This is a radio play review of Big Man with a Shovel:

[Cue music: old-timey banjo-laden number]

Man’s voice [sounds like a smoker]: This was one good book, I tells ya.

Woman: I don’t remember you vein’ from Brooklyn, Frankie.

Man: Wells I is, Lila, I tells ya. That’s my thing, that ‘I tells ya.’

Woman:

Man: Why so silent, chum?

Woman:

Man: It’s… you don’t agree?

Woman: Well…

Man: The digressions?

Woman:

Man: The different styles?

Woman: No…

Man: The pastiche? The literary pastiche?

Woman: No.

Man: Because the story was good. I rifled through the book, the way you can on one o’ them e-readin’ devices. Just flickin’ and flickin’. It captivated me, you might say. Hell, let’s say it: it captivated me.

Woman: I’m gonna switch it up here.

[Cue Western Union telegram sound.]
INCOMINGTELEGRAMFOR: MAN
FROM: WOMAN
DIGRESSIONSFINE. STOP.
SWAPPINGNARRATIVEPOINT OF VIEWFINE, GREAT, EVEN. STOP.
MYTHICAL–DIGRESSION, NEARLYDISAPPEARING UP ITSOWN A**HOLE THEONESTICK-IN-THE–MUD. STOP.
COULDADONEWITHOUTLASTLAYER OF META–NESS ON TOP. STOP.
LIKE A CHOCOLATELAYERCAKEWITHONETOOMANYLAYERS OF CHOCOLATE ON IT. STOP.

Big Man with a Shovel was a great read. The story was a really great yarn with, yes, underpinnings of tall tales, and enough meta-ness to satisfy my old hyper-fictional biases. I think I would have enjoyed this book more had I still been working on my English degree. But if you can (and you can) breeze through those indulgent bits when the author (one of the many intruding upon the story) goes a little too into his lists and definitions it’s a really worthwhile read. Steerage Press have picked some excellent authors, and I’m excited to see what other books they pick to publish based on this one and Michael Joyce’s “Disappearance.”

I think this might be my favorite Christopher Moore book, up there with Lamb, for sure. He’s wildly inventive, like he usually is, and tells a fantastic story in which it’s very easy to get lost.

He doesn’t belabor any of the jokes too much, and each character’s been given a full, fleshy life. A really good read.

Well, thank goodness that’s over.

Pull up a chair, let me start a little further back.

I used to like Neal Stephenson. Used to anticipate his every new book like a little schoolgirl (for the record, I have not ever been a little schoolgirl, but have, at times, acted like one). Until “Quicksilver,” which, for me, was a pompous, over wrought nightmare of a read. I slogged through it because I gave him the benefit of the doubt from “Cryptonomicon” and “Snow Crash” and Zodiac." I bailed on the rest of the trilogy and waited patiently until Neal got something a little more… manageable under his fingers.

And I thought, from the reviews and book jacket copy, that REAMDE would be it.

But it really isn’t.
REAMDE, I thought, would be right in Stephenson’s wheelhouse: tech-tinged with a bit of real world intrigue and excitement, but now I’m afraid to go back and revisit Crypto, for fear it suffered from the same problems REAMDE does. I get the sense that Stephenson hates the reader (and freedom, too, while we’re at it) while plodding through this book from joyless cardboard description to the next. He had a really interesting idea, in outline, for a book, researched the crap out of it, and then put all of his research in painful, way up front detail into the book. He spends far too long on certain subjects, stroking them and milking it until it gets to the point where you want to look away, to give him a bit of privacy, while he finishes whatever it is he’s doing (which he obviously loves – but is probably something best done in private). The dialogue makes me feel bad for Neal, because if this is how the characters talk in his head he must be driven almost completely insane by their stilted, awkward drivel. The dialogue, like crawling over shards of glass, makes the characters’ interactions a bit far-fetched and unbelievable. When he matches them up you feel much the same emotion you feel when putting together a children’s 12 piece puzzle: it’s not shocking and you don’t feel like there’s much of an accomplishment having done so. But here’s the rub: the children’s 12 piece puzzle you just put together you also did with the aid of a jigsaw, and none of the pieces were from the same puzzle, really, so you just cut them to shape and shoved them all together, leaving behind a messy, incoherent picture, in the end.

I may be a bit biased, but here goes: This is one of my favorite books of the year.

It starts out slow. The preface, by Stuart Moulthrop, was a bit overwrought, and you’d be okay skipping it. The slow start, the boredom, you suspect, may be intentional. But it almost lost me, who is an admittedly patient reader, especially for Michael, willing to give him a lot of rope with which to hang himself and neighboring parties. About 40 pages in I was on the cusp of leaving it for another read, but soldiered through, and it was at about that mark where the story took off. Unraveled, to a degree, and picked up the pace. The awkward entrance into the hot tub was complete: the tentative sensitive portions of your body had been burned sufficiently with little enough lasting damage that it now felt comfortable, right. Or perhaps, more in line with a theme from the book, you, the reader, had learned the controls of this new video game, and now were fully immersed in the experience.

If you’ve read any Joyce before it covers common themes from his other works. I still think I rank The War Outside of Ireland as one of my favorite books of all time, but the more time I’ve spent thinking about how this book unraveled and came together in the end I find myself appreciating it more and more. It feels very hyper textual, and I can imagine Michael writing the bulk of the work, with all its intertwining strands, in Storyspace, which is where his more famous hyperfictions have been created, of course.

And, like his other works, this one is beautiful, elegiac, and lyrical. In addition to disappearance there is the other side of the coin; loss, that figures heavily. It may not be for everybody, but if you can slog through the opening scene setting and give yourself over, you’ll find a brilliant read.