Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

This is one of those tough gray-area reviews that could have gone either way; it wouldn't take much effort to sit down and write Es Muy Bueno: Cryptonomicon. I was very engrossed by Neal Stephenson's novel, enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to friends (at least to friends who're willing to make certain concessions when reading a book). Cryptonomiconhas a lot going for it—Stephenson is clearly a smart, funny man, and the book is frequently hilarious and packed with interesting information. The book's central concerns—the uses of cryptography during the second World War—are excellent hooks upon which to hang a book. Two of the three main characters are fun, compelling creations (that would be the two from the World War II sections; Randy Waterhouse, well, he falls into the problematic section).

Unfortunately, Stephenson has a raft of shortcomings as a novelist, and lots of them float up during Cryptonomicon. One or two would be no big deal, but, in the aggregate, they become distracting and frustrating. To list a few:

• Almost none of the action in Cryptonomiconhappens on-camera, so to speak. And if it does, it's a flashback. Chapters in Cryptonomiconoften start with dazed characters reacting to some traumatic event that just happened to them. They react, engage in some exposition (frequently about some piece of cryptographic or computing history that Stephenson found cool), and then position themselves to set up the next piece of action which will happen off-camera. Alternately, the chapter will begin with characters reacting to some traumatic event, which then plays out in flashback. These flashbacks are the closest Cryptonomiconcomes to straightforward action.

• There's nothing resembling a realistic human relationship anywhere in the book; women either come pre-attracted to the men, or just abruptly become attracted to them when the plot requires it (Amy Shaftoe's switch from indifference to love for Randy Waterhouse is sudden, but at least it happens on-camera; Lawrence Waterhouse's courtship takes place almost entirely in the gray areas between chapters, without even a flashback). My favorite relationship moment, though, runs like this (and I'm trying to be vague so as to avoid spoiling anything): a character's long-absent paramour appears suddenly, with a disfiguring illness. The character screams. The paramour disappears, never to show up in the book again. Classy.

• Much like the disfigured paramour, threats bubble up and disappear as the plot requires. A shady dentist will sue the main characters (off-camera, of course), leading to discussions about how screwed they are. And then the suit's settled, until tension is required a few chapters later, prompting another off-camera lawsuit. Better still, the shady dentist himself is an unbeatably, uber-powerful force in business until the main characters learn who he's working with; immediately, he and his threat disappear from the book.

• (I guess you'd better stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled… ) The ending of Cryptonomiconis unsatisfying and laughable. Aside from the fact that nothing is resolved, there's no way that the logic of the book would allow any of the final action to happen. If the Catholic Church owns the land where the gold is buried, how is it ok for Waterhouse and co. to be digging on it? If Randy Waterhouse has been exiled from the Philippines on pain of death, how can he be giving interviews to the media about what they plan on doing with the gold? Is it even remotely conceivable that the governments of the Philippines and a raft of other countries in Asia and Europe wouldn't be raising an international stink over the ownership of an enormous cache of looted WWII-era gold? And never mind the out-of-nowhere appearance of fantasy/mysticism with the Enoch Root/Andrew Loeb magic-off.

• Finally, this one's minor, but it kept recurring and bugged me more every time it popped up: it appears that Neal Stephenson was, as a child, kidnapped and beaten by a gang of grad students. This is the only explanation I can think of for the presence of Randy Waterhouse's loathsome girlfriend, who Randy dated for ten years merely so that he could expound on how silly and annoying grad students are (there's another one of those bizarre relationships, by the way). By the time the girlfriend's silly and annoying grad-student (and professional academic) friends show up, there are so many straw men floating around that you feel like you've wandered into a book written by Ayn Rand or Tom Clancy. Or maybe Jack Chick, even.

In one interview, Stephenson said that he thought reviews were pointless—either you liked the book, and would read it, or you didn't. This is absurdly reductive, and, frankly, kind of chickenshit. I hate this idea that the book's either all-good or all-bad, 1 or 0, with no possibility of it being worthy-but-flawed. Because that's what Cryptonomicon is, and the fact that Stephenson went out of his way to disallow that notion makes me wonder if he doesn't know it, too.
--Keith Pille