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h2oetry's review against another edition
5.0
Mark Costello’s hard-boiled political story tale as prescient and present today as it must have when it was published in 2002. I also think he was robbed of the National Book Award, a mere finalist to Julia Glass’s “Three Junes.”
Costello tosses the reader into the lives of Secret Service agents & video game designers, as familial obligations and obfuscations take the toll during the high-stakes of a presidential election.
It’s about protection and invention with paranoia fueling the weaving plot lines. Reality proves difficult for those entrusted with forging anticipatory calibrations of possibilities, the What Ifs that alter the flow of life at each switch-point. What happens when human choice gets in the way of expectations?
The unnamed vice president being protected is a blackhole or vacuum of society’s compulsion toward power lust, stamped history, fleeting quests of fame, et cetera. Costello doesn’t need to deploy his name, for he’s never really a person, just a perspective.
ps: I can hardly fathom the 1989 literary powerhouse Cambridge apartment that housed M. & D. with so much pulsing talent on the precipice.
Costello tosses the reader into the lives of Secret Service agents & video game designers, as familial obligations and obfuscations take the toll during the high-stakes of a presidential election.
It’s about protection and invention with paranoia fueling the weaving plot lines. Reality proves difficult for those entrusted with forging anticipatory calibrations of possibilities, the What Ifs that alter the flow of life at each switch-point. What happens when human choice gets in the way of expectations?
The unnamed vice president being protected is a blackhole or vacuum of society’s compulsion toward power lust, stamped history, fleeting quests of fame, et cetera. Costello doesn’t need to deploy his name, for he’s never really a person, just a perspective.
ps: I can hardly fathom the 1989 literary powerhouse Cambridge apartment that housed M. & D. with so much pulsing talent on the precipice.
greyscarf's review
3.0
The summary to this novel would make it seem dry & uninteresting, but I didn't find it to be so. Costello excels on taking specified fields (Beltway politics, programming a MMORPG) & making them relateable. Even though Vi is the main focus of the novel, I was much more interested in Jens' story & the ethics of creating an alternate reality while trying to make money or predict human behavior. The story is good, but seems to get away from the writer, giving some of the other subplots more prominence than they should probably get. In the end, Costello does tie everything up well, but I wish some of the other sections had had a bit more substance.
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