"Reamde" and Why
When you finish a Neal Stephenson book, you feel like you've really accomplished something, except you also sometimes feel like you've taken a very long Greyhound bus ride and you're mostly very tired. So, about 30 days after its release, I have finally gotten through the 1056 pages of Reamde, which is his novel about how a computer virus messed up a credit card scam and a video game, which upset the Russian mob which then intruded upon a terror cell, drawing everyone into a giant international mess. The great stuff is so terrific! Particularly the asides, the thoughts on how minds work, on how the modern world treats us, and all that very "now" stuff. For instance this, in Seattle.
Right?????
And then the action—and this book is 70% action with, as most have noted, great attention to the mechanisms of very specific firearms!—goes from exciting and scary and weird to fairly trudging. There is a really rather interminable part about 2/3rds of the way in, when time stops making sense, and everyone is on planes or containerships or flying back and forth senselessly across the Atlantic, and some amount of days or weeks go by, and he recounts this in methodical, exacting detail, and you have to ask: why? Is it a meta-commentary? Is it an exercise? Is it a comment on mundanity? Is it simple OCD? No idea! In the end, I still love Neal Stephenson, as always, and don't totally understand why he does what he does, which is better than the alternative I suppose, and also kind of I'd really like a shower and a nap. Mostly I am saying this because: if anyone can fill me in on rationale for this sort of writing, I'd love it.
I think it's less a rationale and more of an utter lack of editorial oversight. If left alone in a room crates of printer paper and a fifteen year old laptop with Microsoft Works, this is exactly what Stephenson would write just for himself. Hundreds of pages of trudging detaily research vomit.
Ooh, I read it too and loved it, but in that way where I love most of a Neil Stephenson book but am baffled anew each time when it turns from a digression-rich fascinating thing to a meticulous and kind of tedious nuts and bolts action sequence where all plot points converge, the nitty gritty interesting tidbits disappear and everyone either dies or gets married? Which didn't prevent me from getting sucked into it during a family reunion and people would ask me how the book was or what was happening and it was just impossible to tell them because it's a huuuge Neil Stephenson book. "What's it about?" "…" and then I finished it and PASSED OUT.
But I never ever thought I'd devour and thoroughly enjoy a book about MMORPGs, so there's that. I like how you always learn something with this guy. And I'm dead broke but bought the Reamde hardcover almost immediately (and still mentally refer to a certain type of person as a "sline") which might tell you how much I love this guy despite the way he ends his books.
@hazmathilda I also thought "Can't wait to hear what Choire thinks about this book" as I was reading, because obviously this post was going to happen, which is to say thank you for being yoouuuuu
@hazmathilda The wrap up bugged me too, I tried to ignore it but seeing the way he was maneuvering the couples together in the book irked me. It felt too much like in Shakespeare where you know it was a happy ending because everyone gets married.
Agree about MIA editor. This is what unchecked graphomania looks like I guess. Yet, Stephenson does something to my pleasure receptors to the point where I've been lugging the local library's giant heavy hardcover copy onto the train with me. Anyway I'm on page 859 and Zula is about to make a break from the terrorists' wilderness camp!
I loved The Baroque Cycle (ALL of it. Okay, all of most everything he's written) when I was younger, but am scared that I would find all the contrived plotlines and nerd hissy-fits tedious at this point.
How has Stephenson managed to sneak his over-stuffed manuscripts past the editorial axe for so many years? Or do I just not understand how publishing works?
I think there are certain authors, and Neal Stephenson is one, for whom the "he needs an editor" argument just does not work. We love Stephenson and his books BECAUSE he writes exactly how he wants to, and his voice and vision are so distinct. A forceful attempt to excise the "boring parts" would be much, much more likely to screw up the book than truly "fix" it. At this point, Stephenson knows what he's doing.
And complaining about the weird parts of what he does just adds to the buzz around the book, anyway.
@crashlaunching Um, an editor would of at least caught the typo in the title. How embarrassing is that? Yeesh!
A couple years ago at the SF Museum in Seattle I saw an exhibit with Stephenson’s handwritten manuscript (redundant, I know; retronym!) of the Baroque Cycle and all the pen nibs & such he used when writing it. A stack of paper as tall as one of those illegal hybrid cats. A perfect picture of his pride in process & longwindedness itself. I bet he can’t help loving all that detail, but he’s an intentional maximalist, and while sometimes I think he could use tighter editing, the toomuchness is the point. And for me mostly pleasurable.
Haven’t gotten to the flying back-&-forth section yet but I’m not surprised to hear it gets dull. There’s always some stuff in his books about boredom & captivity, right? And how the brain deals with it.
Is it that hard for electronic book-makers to hyphenate their text? Looking in the missing teeth in that page of text makes me want to tear out my eyes. So does Stephenson's prose, but that's another problem.
I LOVED this book until the first time I read the name "Olivia". It wasn't that her character ruined the book (though she was ridiculous), but at that point there are no more surprises. Everything after that point was maneuvering and fighting as characters scatter and (spoiler?) are never reunited until the four page epilogue.
I'm a big fan of Stephenson and I was really pretty unhappy with this book. I read his work because it is clever and insightful and makes me think about big ideas, but the MMORPG stuff never really got developed and the terrorist bit felt like a huge tacked on detour. And that ending where every loose end is tied up in a pretty holiday bow is just juvenile.
As it happens I wrote a rant/review about the book just yesterday.
http://bluedoghydrant.blogspot.com/2011/10/reamde-was-disappointment-for-this-neal.html
i read 250 pages on days 1 and 2, and then the second half in one massive bit overnight. at the end, though, i didn't think it was that good.
i think the ending is an actual reaction to criticism that his endings "aren't very good". so he went from the kind of ending in snow crash where not everything is tied up neatly, to one where way too much is tied up.
basically, i wish there had been more stuff about gold farming and MMOs and less ridiculous action sequences.
@dreww : basically, i wish there had been more stuff about gold farming and MMOs and less ridiculous action sequences.
Sounds like you'd enjoy Charles Stross's Halting State, because that's basically what you just described.
Actually, I'm still not convinced that Stephenson didn't read Halting State and say "what this book needs is more dei ex machinae and interminable chases through Canada / the Pacific Northwest."
Stephenson writes for nerds and nerds appreciate an actual understanding of their nerdly fixation. Most scifi works on the premise that computers/science is magic. Sure the digressions about the workings of {x} thing can be tedious, but it's basically Stephenson showing off his nerd credentials.