Erik's Reviews > The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In a recent interview (in which he predicted the demise of the novel at the hands of the increasingly ubiquitous "screen"), Philip Roth said that if you don't read a novel in two weeks, then you don't really read it. He's talking about the necessity of focus and attention, the dedication required to trick your brain into thinking these characters and places are real, without which you cannot become emotionally and intellectually enmeshed in the narrative, without which the novel has no bite, no pathos, no transformative power. I agree.

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a near thing. I just couldn't get into it. Perhaps it was the sometimes unnecessary minutiae of description, for example a five page description of a mural. Or maybe the disjointed plot, which only kicks into full gear in the last half of the book. Or maybe that I didn't quite believe the world building: in Stephenson's view of the future, nation-states have been replaced by smaller phyles (i.e. communities or organizations), such as the stuffy, archaic neo-Victorians who are the primary focus of the plot. I didn't agree that the rise of ubiquitous nanotechnology would dissolve the nation state or that the world would remain largely poor and polluted [as a comparison, in 1980, 45% of the world lived in poverty; it was 9.5% in 2015].

But then, with about 100 pages to go, it all clicked into place. I understood the appeal of Victorian sexuality: The unwieldy dresses, the coyness, the repression - foreplay, all of it, tease on a societal scale. I understood the Eastern conflict between acceptance of Western technology and Western philosophy: A desire to wield the power of technology without being corrupted by the attendant culture. I realized how little I truly knew about the history of China pre-Industrial age - that I might know the facts but have not developed a clear understanding of the tone or texture of those people. One of the book's primary characters, Hackworth, found his place - he was not just an engineer but a genius and like all geniuses, a bit unhinged. I saw the parallels between Nell's primer, a penultimate choose-your-own-adventure adaptive book meant to instruct young ladies in independent and intelligent thought; her ghost-mother, the ractive (interactive) actress Miranda; and the hundreds of thousands of Chinese girls, orphaned by civil war: Conquering poverty is not just about feeding the belly, it's about feeding the mind. I realized that the stories found in the Primer were not meant to be mere allegories of Nell's life but a story within its own right. A book within a book if you will. Just like the story of our own lives is filled with stories within stories and is itself a sub-story of the larger stories of community, country, and humanity. Stories as Matryoshka dolls.

In short, Diamond Age became more than just a static stamping of ink on a page. It infiltrated my mind and became not just *a* story, it became *my* story, personalized and customized to me, by my own thoughts, just like the stories in the Primer are customized to the reader. The Diamond Age is then a celebration of that great and wondrous paradox of books: their mutability. A million people can read the exact same words and yet each will be reading a different story.