Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Neal-Stehpenson-a-thon   [John Derbyshire]

[The story so far:  The courageous editors of a certain magazine (not NR) have commissioned Derb to read Neal Stephenson's four linked novels (Cryptonomicon and the three Baroque Cycle books) and write a portmanteau review.  This is a total of 3,800 pages of heavy-duty fiction.  A dump truck bearing the books showed up on Derb's doorstep October 10th, and the clock started.  In conversation with several Corner readers at the NRO tenth anniversary bash October 11th, Derb vowed to issue running reports on his journey into Neal Stephenson's imagination.  Now read on.]

I am now 383 pages into Cryptonomicon, i.e. about a third of the way through it, one-tenth of the way through the tetralogy.  This is the point at which, if you are not being paid to read (and in some cases, shameful to report, even if you are), you either (a) have been captured by the narrative current and will be swept pleasurably and effortlessly along to the end, or (b) are tired of being banged up against underwater rocks, dragged over mudbanks, and tangled in water-weeds, and have decided to strike out for the river bank.  

I'm being swept along quite nicely.  Stephenson maintains a good narrative pull, though I'm getting a bit weary of the 1990s techno-geeks and their business ventures, which are much less fasinating to read about now than they would have been when the book came out (1999).  That's the pace of development in the info biz—not Stephenson's fault.  (Look at the YouTube-Google deal.  You can now have a good idea in January, be a household name by the next January, and sell out for a billion point something dollars in July.  Never mind Andy Warhol's "everyone will have fifteen minutes of world-wide fame":  pretty soon a really good idea, plus fifteen minutes of hard work, will set you up for life.  And if you are very lucky, it will all happen so fast you don't get famous.)

The author's style is wobbly, with some hits and misses.  Hits:  He is very deft with similes and metaphors, often making me smile.  Of a dinner party where political rancor breaks out: "Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned.  All they could do now was grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt."  This kind of thing can be overdone, and the universe of referents you're drawing from needs to be customized to your anticipated readership demographic to some degree, but I think Stephenson gets it about right.  He knows stuff, too:  The business plan boilerplate in  p.294 ff is hilarious, and all too true. 

Misses:  Stephenson doesn't know as much about language as he thinks he does.  Anyone who names a place "Qwghlm"—a place supposed to be inhabited by Celtic-or-Germanic North Europeans, yet—needs to spend a few hours browsing The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language or some similar tome.  Just because Jonathan Swift got away with stuff like that doesn't mean you can.  (And in fact Swift's nonsense words and names always have some point , if you try saying them out loud.)  The math gets out of hand, too.  Naturally I swooned to see the Riemann Zeta Function on page 11; but I got bored with the modular-arithmetic stuff about the bicycle chain in p. 204 ff, and just skipped to the next chapter.  Modular arithmetic **is** boring, until you get to quadratic reciprocity (which Stephenson doesn't), after which it gets terrifically fascinating—any math geek knows that.

Like every other "serious" book published nowadays, Cryptonomicon is far too long.  This goes to the demise of book editing, which—I know—you have heard about a thousand times.  Editing simply doesn't happen any more.  In my most recent book I mis-spelled "Sao Paulo" as "Sao Paolo" several times over.  (Who knew?  Though I **did** get the tilde right on "Sao.")  That would have been jumped all over back in 1960, with memos flying around, phone calls up and down the chain of command, and likely a full editorial conference to drive the point home.  As it was, the error survived my publisher's editing process and emerged into print, making me look like a sloppy idiot.  (All right, I'm a sloppy idiot.  Lots of writers are. That's why we need editors.)

Paul Johnson, in one of his Spectator columns, put the death of editing down to moral changes in our society.  The typical low-level book editor of 1960 (says PJ) was a clergyman who'd been defrocked for messing about with boys, and driven to this terribly-paid work as the only way he could make a living.  He was grateful for it, diligent and conscientious.  Nowadays of course he'd write a best-selling confessional memoir himself, hit the talk-show circuit, and start a hedge fund.

10/17 08:42 AMShare