"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.