dnf read about a third

Neal doesn't want you to read this.
He's right.
I'm not going to tear apart someone's early writings, theres no sport in it.
It's not bad, per se. It's just rather aimless and obtuse.

Going into this read I was aware that it was Stephenson's first novel and that he had previously disowned it. Given that and the fact that this version is a more highly polished version of the original you can tell why he might have thought that way. It was definitely his weakest novel but I did quite enjoy it and you could see the sparks of what an amazing author he would become with this later novels.

A 2.5

Perhaps I would have enjoyed this more if I read it at a different time, but it came across as more tedious than humorous. You can see the beginnings of the writer Stephenson became.

I’d fallen out of the habit of reading….

The street outside my restaurant pulsates with life. Fad-adorned hipsters walk up and down the main drag likes it’s a track ducking into local bakeries, cafes, music stores, bars, and eateries. The sidewalks narrow as random guys hold signs offering free advice. Tables are strewn with trinkets for sale. A French hippie carves one-hitters and juggles badly. A wannabe thesbian dresses in crazy outfits and sings and jumps around without rhyme, reason, or talent in a bizarre attempt to entertain at all costs: a sort of street theater of the rude and crude. Book peddlers are spaced every half a length of a north-south block. From time to time, the book peddler, who sets up two long church basement tables almost every day just outside my restaurant, offers a free book as I arrive for work. I’ve picked up a copy a biography on William Carlos Williams, a couple of mysteries, and a couple of artist retrospectives filled with photos and descriptions. They remain untouched. I went three months without a day off and convalesced without reprieve from sundry ailments. I began to consider skimming a few articles in the paper or online, a huge accomplishment. I wiled away my days downloading television episodes and watching cheesy DVDs. I was in a rut….


One night, my friend Sandro, the intelligent, scrawny, dancing Dominican who works as a dishwasher and busboy at my restaurant, came in with a find from a stack the book peddler had left up for grabs next to some freebie newspaper carrels. Sandro speaks English rather well but has never attended school so he doesn’t read books in English. But, one night he found a book that looked interesting. He loves history and natural history in particular. Thinking he’d uncovered a botanical compendium of some sort he rushed in with the book in hand to see if I’d like to read it not wanting it to go to waste. He told me in Spanish, “it takes a lot of time to write a book. You shouldn’t have to find your book on the street.” What a great attitude! He was also excited because he thought he’d found something I’d enjoy. I accepted the book and began to read. Turned out the book, “The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe,” was a novel, and a very good one at that. Thanks to the enthusiasm displayed by my friend, I was back in the reading groove.

By the next morning, I was better than half way through the novel and woke up early. I rushed to The Strand, one of the world’s great booksellers. Based out of lower Manhattan, The Strand boasts that it shelves “18 miles of books.” With two large downtown locations as well as sidewalk operations along the southeast corner of Central park, I don’t doubt it. I scanned through metal racks of paperback books on sale and stacked on tables. I looked over the sale racks and tables that are not organized like the rest of the store. Books are not strictly sorted by genre, subject, or author. I love looking at books this way when I’m not sure what to read next. I just wait for a spine, a cover, or title to leap out at me. Then I read back covers and keep going. Within minutes I had ten or twelve options that I narrowed down to two, two paperback novels and five bucks later I emerged on the street just south of Union Square. I walked through the market, picked up a couple of perfect peaches and walked up to Madison Square Park where they were playing U.S. Open matches on a big screen in the park. A seat in the outdoor park, a tennis match, a good book with two more ready to read and I found the perfect form of relaxation before going to work.

As I searched through the sale ranks of The Strand, I was drawn to “The Big U.” The back cover announces that the protagonist is a thirty year-old college junior named Casimir Radon. I was hooked. I suppose I have to believe that dreams can be realized even if outside the conventional timeframe. I started cooking professionally when I was ten years older or more than most who start out. The idea that it’s never too late to start all over again (also the title of a good Steppenwolf song) appeals to me. I can only hope it’s true. Or, I endeavor to make that true. I knew I’d read the book.

Within pages of starting this novel, I became intrigued by the narrative voice. The voice is first-person. The narrator is not omniscient per se. He identifies himself as a “tweedy” young black professor starting out teaching in what we assume is the sort of large all-American (traditionally white-bred) University. He tells us that he spent most of his time at ‘The Big U’ listening, observing, and, talking. He sets himself apart from the fray. He also tells the reader he is writing “to put ‘The Big U’ behind” him. Immediately, the narrator is complex. He is not omniscient. Yet, he is an observer. Therefore, he’ll know more than the average character. We also get the idea from the opening pages that the narrator is a player in the story. What then are his motives for telling the story? The question underlies much of the novel. Perhaps he’s trying to distance himself from the story he sets about telling. Perhaps he needs to make himself more integral.

This raises the whole question of the autobiographical voice in literature. I remember reading Harold Bloom’s take on Walt Whitman, I think in “The Western Cannon.” Bloom noted that Whitman made himself a character in his poetry and by doing so Walt Whitman became greater than the man himself. He endures not because Whitman included portions of autobiography and imposed his own soul on the work in a direct fashion but because the character Whitman is immortalized by lofty words and thoughts. Whitman becomes a symbol, perhaps what he wanted to be or could have been in life, he becomes these things and more in poems. In a way, Neil Stephenson, author of “The Big U,” plays with just that. The reader is almost forced to ask himself, how is the narrator’s character different from the narrator himself? We must assume his facts are at least skewed if accurate.

The whole novel has these sort of built in complexities that give the reader so much to contemplate while enjoying clear, straight-forward prose.

Aside from the narrative voice, Stephenson is a powerful descriptive writer. The university’s campus becomes a character itself. The campus is a droning bureaucratic grunt that almost serves as the chief antagonist – rather “Catch-22” as one reviewer noted, although I’d add that the book accomplishes this sort feat without humanizing the campus itself. This speaks to a lucid, powerful descriptive writing that I’ve rarely come across.

In the end, Stephenson provides a great piece of satire that’s worth reading. I’m just lucky the publishing house reissued the book based on the author’s subsequent success.

It was darker than I thought it'd be, but then, so was college.

Animal House with a higher IQ and Kalashnikovs.

This is an early work. It contains the humour, satire, intertwining stories with what appears to be asides that come together. The topic of this one is a megauniversity that is run for profit. Some of the statements inside seem prophetic or maybe satire can be overtaken by reality at any time. Simpsons, any one?

This was published in 1984 when Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood came out. There is some type of resonance that works together. I have been trying to convince my younger friends and partners that what we are seeing now reminds me of the bad old times of the 80s. Reading this about higher learning reminds me of what is being said about high schools and unis now.

Things swing around and around. While I enjoyed this once it got going, it is definitely of the Stephenson writing mold. Maybe this would be a good start for a newbie? I would still recommend another one although this has been the shortest novel I have read by him. I still love In the Beginning...There was the Command Line best.

Regardless, if you are a completist, this shows early growth into what would become more signature.

Neal's first book. You can see his talent for creating fantastical, imaginative worlds that will later be put to use in sci-fi, historical settings and even time travel. One of my favorite writers. But this tale of a mega-university run amok gets to be a tedious chore to finish.

This book is brilliant. It's beautifully disturbing. It flows like a mad river. It's amazing.

Admittedly, I have not read much of Stephenson. I read bits and pieces of 'Snowcrash' but found it a bit boring. I have had 'Anathem' highly reccomended to me but found the thickness a bit intimidating. Therefore I am a novice, untainted by Stephenson's apparent brilliance.

This book is a little gem. A rough, uncut, blinding gem. I love the smooth transitioning into madness. Until pretty much the end, when I could stop and think, I did not realize how ludicrously exquisite the descent (or rather, ascent) into madness was.

Most of the critiques towards this book seem to have to do with how it doesn't stand up to the standard of the later Stephenson. I think this beauty should be held as an amazing piece of literature in its own right.

In my ongoing effort to read everything by Neal Stephenson that isn't the very intimidating 3000-plus-page Baroque Cycle...

Neal Stephenson has essentially disowned the book, this being his first effort and not up to the Cryptonomicon standard. Personally, I thought it was great. It's still very Stephenson in style, although the scope is smaller than his other books and doesn't go as deep. The Big U is a send-up of large university life, taking every paradigm and sterotype to a hyperbolic extreme. Drunken jocks become pseudo-terrorists, drama-club nerds play out real life Dungeons and Dragons in the sewar warrens of the "Plex," the massive towers for residences, the university president is both cunning and hyperintelligent as a good-guy and bad-guy in different venues, and science club projects become full scale weapons of war. The style was snarky and excellent, still very funny and scathing of university culture.

The whole book is technically narrated by a younger-30s new professor and faculty-in-residence who just started at the American Megaversity. The cast of good-guys is pretty solid: the 30-year-old-junior devoted physics nerd-cum-hero who simply wants the ideal university experience who also befriends (and falls for) the student-body-president with a pragmatic worldly view, she herself who falls for another girl that is the deadly rebellious type on the inside of a sorority-airhead act that she plays, not to mention the overeager philosophy major, the systems engineer/supreme mage with a normal-student alter ego, and what essentially amounts to an early inception of Enoch Root: megaprogrammer, keenly intelligent on many levels, and has access to the deus-ex-machina skeleton key to the entire campus.

At first I thought that the final "battle," as it were, was going to be drawn out and cheesy. But the narrative really held true to the overall theme, and the plot finishing up with this over-the-top event was a pretty decent page-turner- not for what happened, but for how it was described.

I liked how a few of the main ideas in later volumes popped up here (potential spoilers):
1. Discussion on the bicameral-mind theory and its theoretical effects - integral to the main plot point of Snow Crash.
2. "One of my professors has interesting things to say about the similarity between the way organ pipes are controlled by keys and stops, and the way random-access memory bits are ready by computers." Yeah, that's pretty much the entire first chapter of Cryptonomicon.
3. The housing of nuclear waste at academic institutions since they tend out outlast governmental cycles - major plot point of Anathem.

All in all, it comes recommended for the Stephenson crowd and the non-Stephenson crowd who just wants some apocalyptic collegiate satire. It's not as epic in scope as his later books, but definitely a "light" Stephenson read, if you want the humor and snark without all of the need for a glossary or dramatis personnae to have to refer to.

Clearly the work of a less mature author, but I had a lot of fun reading it. To my incredible thrill, Mr. Stephenson trots out ideas that appear as major plot elements in the other two books of his I have read (Anathem and Cryptonomicon). That was awesome - like organically discovering the original work that the Beastie Boys sampled in some random Paul's Boutique track. The whole world makes more sense now.