But until Vanity Fair starts hosting the only decent after-party, no matter how Hollywood the awards ceremony becomes, no matter how many black-tied publishers, agents and authors show up at the Marriott Marquis on Nov. 20 for a $1,000-a-head rubber-chicken dinner and some jokes by Mr. Martin, the most attention-grabbing moment in the yearly publishing extravaganza will always be now, when the nominees are announced.

Typically, the pre-ceremony talk-especially about fiction, which along with nonfiction is the only category most book people really care about-centers on the books that didn't make the short lists. "Where's the new Donna Tartt novel?" asked one critic, referring to the long-awaited and ambivalently reviewed The Little Friend , which, with a publication date of Nov. 1, got in under the deadline of Nov. 30. Where, for that matter, is Knopf's very expensive and, for a few weeks, best-selling The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter? Also nowhere to be seen: Jeffrey Eugenides' widely praised Middlesex , just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

According to Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation, literary opinions are not his job. He's around to choose the judges-whom he culls from lists of recommendations given by previous winners and judges. (He makes those decisions as early as the spring; judges begin reading hundreds of submissions in early summer.) "I tell the judges it's their sensibilities that we want, and that the decisions are theirs alone," Mr. Baldwin said. Judges are also not supposed to talk to the press, but one former judge said that she was told by her committee chairman to try to ignore reviews, blurbs and "buzz" as much as possible.

Except for the fact that one of the fiction judges, Jay McInerney, was the author of a rave review for Mark Costello's Big If (before-miraculously-that book appeared on the fiction list), the panel seems to have taken a publicity-blind approach. Sort of. Mr. McInerney and his teammates-Bob Schacochis, Adrienne Brodeur, David Wong Louie and Jacquelyn Mitchard-chose authors that the National Book Foundation which administers the awards, calls "relatively young writers-none of whom have published more than one other novel." (Somehow they forgot about the 25-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated , and also about Alice Sebold, whose first novel, the commercial and critical hit The Lovely Bones , has sold 1.6 million copies and counting.) But most of these nominated writers have some pretty powerful media connections. Mr. Costello, after all, is the partner of Scribner's editor in chief, Nan Graham. Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here was chosen for the Today show book club by his former teacher (and last year's fiction winner), Jonathan Franzen, and one of the stories in the book was originally published in Zoetrope , whose founding editor is one Adrienne Brodeur. Martha McPhee ( Gorgeous Lies ) is one of those McPhees. (Extra-credit tidbits: Another of père John's daughters, Sarah, has a forthcoming book on architecture, and her step-sister, Joan Sullivan, just published a memoir of working on Bill Bradley's failed Presidential campaign.) As for Julia Glass, her Three Junes was a Good Morning America book-club choice. Brad Watson-a visiting writer in residence at the University of West Florida and author of the nominated The Heaven of Mercury -seems to be the only nominee out of the big-publishing loop.

The fiction list lacks not only a clear favorite, but also a controversial anti- favorite-think In America , by Susan Sontag, in 2000-that could provide what contest-watchers live for: a big fat upset. By contrast, the nonfiction judges-Christopher Merrill, Anthony Brandt, Gail Buckley, Mary Karr and Michael Kinsley-put a strong front-runner on the nonfiction list: Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate , a 1,000-plus-page installment of the author's L.B.J. magnum opus that took almost a decade to produce. Most National Book Awards–watchers have barely heard of the other nominees.

Then again, sometimes the National Book Awards committees like sleepers. That's how Cold Mountain won the fiction category in 1997. And it's how, the next year, Alice McDermott's Charming Billy won over Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Robert Stone's Damascus Gate , although I suspect the big guys just canceled each other out that year. If this becomes the year of the underdog, I'd root for Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man ; she's every thinking person's favorite magazine writer (in GQ and elsewhere) and a funny, pretty novelist ( Stern Men ) to boot. I haven't read the other three nominees-Devra Davis' When Smoke Ran Like Water , Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Steve Olson's Mapping Human History -but their titles, at least, have that eat-your-vegetables quality. Whether this will help or hurt depends on the judges' mood on the day of the awards ceremony. That's when the foundation sends the committees to lunch-just don't look for them at all-too-visible publishing hot spots like Michael's or the Union Square Café-to make their final decisions.

Of course, nobody ever said the National Book Awards are supposed to reflect popularity, although they do-at least for a minute-increase it, despite what one publisher who wasn't nominated told me: "Prize-winners are not usually best-sellers." But this wouldn't be publishing without a healthy dose of Schadenfreude . Publicly, publishers say nothing but nice things about the nominated titles. Privately, they bicker and bitch about who's been excluded. And who came blame them? If I were at F.S.G. or Scribner's, I'd be miffed at being shut out in all four categories. Both of those prestigious houses have, in past years, gotten many nominations; last year, they were winners with The Corrections and The Noonday Demon , respectively. But maybe that's the point: While house-proud publishers think the National Book Awards are reflections on them, the authors and agents who supply them with books know otherwise. How else could the partner of Scribner's editor in chief get away with publishing his book at Norton, and the student of F.S.G. star Jonathan Franzen end up at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday?

Sheesh. Doesn't anybody have brand loyalty anymore?

Those Secret Service types with the suits and the shades and the wires in their ears-any novel that can put you inside their heads deserves an appreciative audience. Big If successfully maps the thoughts of a trio of agents charged with the protection of a Vice President campaigning in a Presidential primary-and that's just to begin with. Mark Costello also has a knack for surfaces; he gets the feel of places and things; he stirs you into the thick of an American moment.

There's still more: Mr. Costello is aiming higher than simple entertainment. Never pretentious and only occasionally "literary," Big If situates itself somewhere on the same shelf with the novels of Don DeLillo and Richard Ford. Although it's only Mr. Costello's second novel-and not up there with Underworld or Independence Day - Big If suggests that Mr. Costello has the talent and the ambition to one day write a big, powerful book (there's no hurry).

One of the agents, Vi Asplund, is a young woman in mourning for her father; Gretchen Williams, the V.P.'s chief-of-detail, is a 45-year-old black single mother who knows that "above GS-10 or so, the Service, like a mountain, grew white as snow and also very cold"; and Tashmo is an incorrigible philanderer who was on the Reagan detail when John Hinckley Jr. fired off his tribute to Jodie Foster.

Agents in a crowd, or along the ropes separating crowd and candidate, go deep into what they call "vacant mode" ("total watchfulness, scan the hands, scan the hands, always the hair trigger"); Vi guesses that they all have "such shitty home lives" not just because they're constantly traveling but also because they're forced to "toggle back and forth from vacant mode … to normal people mode, whatever that might be." Vi herself has to struggle to stay vacant: "[T]he faces on the rope were bar code, miles of it, and she scanned."

One threat to the V.P. turns out to be a programmer who worked with Vi's brother, Jens, writing code for a war game called BigIf. (Jens is a fan of another computer game, Red Motorcade, "which let you relive the murder of John Kennedy in the role of Oswald, the Cubans, the CIA, the Soviets, the Cosa Nostra, or the Secret Servicemen playing in thwart mode.") Through Jens, Mr. Costello introduces the notion of a world reduced to a computer's binary logic: "Life, wisdom, speed, strength, agility, time, fate, beauty, death-everything was numbers crunched through algorithms endlessly."

It's Jens' wife, Peta, a high-end real-estate agent, who's our window on the "normal world," away from both computers and the business of safeguarding politicians. Peta's job is to house the lucky few who've profited to the max from the New Economy; she puts a roof over an upgraded version of the American dream. Her clients require self-mulching gardens, helipads, walk-in humidors.

Mr. Costello gives the impression that he's casting a fresh eye on the world-a fresh and playful eye. We visit a retirement community called Grassy Knoll. We sympathize with Gretchen, who's worrying about her weight: "She was coming off a solid year of food-verb events on the campaign trail, corn-boils, fish-frys, weiner-roasts, bean-bakes, salad-tosses." (Despite her worries, we catch her eating a pretzel, "the big kind with the mustard and the road salt.") Tashmo, who used to patrol the woods at Camp David, reflects that Lyme disease "was basically old age except you caught it from a deer." Here's Peta driving along an interstate, puzzling out a theory of rubber-necking: "Highways were the place of straight ahead, lanes and lines ... a place of architected flow, rails and information. Any break in flow, any accident, was doubly engrossing because the eyes were starved for something jarring."

Big If is a good book with a flaw: It doesn't get far enough beneath its brilliantly rendered surfaces . Yes, Mr. Costello has done an impressive amount of homework: He knows the Secret Service and he knows programming. More important, he knows his characters-they feel real. But he's restless, too quick to hop from one head to another. We don't understand Vi's protracted mourning and her anomie any better at the end of the novel than we did at the beginning. A reader needs to live with characters a while before their inner lives blossom, the way they do, for example, in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (Mr. Franzen, who's been generous with his name in the wake of his own success, bestowed a handsome blurb here, as did David Foster Wallace).

No single storyline ties Big If together. The fact that many of the characters go out every day and risk their lives ("If she saw the muzzle of a pistol coming up, she was trained to shout Gun gun and pivot on her outside leg and curl across the VP's chest") absolves Mr. Costello of the need to plot: Suspense is built into the package. If he'd been obliged to spin a yarn, to supply motive and other psychological baggage, he might have pushed himself into more resonant depths.

He does, though, have a coherent theme: our need for protection-and our hunger for risk-in a dangerous world, a world in which, sooner or later, the relentless, amoral logic of algorithm will escalate accident into disaster. It's a matter of mathematical inevitability. In the end, this is the brilliance of Mark Costello's Big If , the sly way he gets you to think about what it is the Secret Service is actually protecting-the American Way-as the candidate works a New Hampshire crowd: Howyadoin, howyadoin, goodtaseeya, howyadoin .

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.