“Let me just put it this way: I read this book all in one go. So thereâs zero chance I missed anything or forgot details or whatever. And when you read a book like that and the first thing you do upon finishing is Google âMaxwellâs Demon explain what happened,â something has gone awry.
I loved Raw Shark Texts, which was a wild ride and very meta and all, but this one just falls apart about 4/5 of the way through, even going so far as having one of the characters say, to another character who is a stand-in for the reader, that they canât explain everything.
Or, hear me out, you could. Because itâs a book with made-up shit in it. Nothing is inexplicable in fiction because everything has, at the very least, the explanation of why it was written.
I just donât get this one. I donât get the love from readers who, after reading their reviews and seeing they were also confused, said they enjoyed an experience that was, to me, akin to âit was all a dream.â
Now, sometimes it’s the reader’s fault. If I was hating this 25 pages in and forged on, that’s on me. BUT, this book is set up, sort of like Raw Shark Texts, where the reader is made to hope/expect that things are confusing in the moment, but will wrap up nicely.
I’m trying to think of movie equivalents…maybe Memento. You know how Memento is based on the idea that things are confusing, but you will be given an explanation? Or Jordan Peele’s US. LOTS of weird crap is happening, and although the explanation has some holes in it if you think about it too hard, you at least feel confident that you understand, basically, what’s going on by the end.
Both of these movies have something in common, which is that the stories are incredibly weird and confusing, but the storytelling is compelling enough to propel you through to the promise of an ending that is satisfying.
Some stories, like US and Memento, are building to an ending. They’re a maze, and the promise of “solving” the movie is what keeps you going. When stories like this have endings that don’t work, the maze collapses behind you.
Maxwell’s Demon read like this to me, a maze of a narrative that falls apart.
Maxwell’s Demon’s ending was almost there, close enough to make the reader feel like the problem was them, not the book. “You didn’t get it, you’re probably not smart enough,” is not only the feeling you’re left with, it’s said to your avatar character in the book, the narrator who the reader is meant to identify with.
I don’t like that. Because, as is the case with most readers, I don’t like being made to feel stupid. But more than that, I disagree with the premise that a reader is to blame when they don’t understand the basic plot.
Yes, sure, in some cases, stories are complicated. And if I read Maxwell’s Demon with the TV on or on an airplane or some shit, I’d be more generous in assuming there were things I missed.
But I think I gave it as close a reading as is possible, and I was still pretty lost.
My younger brother was involved in some kind of chemical engineering project, and he was excited to tell me about it. I told him, “Okay, but just so you know, I probably won’t get it.” And he said, “If I can’t explain it so you understand it, that’s my fault, not yours.” That’s kind of how I feel about storytelling: the purpose of storytelling is to take thoughts and ideas and transform them into something people can understand. The challenge of storytelling is taking incomprehensible feelings and fears and ideas and turning them into something that feel real.
Maxwell’s Demon seems to go the opposite direction: turning something very real into something intangible and untouchable. And I’m skating dangerously close to talking myself into, “And that’s the real genius of it!” but I’m not going to let me persuade myself that way.
Let’s talk a little about the formatting as well.
This book seems to have something to say about ebooks and how they’re sort of ruining things, and I can get behind that, but it’s a thread that’s mostly dropped. It seems like there’s a point about how ebooks are infinitely edit-able through time, and this is bad, but the message of the book is also about creating your own narrative, so…I’m not sure I get the difference between promotion of creating your own narrative and condemnation of editing the existing narratives, but whatever.
That said, this book would be kind of difficult to read in electronic format, and I can dig it. Creating books that don’t work well electronically is a good idea, if you can get a publisher to jump on, just so long as everyone going in knows that they absolutely shouldn’t buy the electronic version.
Raw Shark Texts did some interesting things with the arrangement of text on the page, of sizes and shapes of letters and words. It worked with the narrative, and I’m game.
Maxwell’s Demon does the same thing, but it felt more gimmicky this time. It’s sparse, and it doesn’t serve much purpose, but more than that, it was deployed in an annoying way. Allow me to explain.
We get several text asides, like footnotes, written out in the shape of leaves. Okay, fine. I don’t mind looking silly and turning a book upside down and so on. Silly is my general aesthetic, so this doesn’t throw me off my game whatsoever.
We get these leaves here and there, and then, at some point we get an EXTREMELY tiny leaf, the font is totally unreadable (I just so happened to have visited the eye doctor 3 days ago and have perfectly corrected vision, thank you very much).
Because this leaf is SO small, all I could think to do was grab my phone and use the camera as a magnifying glass. Which worked, I was able to read the text. BUT, it forced me to grab my phone and resist looking at texts and other shit, which seems to be antithetical to the purpose of the book, and I found that odd.
THEN, you turn the page. This is important, you turn the page, the next leaf isn’t on the facing page, it’s on the NEXT page, and it’s the same leaf I just read, much larger this time. Totally read-able.
THEN, on the following page, you’re informed that the leaf has struck the narrator in the face.
So, what we were seeing, through this visualization, is a leaf being blown straight at the narrator, gets closer, then hits him in the face. Which is totally fine, BUT, because there was NO WAY to know that I’d get the same leaf, in read-able size, on the next page, I went through the exercise of getting a phone and magnifying and doing all this shit unnecessarily.
And this, my friends, is where I part ways with the charms of books with unique layouts.
I’m a House of Leaves fan, it’s a little gimmicky, but overall, it works, and it adds something to the story. It’s rarely frustrating, just more…an unusual experience. Author Mark Z. Danielewski described it as climbing a mountain, you can see the top, you can see a couple different ways to get there, and you sort of pick your way along the route that looks best to you. And that makes sense.
Raw Shark Texts, same deal.
Maxwell’s Demon felt, to me, like climbing a mountain, you see a trail sign that’s in teeny, tiny letters, so you pull out your phone, even though the point of being in nature was to get away from shit, dismiss a couple notifications, check work email really quick, magnify the text, see that it’s mildly helpful, then walk on, turn the corner, and find another sign with the same info, but in a font that is read-able by humans.
If the idea was to send readers running for their phones, I would be entertained. I mean, if the narrative leaned into that portion, the battle of electronic convenience and other joys, that’d work great. But that storyline, being almost entirely abandoned, doesn’t feel like the motivation here. It feels like this was just an accident, a happenstance of printing that the repeated leaf is on a non-facing page (and is, I believe, the first repeated leaf, something that happens more later but not before this).
A minor annoyance, and, to me, a bad use of the technique of concrete poetry footnotes, let’s call them, that lend credence to the argument that this sort of thing is just a gag, a gimmick. “