Big U (Paperback)

This book is really close to being "great", in that Stephenson takes some pretty heavy (and, in my experience, deserved) jabs to the gut of the academic elite.

In the Big U, we witness a complete social meltdown, during which professors hole up to ponder slides of various samples of "scat" while the world crashes down (literally) around them. The retreat of the intelligensia when the "going gets tough" (and when they seem to be needed most) is paramount to the message Stephenson is getting at here (like I actually know!). Left to their own devices & without any guidance, the students (who have matriculated only to find that the primary obejective of the tenured is to avoid them at all costs) spin off into what other reviewers see as the "inferno".

Granted, this is not Stephenson's best work, but it is honest & while (of course) totally fictional and fantastic, it is poignant (I hate myself for using that word).

Not the best introduction to Stephenson, but a required read by his fans.

If you are looking to get into Stephenson, I would recommend beginning with "Zodiac" (totally hilarious/five stars). Then I would suggest "In the Beginning...was the Command Line" (a five star philosophical read). Then, I would choose Cryptonomicon (brilliant/five stars), and then Snow Crash (4 stars), The Big U & finally the Diamond Age (Neal must've been doing crack when he wrote it).

Anyway, this is a four-star read for Stephenson fans, a three star read for new fans, and a book to avoid if you are not yet a fan.

I entered SUNY Buffalo in the Fall of 1984, one of 30,000 students at this megalithic university. For all the similarities, this book could have been set at my school. I read this either in late 84 or early 85, enjoyed it as only one living the book could, and went on with my life. Over the next couple years, I began reading a ton of Philip K. Dick and The Big U's dystopian near-science fiction was left behind. But elements of my life would remind me of this book in a way that it has of only one other book.

I spent part of the Summer of '92 working in a fish-processing plant on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, and during this time I read Franz Kafka's The Castle. It was my first time through the book, but I had already read The Trial, so I was used to Kafka's absurdist dystopian stylings. My reality so closely mirrored the situations in The Castle that all I could do was laugh and wonder if Kafka had been hired by God to write my life. My feelings about The Big U were a precursor to this.

It's hard to find a good review of The Big U online. Most people reviewing this for Amazon hate it or see it only as a bit of literary anthropology- interesting because the guy who wrote this evolved into the guy who wrote Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon. Read as the infant Stephenson, it is only interesting. But read in conjunction with (former) attendance at a 1980's Mega University, it is not quite Candide, not quite The Castle, but almost there.

As always, Stephenson writes a bang-up beginning. Those are always his strengths, he then is typically weak with endings and holding the plot together. Unfortunately in his first novel here the threads of the plot escape his reins quickly and run out of control. There are some funny bits in this alleged satire, such as the M.A. and philosophy Ph.D. cement-truck drivers. However the satire quickly escalates into sheer lunacy, and becomes so ludicrous that it loses effect.

One other problem is the jarring change from 3rd person to 1st person that occurs from time to time in the book. The narrator of the book is a participant, albeit a very passive and seldom seen participant. The change of perspective from straight 3rd person to a sentence beginning with "I" really takes the reader out of the story.

Add to these problems the apparent Boston University in-jokes and the good things in this novel are vastly overshadowed. There may be a good Stephenson story in here, but it needed much tighter editing.

Luckily for us all, Stephenson got much much better. If you must see his genesis as a writer, read this, if you aren't interested in his development as a writer give it a big pass.