I recently re-read Cryptonomicon and I understood, finally, why the ending was so abrupt. The scene was not a scene from a book, but a scene from a movie. The

I recently re-read Cryptonomicon and I understood, finally, why the ending was so abrupt. The scene was not a scene from a book, but a scene from a movie. The whole river-of-gold thing is a striking visual, and doesn't work that well as the end of a book because in a book we just don't care about visuals, we care about characters. In a film, it's where the titles should start scrolling up and followed by a slow fade to black. Finishing a film on a striking image, that works. A book: not so much. I still deeply love that book, and remember fondly buying it at a train-station at about 5.30pm and then suddenly it was 5AM I was at home, and I finished the book.