"Ready Player One" is a YA novel

The buzz around Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One was extremely positive, so I borrowed a friend's copy last year when I was in serious need of diversion. On the one hand, I stayed up late for a couple too many nights reading it. On the other hand, that was despite my impatience for its weaknesses. I found myself skimming past sentences and paragraphs because I was more interested in the plot's resolution than in how it got there.

To be fair, Ready Player One's weaknesses are baked into its premise. The Oasis, a virtual reality social media/gaming platform has become one of, if not the, primary arenas for all human interaction. Even public schools have migrated onto the Oasis's platform. Since a great deal of the action takes place in the Oasis, page upon page is taken up with exposition: the Oasis's history; its social order; its effects on the real world; its appearance; its fantastic sights; so on and so forth. However, not all the exposition is necessitated by the premise: the narrator would rather explain relationships (ex. "He is my best friend") than show them at work.

Overuse of exposition is the great weakness of young adult novels, apparently because their authors don't trust their young readers to put two and two together. (The excellent Hunger Games does not fall into this trap.) I was thinking I might recommend Ready Player One to my teenage son until I ran into some explicit, albeit clinical, discussion of masturbation. With those bits expurgated, it could easily be moved to the juvenile section of the library.

Still, the main characters are interesting and sympathetic, and the plot engages the reader almost inevitably. It centers around a game which is coded into the architecture of the Oasis; accordingly, one is drawn into the plot precisely because human beings all, always, want to know who wins.

Given that Steven Spielberg is directing, I expect the film version, for once, to be better than the novel. All those dizzying visual elements will be shown, sparing the viewer from being told too, too much.