Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson: ***1/8

It's been said that you can't judge a book by its cover, and though that's completely true, I will admit to choosing a lot of my reading material based on appearances. I wade through the aisles with the classic bookstore head-tilt, skimming titles and author names until I stop on something for reasons completely unclear to me that I then pull from the stacks to examine more closely. I know it has something to do with font choice and title, but I couldn't express anything specific there. Once I pick up a book, I go through a more thorough check of the cover art and press quotes before deciding if maybe I should read a sample page. But you're still talking about some pretty un-scientific stuff going on here. I can't even say that this method works that well for me, since although it has yielded some real winners over the years (DFW's Infinite Jest, Wolfe's Book of the New Sun), it's also steered me astray (Spinrad's Child of Fortune, Zelazney's Chronicles of Amber). Nonetheless, when I first saw Cryptonomicon on the sci-fi/fantasy shelves of the Poughkeepsie Barnes and Noble this past fall, I knew I would read it. It's got the good press comments, the 900-plus pages, some cool looking runes on the cover, and witty dialogue on most every page - it's a Jeff magnet. I held off buying it for a while, mostly because a friend told me that his previous Stephenson experience (with the cyber-punky Snow Crash) was a decent if unspectacular one. But once I saw the trade paperback at less than half price at my favorite used bookstore in Buffalo, I knew the time had come.

Ultimately, it was a fun experience. It reads pretty quickly, as quickly as a book this size can read anyway, and there's a lot of comedy, some really loony situations, and a real plot to push it along - intrigue, war, mayhem, money, romance. The book centers around several leads, based in modern times and World War II, and they're all rich, full characters. Furthermore, they're distinctly different people, and Stephenson proves that he can write diverse characters very well. Sometimes the book suffered from the "chapter-per-character" syndrome where the author jumps between stories with every chapter and stifles momentum, but I can't imagine how difficult it is to maintain tension in a 900-page book without jumping around pretty frequently. In all, I'd say Stephenson handles this quite well, stringing along several seemingly unrelated stories while maintaining my interest in all of them. In fact, I found myself enjoying the book as a collection of mostly unrelated stories with a single theme, and was a little disappointed in the end by the tightly knit conclusions, though I imagine I would be in the minority in this regard. It's just that found his characters more interesting than the actual story, so I enjoyed the book most when it focused on his characters in funny and unusual situations than when they were actually trying to accomplish something 'real.'

It says something on the jacket about how the book is "an examination of the way that the flow of information shapes history," and I suppose that's true, although one of the weird aspects of the book is the fact that more than half of it would be classified as a historical novel about WWII, but I'm left completely uncertain as to how much of this stuff actually occurred. Was the war really won by code-breakers? When Stephenson says the army broke such-and-such code and sunk a submarine off the coast of Italy, did this happen? Because sometimes there are very clearly real historical events (Pearl Harbor, battle of Midway), but then other times I don't really know what to believe. Which of these characters actually existed? Not that this matters regarding whether or not it's a good book, but it's a strange example of how reading historical fiction can leave someone with some knowledge of a subject more confused than before about reality. Reading a historical novel about ancient Egypt would no doubt be enlightening, because I don't know much about ancient Egypt. But a novel about WWII, a subject studied at some length in my school days, seems more uncertain.

I've joked before about how some books that shouldn't really be classified as sci-fi/fantasy get stuck there because of the previous works of the author (notably with Delaney's Dhalgren, which is mostly just an investigation of issues of race/class/sexuality in America despite a couple of inexplicable phenomena). But never before had I read a book that has absolutely no elements of sci-fi or fantasy that was shelved there, as is the case with Cryptonomicon. For long time, I kept wondering if these elements would appear, and they never did, but something else happened. I realized that this book is essentially a nerd-fantasy. It's got all the classic elements - the everyboy that becomes important in world events, unexpected romances, an epic scope and grand adventure - but it centers around technology instead of swords and sorcery. In some way, though, I feel like this cryptography (codes) is a kind of nerd sorcery, so I'm going to say that it fulfills that element too.

Quotes:
pg. 78:" This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research."

pg. 99:"Or perhaps it is just that he is wearing leather shoes for once: topsiders, which he's always thought of as the mark of effete preppies."

pg. 101:"Pies crumble when you slice them too thin."

pg. 442:"The United States military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization."

pg. 474-5:"Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical body in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?"

pg. 572:"He's going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his works, but because he wants to fuck Mary."

pg. 573:"It turns out that, like all ethnic groups that have been consistently screwed for a long time, the Inner Qwghlmians have great music."
(winter 2003)


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