-Biblical implementals (the Certainties) as well as its dangerous antithesis (The Sensitives), is a loose cannon with a gut full of gunpowder. Equally-endowed ovaloid Naubek, with a disastrous O-ring past and a corrupted co-creating present in the virtual bloodlust of BigIf, is - literally - being driven postal. Both fret the fallibility of their almost altruistic creations, and thus are destined to reap the consequences of what their fallible creations bring about.

Over Russo's rivers and through Faulknerian floods they go, at odds enmeshed in Ellroyesque conspiracies, at odder evens transversing Delillo-like mazes - the living, dying, splitting ends a veritable network of comeuppance that's pure Costello. Those who stick close to their own micro-cosmos endure but the slightest of consequences, while the bold souls who dare to go macro and create cosmos akin to Godly are forced to face finalities proportionate to a/the Creator. Is Costello cautioning us about playing God? Or is he simply daring us to try?

Big If takes place before the big, fat bubble burst all over America's face, in the heady days that preceded our own occupations (regime change anyone?). But its turn signals clearly indicate the worst has yet to come. If Bag Men is/was a marvelous diversion - a guilty pleasure for the guilt-ridden among us - Big If is a revelatory warning, a harbinger of our collective disintegration, and the courage it's gonna take to keep our world at bay. (Clue: face it.) Anyhow you do it; anywhere you see it; anywhen you want it - there's always gonna be a Big If.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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