Mixing Genres: Two Postmodern Door-Stoppers

Postmodern fiction can be daunting territory to venture into. I often find that I need to be in a particular mood to try the more ambitious titles in the field, and I am not always successful in completing my mission.

And yet… And yet, somehow, I continue to return to Postmodern fiction, if only to remind myself of how difficult some of these works can be. Like Brussels sprouts, the genre may be good for me, but it’s not always fun to consume.

Okay. The above makes it sound like I don’t like Postmodern fiction, and that’s not necessarily true. Like any genre, it has produced its fair share of stinkers (that range from the merely pretentious to the downright unreadable), but it has also produced a number of extremely good books that deserve a read.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the genre’s reputation for being difficult often gets in the way of many people’s desire to read it.

So, with no further ado, I thought I might list a couple of titles that I quite enjoyed. These books are worth the time and the cost of the occasional aspirin one might need to read them.

Mason & Dixon– By Thomas Pynchon
Or, as I occasionally called it while reading, Can You Decipher the Damn Meaning?

It’s been a few years (okay – almost eight) since I first read this one, but that really wouldn’t make much difference in one key area: even hours after I read the book, I couldn’t really tell you what it was all about (other than the obvious ‘It’s about these two guys, see?’).

Nominally, the book follows Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as they chart the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. It also includes novels within novels, encounters with American Indians, slaves, and Ben Franklin, and a host of experimental literary styles. There is, of course, ye ole “Deeper Thematic Meaning” here, and half the fun lies in trying to figure it out.

But my hazy understanding of the book’s events don’t really matter, because I did know, even years ago, that I enjoyed the novel. It was often funny, frequently serious, and wholly dense. A nifty effect, that.

Cryptonomicon– By Neal Stephenson
Essentially a Postmodern beach book. A far easier read than Mason & Dixon, and epic in length, the novel is simultaneously grand and very simple in its ambitions.

Its grand ambitions lie in telling the history of Allied code breaking during WWII in a fictional format, and in charting the threads of that history through to the present; in presenting a novel that is both about mathematics and about the love of pure science; and in charting the inescapable forces of love and history.

Stephenson’s other, far more simple ambition? Tell a story that will make the geeks among us read and afterwards think – “Cool…” Essentially, he wants to write the equivalent of a summer blockbuster that’s still literate.

I looked through the novel again just recently, and was reminded of its great strengths and its great weaknesses. Its sense of humor is, perhaps, its chief strength. The book is often very funny, with a nicely acerbic tone that goes a long way to alleviating the occasionally tedious pages that deal with math logic and theory. It’s a rare book where I say that a reader can safely skip some pages and not miss anything, but this is such a book. There are lengthy passages in which mathematical theorems are discussed and explained, and if, like me, you are a math idiot, these passages will likely make little to no sense. Fear not. You do not need to read them.

Stephenson is also not that convincing when trying to write from the female perspective. The women in his novels aren’t terrible, mind you, they’re just not as fully-fleshed out or believable as they could, and should, be.

It’s a good thing this book is so frequently entertaining, because it is also too long. Stephenson really needs an editor, but judging by his most recent trilogy of books, he hasn’t yet found one that’s willing to tell him what and when to cut. That’s a shame, because there is a lot of really good writing in his novels. They simply need to be streamlined.

Indeed, Cryptonomicon is a highly readable novel despite its flaws – smart, engaging, and frequently funny.