The Forthrast clan is good-natured enough to welcome Richard his survivalist brother, Jake as well as numerous old-timers, grad students, homemakers, Gen-Xers and awed youngsters who know of Uncle Richard’s legendary exploits from his Wikipedia entry. 22s, Glocks and assault rifles are cheerfully deployed in the tribe’s yearly target practice. Richard Forthrast, a middle-aged former marijuana smuggler and founder of Corporation 9592, a Fortune 500 company based on a game called T’Rain, joins the rest of the gang in the Back 40, where bolt-action. “Reamde” opens disarmingly enough, on an Iowa farm where the Forthrast family is having its annual Thanksgiving reunion. If Melville had Neal Stephenson’s gift of pacing, Captain Ahab would have had his own summer blockbuster and an action figure. Those put off by the novel’s heft - at over 1,000 pages, it’s about a third longer than “Moby-Dick” - should be reassured that this is perhaps the fastest 1,000-page read they’ll ever encounter. This is the rare book that will appeal equally to fans of both NPR and the NRA. Not that there isn’t plenty of both, especially the latter: reamde is a near-anagram for armed, a state in which, by novel’s end, even the most improbable characters find themselves. The title refers to the misspelled subject line of an e-mail virus, “Reamde” rather than “Read me.” While its early pages suggest the novel will be an intriguing if fairly boilerplate techno-thriller, “Reamde” turns out to have more on its mind than the usual complement of genius hackers and things that blow up. Among all the books tied to the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, Neal Stephenson’s massively entertaining new thriller, “ Reamde,” may turn out to offer the best take on this increasingly fragmented, bizarre and bleakly beautiful world we now call home.
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