loosie: words: Book Review: Marc Romano's <i>Crossworld</i>

Book Review: Marc Romano's Crossworld

Searching for a ten-letter word for “boredom”?

by Staff | 2005.12.02

Searching for a ten-letter word for “boredom”? Try “Crossworld.” It’s a dull book, written by an evidently dull guy.

In the insular world of crossword puzzle creators and competitive solvers, there may exist a compelling story, but it remains to be reported by a writer more talented and less self-absorbed than Marc Romano. Padded with tedious blather on the history of word puzzles, pompous observations rich with contradictions, and dreary personal anecdotes, Crossworld casts a sleep-inducing spell in just 225 pages.

“Cruciverbalists,” serious crossword puzzle devotees occasionally call themselves, and those who gather in Stamford, Connecticut, for the annual tournament organized by Will Shortz, puzzle editor for the New York Times, are the most serious of all. A real reporter would have combed through this crowd, focused on a few puzzling geniuses, and then followed the top contestants through the eventual triumph of Trip Payne, who took only five minutes to blow away the other finalists.

Marc Romano, unfortunately, chooses to focus on himself. You see, Romano is a participatory journalist, so he does not merely describe the competition, he experiences it. The reader is hardly surprised: Romano’s own skills at wordplay serve as a subtext for the book. The author frequently and painstakingly details his completion times for the daily crosswords in the Times.

Romano’s fixation with Brendan Emmett Quigley, one of the puzzle “constructors,” leads to an odd one-on-one competition within the larger tournament. Romano is committed to finishing ahead of Quigley; Quigley seems mildly interested in finishing ahead of Romano. The reader is indifferent to the outcome of their little duel, but is nonetheless subjected to Romano’s whiney round by round accounts, Trip Payne be damned.

As Romano focuses on himself, the book provides all the punch of a decidedly unfunny sitcom. Watch Marc’s reaction to a single Ativan tablet: stripped of his crosswording abilities, he is humiliated by a puns-and-anagrams puzzle. Watch Marc attempt to become one of “the cool kids” by skipping a lengthy commemoration ceremony to down a couple of beers at the hotel bar. Watch Marc groan over his hangover. In an episode titled “Crosswords and the Mystery of Sex,” watch Marc halfheartedly pursue evidence of libidinous action at the tournament. He discovers none. And when the tournament ends, watch Marc throw up and wander into the dark forest of cheesy similes: “I heard a snapping sound, as if a peal of thunder had broken out across the room, and I felt a sharp pain in my head, as if a ten-ton weight had fallen on it.”

A minor irony is that, however much Romano tries to cast himself as an outsider, he is comfortably at home with the Stamford puzzlers, whom he collectively describes on different occasions as introverts, extroverts, geeks, and Animal House types. He is obsessed with moving into the upper echelon of competitive puzzledom. Should he alter his handwriting for more speed? Can he profitably analyze the styles of the leading constructors? His intensity wears down even professional puzzle masters: “Marc, you’re talking about crossword puzzles,” says Quigley finally. “It’s really not that complicated. They’re just games.”

Romano never quite accepts that. His claims for the importance of crosswords and the moral and intellectual superiority of crossword enthusiasts culminate in his overwrought concluding admonition: when you next see someone working on a puzzle, “don’t disturb that person—he or she is solving a mystery and at the same time putting back together, word by word, the pieces of our broken world.”