Was it the 2001 release of Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis’s ingenious Scrabble-fiend memoir, that jump-started this whole literary sub-sub-sub-genre, the Nerdy Competitive Quest Book? Was it Spellbound becoming one of the surprise movie hits of 2003? Whatever the case, there’s been a rash of these books lately, each a ticket into a different geeky subculture. I thought I’d post capsule reviews of them periodically to the blog, under the assumption that anyone who would read the website of the author of a book on competitive trivia players might also like the analogous book on, say, the math Olympics.

Unfortunately, the book I chose to start with was Marc Romano’s Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession (Broadway, 2005). Having just returned from the 2006 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, I knew there was a great book in crossword culture, and so I couldn’t wait to read Crossworld. Unfortunately, Crossworld is to that hypothetical book as TV Guide’s crossword is to The New York Times’s.

There’s no “there” there. Romano attended one crossword tournament (two days, eight puzzles), interviewed Will Shortz once and one other constructor a few times, and thought he had a book? He had a longish article. As the documentary Wordplay demonstrated, the puzzle world is a rich and sprawling one, but we don’t get to see that in this curiously claustrophobic book. We just get the Stamford Marriott for 48 hours. Romano even makes a point of how he never even left the hotel for lunch. This, when coupled with the randomness of the areas he does spend pages on (weird philosophical ruminations on, for example, why British crosswords show more constructor personality than American ones, this without ever giving the reader a good idea of how British crosswords actually work, or two whole sections on crossword-themed mystery novels) make Crossworld seem like the unused outtakes from a much better crossword book.

And Romano seems to go to great trouble to make himself seem as unlikable as possible. He never, not for one second, convinces us that puzzling might actually be fun, the way Fatsis did so effortlessly in Word Freak, in the scenes where he and his fellow Scrabblers sit in diners anagramming “TRANSMEDIA + V” into “MAIDSERVANT.” Maybe I’m overlooking something, but I can’t think of one instance where Romano relishes anything aesthetic about crosswords–a particularly clever clue, say, or an elegant theme. Not once! Instead he makes crossword-solving seem like a masochistic and dull pursuit–one man in a New York apartment avoiding work by compulsively doing on-line crosswords and gloating over his solving times–right up to the baffling scene where he collapses of exhuastion mere hours after the eight-puzzle tournament and winds up in the emergency room. Wordplay fans know that the elite solvers at Stamford are fun, quirky folks, but Romano barely mentions them. Instead we get long, leering descriptions of the (possibly underage–he’s not sure) niece of the tourney organizer, and her remarkable chest. And despite the fact that she really plays no part in the book other than wearing a tight sweater, he makes sure to identify her by name. Classy.

Whether or not he needs a chaperone, Romano certainly needs a meaner editor. Almost every page has something so overwritten and wordier-than-thou that you can’t believe it’s not meant as parody. From page 71, where Romano introduces his “rivalry” with constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley (who probably had no idea the weird journalist guy was so fixated on him): “I had come to look on the name ‘Brendan Emmett Quigley’ with the sort of respect an Indus River Valley tribesman might once have shown toward a Macedonian hoplite.” Oh, that kind of respect!

Bottom line: I can’t believe how much I disliked this book, on a subject I was so predisposed to like. If you must read Crossworld, check out the paperback version, which at least has the 2004 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament puzzles as an appendix. Sorry the first review was so negative–next time I’ll get the bad taste out of my mouth with Cruciverbalism, Stanley Newman’s newly released crossword story, which is much less ambitious-slash-pompous and yet much more engaging. And manages to talk about crosswords without once ogling teenage girls.