Getting clued in to crossword mania
Crossworld: One Man’s Journey Into America’s Crossword Obsession, By Marc Romano, Broadway, 238 pp., $24.95
Ten minutes isn't an awfully long time. For most people, it takes nearly that long just to locate the daily newspaper, pick out the section containing the crossword puzzle, fold it open to the correct page, settle into a comfortable chair, locate one's favorite puzzling pen or pencil, take a deep breath, and set to. But for a certain breed, the Sunday New York Times puzzle can be completed in that same 10 minutes. It is this kind of gifted puzzler, and the world of competitive solving, that Marc Romano introduces us to in ''Crossworld: One Man's Journey Into America's Crossword Obsession."
A freelance writer and translator, Romano covered the 2003 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, in Stamford, Conn., for the Globe and returned the next year as a competitor. Most of this slim book is an account of his experiences at the tournament, sandwiched between forays into the history of the crossword puzzle (which first appeared in the New York World in 1913) and interviews with editors, constructors, and fans.
''Crossworld" thus follows a pattern similar to that of Stefan Fatsis's riveting ''Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players" (2001). If Romano's personality is more intrusive and his observations less disciplined than Fatsis's, he still artfully conveys the adrenaline rush of tournament-level competition and offers other insights that will intrigue devoted puzzlers.
At the 2004 tournament, where ''the intellectual wattage . . . is high enough to juice all the light bulbs in any medium-size city you could care to name," the competition among the 500-odd entrants consists of a ''four-hour, six-puzzle ordeal." Romano is undone by a combination of ill-advised self-medicating and carelessness -- the scoring system rewards accuracy over speed -- and finishes out of the running for the finals. Along the way, however, he gives us a look at the pun-laden qualifying puzzles (Clue: ''Analyst's lingerie?" Answer: FREUDIANSLIP) and enjoys the company of like-minded obsessives, such as brilliant constructor and part-time rock musician Brendan Emmett Quigley.
Stanley Newman, puzzle creator and former competitor, is another crossword personality whom the author sketches. The dazzlingly fast Newman once accepted a seemingly insurmountable challenge from New York Sun puzzle editor Peter Gordon: a one-on-one competition on a puzzle that Gordon himself had not only made but spent hours memorizing beforehand. Newman won, finishing in two minutes. We also meet New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz, the successor to Eugene T. Maleska. Shortz, Romano writes, has helped shake up Maleska's ''close to tyrannical crossword tradition" with more culturally up-to-date clues and the use of squares containing more than one letter. In addition, Shortz meticulously edits the clues so that the Times puzzle progresses in difficulty from Monday through Saturday.
Some of the best parts of ''Crossworld" are Romano's ruminations on the nature of puzzling and its allure. He draws a tentative line between the length of the subway ride in New York, Paris, and Moscow -- 20 minutes or less, the bare minimum of speed needed for competitive puzzling -- and the fact that these cities possess ''active and extremely competent puzzling populations." Solving puzzles, he theorizes, can be ''an emotional crutch," an attempt ''to create order by proxy."
The pleasure of reading ''Crossworld" is dimmed by the occasional error (the upper-left corner of the puzzle is called the northeast rather than northwest; a description of two puzzles notes that each has 70 words, then states bafflingly that the word count is higher in the second). Overall, though, it's hard not to enjoy a book that recalls how the nation's previous commander in chief not only read the newspaper but was timed completing the Times Wednesday puzzle with perfect accuracy in under 7 minutes.
