More unfinished buisness

I finished reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Again I found that he didn't complete the story that he was writing. Having completed the story that involved the cryptography, the human elements of the story, the characters that he'd developed to that point, and the entirety of the rest of the plot were left incomplete. Sometimes this type of ending can be an interesting way for a story to end, in Limbo (the movie) the story is left with the viewer to decide if the people who are stranded are going to be rescued or killed. This choice was the point of the movie, and was built up to. In Our Game, Le Carre has an ending without resolution of the story plot of his novel. He does, however, resolve the internal plot of the main character. We followed him as he came to grips with a situation that he began the novel flummoxed by, and at the end had come to understand and accept.

Cryptonomicon doesn't build to a point where the reader is left wondering about a few discrete outcomes, nor does it follow one character closely enough for us to find an ending of the book in their internal choices. The solution of the cryptography puzzle also wasn't followed closely enough to be the center of the novel. When the we learn the solution, we are more interested in how the character cleverly learned while thwarting pursuers than in the solution itself. We as readers are left begging for another chapter, not to wrap up a happy ending, but simply to give us a sense of closure about the novel.