Itzkoff Sings an Anathem

Well, I definitely can't fault Dave Itzkoff for picking a short book, or an old one, this time -- which I've done for his last few, widely scattered, SF reviews -- since he's just come up for air on the other side of Neal Stephenson's latest bug-crusher, the 960-page Anathem. I haven't read Anathem myself -- Harper apparently decided not to send it to me for review, and getting it from the library would be more trouble than it's worth -- so I won't take issue with any of Itzkoff's pronouncements on the actual book.

And plenty of people have been tentatively saying that Stephenson has inflicted another baggy monster on us -- some have been more pointed in their criticism -- so merely saying that Anathem is not all that good wouldn't be controversial. Though the word is that Stephenson actually managed to write an ending this time, which would be inspiring if true.

Actually, Itzkoff fall smack-dab in the middle of the opinions on Anathem: he thinks it has some good points, but that it is essentially trying to do something non-novelistic and gets carried away in intellectual games at the expense of the core story. Those are Stephenson's great failings, shown over and over again -- he'd much rather intellectually wander off to investigate something cool than to stick to the point at hand -- so I'm inclined to believe Itzkoff.

So no bile this time: Itzkoff did take a whole page of the New York Times Book Review to cover one book, but it's an important book, one of interest to general NYTBR readers as well as those of us in the genre. If he's going to write reviews like this, I could even wish that he'd appear more often than once every four months.