Cryptonomicon
The lack of propulsion in Neal Stephenson's doorstop "thriller"
This is the eighteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson’s epic, time-spanning thriller revolving around the search for Axis gold in the Philippines.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
In a telling interview in Locus, Neal Stephenson described that he came up with the title for Cryptonomicon from “[hearing] the word Necronomicon bounced around.” He added that he “actually [hadn’t] read the Lovecraft books, but clearly it’s formed by analogy to that.” Oddly enough, this reminds me of a line from Zoolander, when Owen Wilson’s Hansel praises Sting in an awards show, and then says, “One of my heroes I guess would be Sting. I mean, I don’t listen to any of his music, but I really respect that he’s making it.” As a result, Stephenson comes across as a writer unfamiliar of his own speculative context.
Stephenson is a writer of dense technical detail and clearly has an ambitious narrative streak in him. However, reading Cryptonomicon is like reading a brick wall, a book of 918 pages of small print in which perhaps five interesting things happen. Maybe this book would work better for me if it was, say, 400 pages, but it’s not. Sci-fi writer Charles Yu once said (in praise!?):
It’s so long, and so dense. It’s almost 1000 pages long, and those are big pages. It must be half a million words long… So much information. It’s a fact: a copy of Cryptonomicon has more information per unit volume than any other object in this universe. Any place that a copy of the book exists is, at that moment, the most information-rich region of space-time in the universe. If you drop a carton of Cryptonomicon paperbacks into a black hole of any size, the black hole doubles in size. (quoted in Anders)
While Cryptonomicon is dense, it’s dense with filler (an entire chapter is devoted to a character eating Cap’n Crunch) (Stephenson 475-485). Whereas each piece of a more sophisticated long work like Infinite Jest feels intentional, it’s unclear to me why Cryptonomicon needs to be of this length. The novel tracks four characters across two timelines: WWII codebreaker Lawrence Waterhouse, WWII US Marine Bobby Shaftoe, modern systems expert Randy Waterhouse (Lawrence’s grandson) and Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier who later helps out Randy in the 1980s. The plot builds (glacially) to the planned excavation of a lost Axis gold deposit in the Philippines. And while the WWII plot is mildly diverting most of the time, the 1980s plotline irked me like sandpaper against chalkboard. Perhaps innovative in when released in the 1990s, the plot, which involves building a crypto-financial-data haven in a South Pacific sultanate, feels dated in the 2020s. Stephenson’s male gazey writing of female characters also feels irrevocably tied to the 1990s, when being a hacker and casual objectification women must have been “cool” to some geek circles (for example, “his hands [made] a sling under her warm and flawless ass” (Stephenson 48)).
I want to point out what I found most aggravating about Stephenson’s style: his repetitive and filler-soaked structure. Chapter after chapter, I found that Stephenson had little variation between chapter structure. Typically, Stephenson opens with a tedious situation that takes up maybe 18 pages and is mostly filler, followed by a single final paragraph or exchange that features a plot point to end the chapter. It’s very formulaic and transparent. Take the chapter on cereal, for example.
“Crunch” is a chapter in the middle of the novel about Randy Waterhouse. Informed he will be taking a dance class in Manila with Amy Shaftoe, his love interest and a descendant of Bobby Shaftoe, he watches a dance instruction video while eating cereal. The cereal eating, however, is the primary focus of Randy’s perspective (and therefore, ours):
The gold nuggets of Cap’n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half. Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds. (Stephenson 477)
This isn’t even the first speech in this chapter on how Randy eats cereal! This is the second of three. If there is a point to this speech, it’s to show how analytical and engineer-y Randy is, and how much he doesn’t really want to think about dancing. But we already know that. This is page 477. We have seen Randy enough to know these things about him. What is the point?
Randy then reads a few emails, which we get in full (probably a cool thing when emails were a novel technology?), and then he has a flashback about learning how to dance with his Grandma, and then dances with Amy (Stephenson 477-485). After all these tedious sequences, finally Amy reveals she has latitude and longitudes for a location important to tracking down the Axis treasure (Stephenson 485).
Stephenson spends so much time and energy on information that is not important that it’s hard to care when he finally gives us information that is. Chapter after chapter is a slog to get to the one paragraph or detail which illuminates the way forward. I’m convinced this book could have been a tightly-paced narrative if the book’s editor eliminated every other paragraph (and the reader probably wouldn’t notice any paragraphs were missing).
There is one particular scene in which I thought Stephenson told a good story, which baffled me because I thought the rest of the book could have used a lesson from this moment. This sequence involves Randy read a computer document about a guy who is having troubles in bed with his wife (Stephenson 358-364). The story builds very slowly and efficiently. The narrator of this document, a colleague of Randy’s, explains he is aroused by women in stockings, rooted in some moment in his adolescence. One day he sees his wife wear stockings, and he is completely taken with her and they go to a hotel room; he admits they have “the best sex [he’d] ever had” (Stephenson 360). After he owns up to his kink, his wife agrees to start wearing stockings to spice up their sex life. Then one day they have intense sex in her late grandmother’s bedroom in the presence of antique furniture, and now the wife has a very powerful experience. Then, several years later, the narrator ordered a custom-built heirloom bed for them, which gives his wife a similarly powerful experience. The story concludes with the punchline:
This was the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to—preferably on top of—a piece of heirloom-grade furniture that she owned. (Stephenson 365)
While edgy and a bit questionable, this story has all the elements of a dramatic narrative—with all the set-up needed for the punchline and the economy for the joke to land—that seem elsewhere in the novel drastically absent or buried under the weight of the novel’s density. It almost makes me feel that Stephenson wrote this story for something else and dropped it in here (since this story has barely anything to do with any relevant plot), or that maybe once in a while, throwing enough darts at the board will allow one to hit a bullseye?
Perhaps it is worth noting what is successful about Cryptonomicon, if at all. At the very least, some of the slow-moving plot points build to satisfying reveals. The shock when Shaftoe’s Filipina lover Glory is discovered to have contracted leprosy is pretty palpable, though the moment is undercut when Shaftoe moves on extremely quickly from that loss:
She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth like a mummy’s, and paws the scarf away from her face. Or what used to be face. Now it’s just the front of her skull. (Stephenson 716).
Yet, the next time we meet Shaftoe, (despite pining for Glory the entire book) he only references the incident twice, and in passing (Stephenson 746). Here is an opportunity to go maximal, but Stephenson dodges the dramatic moment.
There is also a certain frisson when we realize that the Japanese soldier Goto Dengo, who we have seemingly randomly followed for hundreds of pages, shows up as an old man in the 1980s plot:
[Goto Dengo] is the only guy in the place who isn’t grinning from ear to ear: apparently when you reach a certain age you are allowed to get away with staring tunnels through other people’s skulls. In the manner of many old people, he looks vaguely startled that they have actually shown up. (Stephenson 852)
That’s great. But why did it take so long to get here? These intriguing and exciting moments are so few and far between, and it’s such a hike to get to them, it almost seems to be in an effort to fool the reader into thinking the struggle is worth it.
Of all the books to show me the virtue of economy, Cryptonomicon has opened my eyes far more than any other text. More is not always more. Every piece must have some purpose. And when the truly dramatic moments happen, it’s time to lean in, not turn away.
Works Cited
Anders, Charlie Jane. “10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them).” Gizmodo, July 30, 2015. https://io9.gizmodo.com/10-books-you-pretend-to-have-read-and-why-you-should-r-5924625
Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon (Harper: New York, 2000).