I write this in the wake of my recent review of Neal Stephenson's excellent book, Reamde. While there are many reasons to be critical of his work, he is an undeniably great author. However, this wouldn't be The Surly Writer without a regular dose of critique, and so I share with you a few more thoughts that have arisen as I allow the book's impression to sink in.
One of the biggest issues I've had with reading Stephenson is that his endings suck. It's a property endemic to the works of his I've read so far; the man simply doesn't end his novels well. They end, to be sure, but they suffer from what I like to call 'Hollywood Syndrome'. This is a formula you're probably familiar with, and I could spend the rest of this post compiling a list of awful movies that do this, but I'll spare you. Hollywood Syndrome's central tenet is that films (and many books, TV shows, etc.) sell synopses first, endings second.
This must be due in part to a simple reality of filmmaking, which is that feature films are expensive, difficult and take a long time to make. The modular nature of the way the film industry works makes it very difficult to predict the quality of the end product. Producers, directors, writers, actors, cameramen, boom operators, set designers, editors, special effects firms and many more people nobody will ever know about are involved in shipping the film that ends up on your theater screen. All any filmmaker can hope to do is assemble the best team they're able to, consisting of as many trustworthy people as possible, then work hard and hope for the best. Unfortunately, this monumental effort alone doesn't pitch that well to anybody investing the money to finance the film. Most investors don't give a shit about the end product, as long as it's profitable. Hence, the selling of synopses is key to getting a film off the ground. A film has to sound interesting, sexy, likeable or any of a long list of adjectives that will inspire people to open their wallets, both on the drawing board and at the box office.
Trouble is, once the film is funded and given the okay, it must move forward and play out how it plays out. Investors don't want to hear that the screenplay is crap and that the film will have to be reworked halfway through. They don't want to hear that the director's artistic vision isn't being realized. They don't care that the ending sucks. They want a film in their hands by summer, the holiday season or whichever is the film's marketably convenient deadline.
I'll repeat the crux of that last paragraph: Investors don't care that the ending sucks. By the time you're watching it, you've already paid, and the ROI is already in the process of being calculated. Movies don't sell endings - they sell synopses.
The stylings of the modern American film have trickled down into any modern medium you can imagine. Hollywood has developed such a strong oeuvre that you can hardly avoid buying into it, consciously or otherwise. Neal Stephenson's Reamde is a summer blockbuster on paper. Its high-volume explosions, exaggerated bodycount and larger-than-life locales practically beg to be adapted to the silver screen. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing a filmic novel, but it presents a number of pitfalls and cliches that can be very hard to avoid, and Stephenson puts his foot squarely in a number of them.
He assembles an unlikely cast of characters that play amusingly together, but whose incongruity could never hope to be reconciled by the end of the novel. No plot twist will adequately explain why the Russian antiterrorist special agent Sokolov ends up romantically cohabiting in the UK with Olivia, spy for MI6. An awkward stretch of the imagination allows a small-village Chinese native to develop a crush on a swarthy Bostonian military fratboy. The most plausible romantic coupling this novel produces is between the Hungarian hacker Csongor and the novel's protagonist, the unbelievably smart, rational, cool-headed and eminently able Zula. It's too much. These characters make for an exciting dossier when browsing the shelves of the local book store, but once the plot's laid out and the bad guy is dead, they're left standing around awkwardly, wondering what contextual misstep ever placed them all in a novel together.
While we're mentioning him, that dead bad guy fills another Hollywood cliche that's even harder to swallow again: the aimless and evil terrorist. He may as well have been a supernatural demon sent from hell to create plot movement in the novel, for all that his motives stand up to scrutiny. We meet him as he's organizing a terrorist bombing at a global conference in China (barely plausible until you consider the probable media coverage, or lack thereof, it would receive in that sovereignty). He then hijacks a plane to Canada and stupidly decides to hold Zula for ransom, simply asking to be prematurely apprehended. His eventual target is "somewhere in Middle America", no doubt to strike a blow against Capitalism on its home turf. The role he ends up serving is filmic indeed - he fills the last two hundred pages of the book with one stupid gunfight after another, eventually "getting it" in the head from Zula's Midwestern uncle, proving again that
A). the good guys always win;
B). don't fuck with Americans!
C). might makes right.
This last point in particular irks me. Why does a novel centered around hacking and the new frontier of the digital global village end with a gunfight in the woods against terrorists? The whole premise of the novel is that the supersmart niece of a tech-savvy ex-smuggler gets kidnapped in order to find a hip virus-writer in Xiamen. How does a novel based around geek exploits become a Western showdown? It's like someone taped over this book halfway through with Die Hard. This novel proves that the answer to the complex questions raised by Chinese eminence in global consumerism is a bullet in the head of a terrorist. Wait, what? Was the original title of this novel Wft? How could such a well-written novel by such a smart guy end so unforgivably badly?
Synopses sell, endings don't. Neal Stephenson doesn't care that his characters don't fit, that they're all autistically smart, that he couldn't have written his way out of this novel to save his life. He gets off on the scenario, on the very idea of having all these improbable perspectives woven together. He's interested in the potential for such a situation to occur. He's sold on his own synopsis, and he'll write this book because he wants it to sell to others.
Videogame developers put most of their efforts into the first half of their games, because statistics show that as little as 10% of gamers will ever reach the end. Will novels soon face similar sad statistics?
