Reamde - More Thoughts

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?

Reat Dhis

Another Neal Stephenson novel! I might say I'm becoming a fan, though that would imply an admiration of his work. It's not an endorsement I'll freely dispense, though this book ultimately helped: Reamde. That's right, you're not dyslexic - Reamde.

You'll notice two things from this title right away. The first is the not-so-subliminal messaging: read me, a compelling title for any book, really, and it's a wonder in this golden age of marketing that every book isn't named similarly. I can see it now on the shelves in glossy hardcover - Pagenurter by Dean Koontz. Mamnaker by Tom Clancy. Roktscar Histper by David Sedaris.

The second thing you'll notice is Stephenson taking on a digital-era meme (I still shudder to use that word) by A). naming his book after the ubiquitous file included with most pieces of software and B). scrambling it to simulate the offhandedly poor English of online Babblespeak. He may as well have called this book Teh L33t H4x0rs and been done with it. But he's not done with it, with proving himself as the most geek-savvy writer of popular fiction in the early 21st century. So now I have to read another thousand-page epic.

The subject topically being global online videogaming (also recently naively attempted by Ernest Cline in his novel Ready Player One). Fortunately, Stephenson sidesteps overt exploration of the human psyche through tired allegory and instead makes the game a fun vehicle with which to examine cultural trends in the modern era. I like this game; it's a medieval World-of-Warcraft-alike with a focus on geology and converting in-game virtual currency to real-life currency (this spontaneous economic model is dubbed 'gold farming'; read the wikipedia entry). Stephenson has honed in on some of the more interesting developments in Massively Multiplayer Online Games or Gaming (MMOGs) and dreamed up a game that supports and encourages them. Anybody who has played one of these games would love to spend time in this world, and I have at times found myself wishing it did exist so I could get a taste of it. This is the end-goal of any author of a fictional universe - to make a place in which the reader desires to spend more time - and to set this universe within the context of a real-world modern fiction is clever. Touché, Neal. You are very clever.

So there's this videogame world known as T'Rain which is the brainchild of an entrepreneur of questionable but mostly harmless character known as Richard Forthrast. He belongs to a large Iowan extended family, which gives Stephenson room to explore two of his apparent fetishes: gun culture and the Midwest. He even slips in a mention of Libertarian survivalism, though it's a passing nod. It's like Stephenson is flirting with an approach to the Great American Novel without yet committing himself.

 Through a series of fantastical events, Richard's adoptive niece is kidnapped by Russian mobsters and taken to China, tasked with tracking down the writer of a computer virus targeted at T'Rain players, but instead she instigates a quarrel with a cell of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists and ends up kidnapped by them as they mount a bombing operation back in North America. It's a long story - 981 pages, to be exact. Reamde has more plot twists than a yearly subscription to The National Enquirer. Stephenson is determined to bring people from all walks of life together, and his cast of characters looks like a Peace Corps pamphlet: an Eritrean adopted in Iowa; a black-skinned, dreadlocked  Islamic terrorist from Wales; an Anglo-Chinese MI6 operative stationed in Vancouver.

The result is a global thrill-ride that vacillates wildly between fascinating and ridiculous. In Reamde, Stephenson has eschewed ambition at plot-outset for ambition in plot-execution. He's bitten off less to chew, for this is no Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon, but boy does he chew on it. He has focused on writing an absolutely ripping yarn, and I applaud the decision. He is relaxing into a style that suits him, one of unique characterization and breathless storytelling. He delights in creating characters with vastly different backgrounds and motives and then cramming them into stressful situations, like going through your yard and putting every bug you find in a big jar and then shaking it vigorously.

Unfortunately, this novel comes perilously close to being shaken to death on a number of occasions. Stephenson is over-indulgent as ever, prone to concept-dropping for the google-happy reader and going into quasi-masturbatory detail about guns, guns and more guns. I never want to read another word about high-velocity rounds and their behaviors. And had I drunk a shot of something stiff every time I read the word 'caromed' in this novel, I may have enjoyed some of its wordier passages more.

If you know Neal Stephenson's work, this novel will fit very easily into your world view. If you don't, know that it will be a lengthy undertaking, immensely enjoyable but of questionable worth in retrospect. I heartily enjoyed this book, and I'm glad it's bloody well over now.

Yellow and Overripe

 I just finished The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto (a pen name inspired by the banana flower, of which I'd never heard until now). She is a celebrated Japanese author with a large global following. The back cover calls the novel "...A quietly stunning tour de force." The Chicago Tribune describes Yoshimoto as "...A master storyteller [whose] ... sensuality is subtle, masked and extraordinarily powerful." "Her achievements are already legend," according to the Boston Globe.

I say she laid it on pretty thickly with The Lake.

I'll start this review with a somewhat lengthy aside that I hope you'll forgive.

In high school I studied film for a year. At the time I was enrolled I wasn't that interested, but my wise and magical guidance counselor knew better and insisted. It was a new and exciting program, she said, and I was a senior with space in my schedule. I consented, and sure enough, I loved it. Our teacher had brought in some old movie theater seats and a projector, and we spent many a class watching films and discussing them - not a bad way to spend an afternoon at school.

It was in this class that I was first presented with the narrative balance of show and tell. Any story must be told from a perspective, and the choice of perspective influences its delivery. Stories usually play out with action and dialogue, but it is up to the author to decide how much 'moral' to inject into the telling, and how much room for conjecture by the audience to leave. My teacher held but certainly did not invent the opinion that voiceover narration was often abused in film and that such a visual medium should be trying to make statements visually wherever possible. By that benchmark, narration cheapens a film by feeding a conclusion to the viewer, forgoing their own process of deriving meaning. It depends on the piece, of course, but his general rule was that narration should be avoided wherever possible.

This idea was new to me, and I quickly took it to heart. I agree with the notion that the room for interpretation is often an ingredient in the best work, for it allows a person the opportunity to have an individual and maybe unique experience. At the time I was listening to a lot of instrumental, textural music that in retrospect I enjoyed specifically because it was devoid of any 'slant' - it didn't tell me how to feel about listening to it. I could use it as a vehicle to explore my own state of being.

The Lake gives the reader no such freedom. Seldom have I felt so trapped in a narrative, so linearly fed an author's conclusions.

It's a girl-meets-boy story with a familiar subtext. She's an art student dealing with the loss of her mother. He's an abstract thinker with an intriguing boyish vulnerability and a dark past. They live across the way from each other and meet by standing at their respective windows, which is just so sweet. Eventually they come together; he's awkward and cute and earnest; she's straightforward and curious. They go to visit friends of his, and in the most predictable fashion imaginable, she discovers the truth about his skeletons in the closet. And then he opens up about it. The End.

That's not a spoiler. You can't spoil a story that's already been written so many times it has entered the archetypal realm. The confused young man finding validation through the receptive understanding of a young woman, the small and infirm but clairvoyant voice-of-god character, the magnitude of adult folly as seen through children's eyes - these are all tired concepts whose conclusions have already been reached, and Yoshimoto pulls nothing new from them. Her scenes are so hackneyed, they suck the magic right out of her lovely words. And they are lovely, as promised - her simple depictions are vivid and her characterizations crisp, as I've come to expect from my limited reading of modern Japanese fiction. There's an economy of words and an elegance here. You'll be touched by her distillations of life's gritty truths...

... Until you read the 50th, and then the 100th, and then you're glad the book's over already, because damn. You'll be hard pressed to find one page in this novel that does not attempt to shed light on some touching corner of humanity, or make a clever observation of human behavior, and it quickly starts to feel forced. Dialogue in this book is 25% conversation, 75% inner monologue, and I walked away from the story feeling like a breathless sports commentator had been calling the blow-by-blow of each plot development as it unfolded. Give your story some space, Banana! The few pretty metaphors she works in are swiftly explicated away before your reading eyes, leaving you to wonder what this story could have said on its own, at its own pace.

I hope this novel is not indicative of the general tenor of her work, because I am disappointed. It could have been short, sweet and poignant, instead of short-but-still-too-long. Perhaps it's that I read The Lake after having recently finished Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, a fantastic display of simple showing, interspersed with small, delicious tellings that only heighten its surreal mystery. That's a novel I will probably read multiple times before fully understanding it. I felt I'd finished The Lake a quarter of the way in, and thus simply reaching the end was all the reread I'd ever need.

Crypto-slashing

Now 30% longer than needed!

 Another book review! And I feel at least partially surly about this book: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I picked it up when it first came out - I was still in high school, was pretty geeky, had loved The Diamond Age and was eager to learn about Alan Turing and the founding of the digital computer. 50 or so pages in, I put the book down and did not pick it back up until January of 2011. It just didn't pull me in like I had expected it would. Now, with my tech job and a rudimentary understanding of information theory and some hands-on experience under my belt, the book feels more relevant to me and I have been able to get into it.

First things first: this novel is 1130 pages long, excluding the appendix and other extras. I am not particularly bothered or intimidated by long books, provided they don't waste my time. With that parameter in mind, I'm on the fence about Cryptonomicon.

The first thing you'll notice about this novel is how exceptionally verbose it is. Maybe Stephenson has a doting editor, or gets payed by the word ala Dickens, or his publishing house decided he had achieved enough success by this point to indulge him in a monolithic opus project. Books like Cryptonomicon are the literary equivalent of the double LP and should be viewed with the same skepticism. The shocking length at which ideas and facts are unpacked in this novel is partially forgivable due to its claustrophobic narration by a number of autists. I can't help but sense, though, that it is also a function of how taken Stephenson is with his own cleverness, and an excuse to show off how much homework he did before writing this novel.

Let's be fair, though, and give credit where credit is due: he has exhaustively researched World War II (especially the Pacific Theater and all the geography involved), has a convincing understanding of all the war-era AND contemporary technologies he references, has a (what I can only assume to be) decent grasp on mathematics and cryptography, and manages to get this all across in a very entertaining manner. Cryptonomicon is a triumph on many levels, and there are any number of nerds in any number of fields who will be tickled pink by its handling of the subject matter.

It's also a self-indulgent conceptual and linguistic wankfest. Stephenson soars off on tangent after masturbatory tangent, tackling subjects as diverse as proper cereal consumption technique, specific sexual fetishes of minor plot characters, and dot-com-boom era Silicon Valley eccentricities. The selective microscope of each narrator's stream of consciousness hones in on awkward images as relentlessly as an episode of Ren and Stimpy. These are delivered with such frequency and gusto that I found myself skimming or skipping whole pages of text that held no conceivable hope of plot advancement. If you want an excuse to peer into the quirky observations of an intelligent man, you could do worse than Cryptonomicon, but I assure you the revelations are tepid at best. I am tempted to view this book as an outlet for years of accumulated musings that didn't warrant publication on their own merits.

These intimate narrations, though, are also at the heart of Cryptonomicon's finest strength: its characterization. Each point of view (and there are a good handful, by the end of the novel) is presented with a verve I've found unmatched by anything I've read recently. Stephenson is able to convey the thoughts, feelings and observations of his characters with such immediacy that the constant switching of narrators between chapters is always a pleasure, and avoids the dissonance I've found reading other authors who try this technique. My favorite character by far is the mathematical savant crypto-genius, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. The world as seen filtered through his peculiar literalisms is a joy to behold, and I found myself reading his chapters with childish delight. His grandson Randy, on the other hand, plays a less likable and diffident tech brat. Stephenson's attempt to cast him in a geek/playboy duality falls pretty flat, especially when the novel's romantic interest tough-girl Amy Shaftoe shows up to validate him. I didn't find their dynamic at all believable...

... Which leads me to my next criticism of this novel: the (un)believability of the whole scenario. I know, I know, it's modern fiction, which will always struggle to reconcile its larger-than-life characters and events with the contemporary world we (the readers) live in and know firsthand. By the end, though, Stephenson was stretching credibility. ***SPOILER ALERT*** Am I really expected to believe that the Shaftoe and Waterhouse lineages (the reigning patriarch of each having shared the same special secret unit during WWII) would rejoin in an unlikely business venture in the modern era? And that codes intercepted by the late Waterhouse and implausibly passed down to his grandson would happen to apply to a treasure-hunting operation underway by the Shaftoes? AND that another member of that secret unit (who also turns out to be an annoyingly unnecessary Deus Ex Machina gimmick that I was hoping to avoid having to mention) would become entangled in the operation, 50 years later? AND that several different capitalist ventures started by workers who were responsible for the burying of the treasure would also become embroiled in Randy's tech startup? AND... the list goes on. I don't mind some fun synchronistic plot connections in a history-meets-modern-era yarn, but a venn diagram showing the unlikely overlapping of relevant plot characters and bloodlines in this novel would look like a slinky after your tyrant toddler niece has gotten ahold of it. Again, Neal, your cleverness doesn't impress me.

This is a fine example of an underwhelming story told in a fascinating way. It's a fine excuse to show off a nerd's view of the world. But it ended with a big fat WAH-WAH-WAHHHHH ride into the sunset that left me feeling like I found a Nestle cream egg at the bottom of a bag of Callebaut chocolates. The plot veered into what I considered to be the least interesting conclusion possible and left me soured.

I walk away from this novel saying that it is a fun lark for anybody interested in tracing the development of computer technology from its founding during WWII through its first global peak, the dot-com boom. Cryptonomicon makes math, computers and autism fun and quirky. But Stephenson could easily have capped this novel at 800 pages and spared us his self-indulgences. And the geography lessons. I mean, damn.