Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession Review

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Crossworld: One Man's Journey into America's Crossword Obsession ReviewIt seems that the wonderfully touching and insightful National Spelling Bee documentary SPELLBOUND has opened the floodgates for literary variants: COUNTDOWN (about young math whizzes), WORD FREAKS (about Scrabble), and Marc Romano's CROSSWORLD (about crossword puzzling). Exploring these peculiar talents and (occasionally) obsessions, and the personalities of those who partake of them, is a meritorious notion, prospectively opening windows into small but almost savant-like niches of human behavior. One might pick up any of these books expecting to be introduced to some of the people who exhibit these extraordinary talents. In the case of CROSSWORLD, however, Romano tells us far more about himself than we care to know and far less than we want to know about the world's best cruciverbalists, or crossword puzzle solvers.
CROSSWORLD centers on author Romano's first-time participation in March, 2004 in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held every year in Stamford, CT. Along with the requisite history lesson in crosswording and discussion about the differences between American style crosswords and British style cryptics, the author describes how he prepared himself as a contestant. Romano is fairly successful at the event itself, but he focuses far more on the people who construct and edit puzzles (Eugene Maleska, Will Shortz, Brendan Quigley, Michael Shteyman) than on the collection of people who bothered traveling to Stamford and giving up an entire weekend to solve crosswords against the clock and each other. We learn something about Shortz and Quigley, but that's about as far as Romano takes us. As for the 500-odd participants in the contest, the author blithely assures us that they are mostly introverts, mostly white, scrupulously honest, unhealthily consumed by puzzling, and just all-around nice people. As human insights go, these are remarkably trite. Romano apparently decided he was far more interesting than anyone else at the contest. We learn about his dating habits, his drinking habits, his use of Ativan to calm himself into a semi-hallucinatory state, and an off-base story about how his puzzling skills helped him acquire "a new bedmate." What should have been a fascinating account of crosswording aficionados ends up being mostly the author's stargazing at New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz and navel-gazing over his own skills.
One other aspect of CROSSWORLD bears comment: Romano writes like someone with ADD. Every page is filled with three or four parenthetical asides, some of them full paragraph length, that are both distracting and annoying. Any writer who needs twin parentheses that often either lacks focus or is simply forcing too much extraneous information into the text. Additionally, the author seems so unsure of his own effectiveness as a writer, he constantly places explicit reminders of things he said earlier in his story. He also presents a weakly speculative, pop evolutionary psychology analysis of puzzling and problem solving that involves cavemen, tigers, and being able to spot a tiger lurking at "the sun-dappled forest edge."
Curiously, for a subject matter as precise and nit-picking as crosswords, Romano seems a bit loose with his facts. He attributes the notion of England and America being two nations divided by a common language to Winston Churchill rather than either Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw (both of whom predated Churchill on this notion, Wilde by 50 years). He also mentions taking the #5 line in New York to Canal Street (New Yorkers know that only the #6 IRT line stops at Chinatown) and comments that Susan Lucci failed "something like a dozen times" to win a daytime Emmy (the actual number was eighteen before she finally won in 1999).

By the end of CROSSWORLD, Romano has clearly gotten carried away with his subject matter, trying to inflate it into much more than it is. If only we taught crosswording to university students, he argues, the world would have no more wars. "The more your mind is filled with real facts about the real world,...the less room there will be in your heart for hatred." He obviously ignored Brendan Quigley's admonition earlier in the book: "...you're talking about crossword puzzles. It's really not that complicated. They're just games." About the kindest thing one can say about CROSSWORLD is that it manages to be modestly interesting despite its author's persistent intrusions into his own material.

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