Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

 

One of the things that I have pretty much not done in these reviews is rate something that I just read. This was partially due to convenience (who can read an entire book in a day and/or stagger their reading so that they can get one done daily?) but also due to the fact that I find that I actually have a better sense of the quality of a book a month or two after I’ve read it rather than right after I’m done. One book which I have not yet reviewed here, Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, suffered from this; I wrote a review on Amazon about an hour after I’d gotten done with it and, looking back, I think I rated it too low.*

It’s also entirely possible that I am basking too deeply in the afterglow of Cryptonomicon to give it the kind of objective rating that it deserves. I’m really thinking not, though. This book has pretty much all of the things that makes my inner 8 year old squeal:

• A winding, conspiratorial plot
• A sardonic authorial tone that keeps you from treating a book like this as a Serious Great Work, which for me anyway is something I have the habit of doing when the page count is up over 1000
• A historical setting which actually works in the historical sense (I mean, I want to like historical fiction but when you give Confederate troops AK-47s**
• Cool technology (which would seem to contradict the last point, except that a. there are parallel storylines and b. just read the book, OK?)
• GOLD (okay, maybe that’s not a real priority)

I realize, looking at that list, that my inner 8 year old is a damn nerd. I am surprised that I was not given atomic wedgies on a daily basis, to be perfectly honest.

The particular field of study that Stephenson tackles in this book is cryptography, which sounds dry, but trust me, is kind of awesome. Okay, it’s dry as heck. But Stephenson is a very competent sentence-to-sentence and scene-to-scene writer, and unlike some authors I know, either manages to avoid falling so in love with his own writing that he can’t drag himself out of it or else has a good editor who is able to point out to him where this happens. There is one scene in particular involving a small subset of the hacking style known as “phreaking” that is a lot of fun to read but which actually does not, for a change, violate Chekhov’s Rule of the Gun or whatever it’s called.*** I won’t give away spoilers this time around but trust me: stuff happens here which actually pays off later on.

Like you would kind of expect from a high-technology book written in the late 90s, some of the tropes used are a little dated. I guess hackers still love Unix, but even people who use C++ don’t treat the now-30-year-old system as a “newer” programming language. To be honest, though, I was a little surprised at how well a lot of stuff has held up. My job only very rarely and tangentially deals with security and encryption but I know that the 4096 bit encryption schemes the main characters used in the novel, which was supposed to be outlandishly heavy then, is still considered pretty strong (to the point that it slows things down unnecessarily for most peoples’ purposes) today, a decade and a half after the book came out. Most of all, what puts the book squarely in the 90s, aside from the occasional question about Windows 95, is the fact that several of the main guys are World War II veterans at the very end of long careers – if you set the book in 2013, all those guys would be dead or very, very old.

One of my readers (apparently I have more than one on this site; it’s called trolling forums, people, and it’s how you get hits) feels a lot differently about Infinite Jest than I do and has, in defense of that horrible, horrible book, posted some comments by David Foster Wallace about wanting to create something that doesn’t talk down to its audience. I actually completely agree with those statements and intend to respond to them with that book in mind in particular, but in my opinion this book right here is a great example of how a good author can make something which is smart and which challenges you to keep up with it mentally but which at the same time is actually, you know, readable and stuff. If that’s the kind of thing you’re into… okay, that was a passive aggressive statement. You should read and like this book and if you don’t you are a bad person with bad tastes.

*In other words, it is the Wilco of books.

**Yes, that’s a thing. Harry Turtledove did it in some book of his. I probably will not be reviewing it because I put it down after 50 pages and I generally like to finish books that I review. Call it an idiosyncrasy of mine.

***”If you show a gun in Act One, it has to be fired in Act Three.”****

****I don’t know why I enclosed that in quotations. I don’t remember the original actual quote at all and anyway it’s in Russian.