My Goodreads review of the first book in years that I've chosen to give up on before finishing.
The Confusion by
Neal Stephenson My review
rating: 2 of 5 stars
I couldn't finish this, and I am not one who is daunted by the size of a
book. I should have been warned when I picked it up the first time after having finished reading a novel written by somebody with a more poetic sense of language and thinking, "Wow, this is ugly writing." I was continually frustrated by the long passages where plot points are explained by the characters to each other (and clunky dialog for that matter), where characters seem to have no inner life (for all the alleged intelligence of the characters, you never see somebody wondering, or imagining, or experimenting, or figuring things out for themselves; not even the ones who end up explaining things to others), and where there is no passion expressed for anything (not sex, nor research, nor discovery).
As a discussion of some interesting concepts about math or financial dealing, it's not bad. As a novel, though, it's dreadful. Reading it felt like trying to put together a moderately intricate jigsaw puzzle whose creator hadn't sanded or polished the pieces, nor used any color in the picture itself. Stephenson has always had this problem to some degree, but usually there's enough story and character to make it worthwhile. Sometimes I get the feeling that because he is a smart guy, that editors and some readers feel like whatever they find tedious or verbose must just be because they don't understand. For this book, I don't think it's the case.
In Quicksilver I half hoped that the length of the book was because it was written in the kind of coding discussed in the book, and I found the intersecting stories interesting. In The Confusion I no longer cared and quit even though I was most of the way through.
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