A Review of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, or ‘Nobody loses all the time’ 1

I was really disappointed in this book. Having read two of his earlier works, Snow Crash and Halo Conspiracy—A Cool Thin Leather You, I was settling into my pecan gilt reading throne, buckles buckled, hatches battened and eyes wide preparing for the adventure to come. First, the book is nice looking. The outside of the text had what we used to call Pizazz. After one look at this book’s cover, I was on the phone. “Bill [William Shawn, former editor of the New Yorker], this young man’s got It. On the way up, if I have anything to say about it.” Well, some Tina lassie seems to have usurped Billy boy’s office. The secretary had the stones to suggest I make an appointment. You just never know in this crazy, distorted world of ours, folks. I decided the only acceptable course of action was to drive over to the New Yorker and strangle the upstart and take my pal Bill to lunch, but since I had a couple of hours to kill before the lounge at Petra’s opened, I decided to go ahead and finish the book. (The astute reader might point out that I had failed to allot time for the actual fight with Tina Brown into my schedule. The truth is, I had been hankering for a good throttlin’ for a couple of weeks, and had a few slots penciled in for fisticuffs every morning and afternoon. Also, having skull-dragged more than my share of punks and literary malcontents, I was confident that I could knock Ms. Brown out fairly quickly—it’s not as if I was going to try to wrestle a wad of 20’s from the scotch addled paws of either of those VanBuren twins. Those gals learned everything they know from their days in the cockfighting circuit.)

The book began with inordinate promise. To be honest, I expected to have more effort understanding the book, but I found it no more crypto than the average nomicon. Open the cover, there are the words. In fact, the whole book is composed of words. All in order, spelled correctly, evenly spaced, and so on. Long words, short words, words with hyphens and apostrophes. This is the sort of book you can just sit and read. The physical text belied the attention to craft that is so often lacking in today’s literature. Before the first chapter was over, I had encountered not only a pair of cognates, but one of those ‘æ’ things—Stephenson’s homage to his classical literary heritage. I rose slowly in my throne, intoning (more to myself than any of the throatvocalists in attendance), “This Donaldson…he’s clever. He’s using words, and I read. Words, that is. It is curious how well he knows me. I’ll read on.” Well, read on I did, and for naught, I am afraid. The dewy-eyed promise of the maiden chapter was wasted on the next. From the unimaginative chapter title “2” to the trite punctuation (mostly periods and commas, with some semicolons thrown in as an apparent afterthought), Stephenson tested my patience. Wake up kiddo, nobody falls for the token ‘joining of independent clauses’ anymore.

The chapter titles and labored structure are only the beginning of Stephenson’s troubles, I am afraid. While I appreciate a little grease on the skids, so to speak (I like to be able to actually read the book) I also like the author to take a little initiative concerning the layout and print techniques. When I was an assistant editor at gramercy press, we went in halfsies with City Lights on various pieces of discount industrial equipment that proved invaluable in deciphering the works of young authors. For example, we had to run cummings’ manuscripts through a sheet metal saxophone press to deform them enough to disentangle the words. His poem “since feeling is first” was originally titled “siflinst,” and an early draft of “my sweet ms etc.” consisted of a single pea-sized smudge of chimney soot. Another editor friend of mine, Marcus Indira [of the Green Lake Review],who only used the equipment on the weekends, and even then focused on the dough rollers and donut punches, once sent back ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ with only one comment—“anyone should invest in a pretty how dictionary.”

We understand, as editors, the delicate interface between provocative language and volcanic outbursts of random nonsense. Very few authors seem to make this distinction. 2 So, in the context of ease, it is fortunate none of those techniques are at work in this book. Old fashioned composition, page after page of subject-predicate care with a sprinkling of steady-handed clausework, and a dash or two of saucy modifiers attempt, in tandem, to draw the reader’s attention from whatever stimuli might be hovering nearby. Sadly, the net effect of Stephenson’s efforts is failure. After drawing the attention, he does nothing except knock the attention down, take its lunch money, return it without comment, and end by calling the attention filthy names. This is exactly the sort of attention abuse one expects from the unrepentant nouveau west coast Mendelhessons, but not from the author of Diamond Age.

I do not wish to imply that this book is without merit. Stephenson’s grasp of the implied, or trompe l’oef, is fantastic. Consider the following excerpt from the strangely arousing verse in chapter “7.”

---“When the 4-wheeled enigma had gone into service on February 1­st, the entire Atlantic had gone black.”

Way to go Stephenson. Hubba Hubba. That’s what the boys back home like to see. However, as is often the custom with young writers, Stephenson allows this use of crafty and perfectly clever entendre to degrade into the downright pornographic,

---“They had Yamamoto.” And later,

--- “’So I was right,’ Lawrence says, ‘we have to assume the jig is up.’ ‘Perhaps not just yet,’ Alan says.’ ‘It has been touch and go. Last week we sank a convoy in the fog.’”

Come on Stephenson, if you have to work blue, that’s one thing, but don’t spring it on us in the guise of ‘speculative fiction.’ Yamamoto? The fog? Leave something to the imagination.

In conclusion, Cryptonomicon is a fun-filled wacky all-naked adventure buddy flic cum loony tune epic musical tragedy, with something for every member of your family, unless certain members of your family like good books.

1 Unless of course, one recalls Last Place McLoserton, who got last place in last year’s ‘Least likely to Excel or, Indeed, Survive, but who may inexplicably be tortured by fleeting, but lucid, delusions of adequacy.

2 One notable exception to this was papa. The most complex ideas, which might take the average working writer two equally complex and compound sentences to express could be tamed by Hemingway in only 50 or so really short ones. That man was born with a conjunction on his lips. His first sentence is reported to have been “and mama gave me milk and it was warm and comforting milk but it was the kind of milk that I wanted more of later and wouldn’t get.” ( I heard this story from the man himself in a panama city strip club over a couple dozen hurricanes dosed with vodka, triple sec and iodine—a concoction he called Diogenes’ Lantern.) A colleague of mine at Brown tells of a childhood incident with Hemingway. Papa wanted to climb on the monkey bars but was a bit too short for a complete ascent. One of the older kids saw this and helped him to the top. After crossing the bars in truest simian fashion and dropping onto the ground on the other side, hemingway returned and kicked the older boy in the stomach. The last thing my friend recalls about the melee that followed was ernie’s voice pealing over the festivities, “That’s how a man crosses the monkey bars.” Every day after that, ernie came to school with a full beard made of shoe polish and brown sugar (presumably for texture). Personally, I think that Papa would rather have been mocked for maturing at so ridiculously accelerated a pace than for having scraped his cheeks in the fracas. (Hemingway was fond of scars, but not scrapes, which he denounced as ‘sissy marks.’)