Word: sudoku
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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First things first, Kim Edwards is not a Wunderkind. Yes, her very first novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Penguin; 401 pages), has become the literary phenomenon of the summer. Despite its total lack of biblical codes, serial killers or Sudoku, The Memory Keeper's Daughter has just hit No. 1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. "It's a thing you almost don't dream about, because it seems so impossible to have it happen," Edwards says, on the phone from her home in Lexington, Kentucky...
...Then the Japanese picked up the puzzle; a New Zealander named Wayne Gould put them into his own magazine and peddled the idea to the Times of London. In a trice, like home electronics, and autos and anime, this Japanese imitation overtook the American original, making Sudoku the Toyota of puzzles...
...Lady Pat wants to convince me that Sudoku is the caviar of puzzles, an ideal mind expander, opening a world of numerical possibilities with a minimum of means. All right. I acknowledge the game's elegance. And, heaven knows, I'm a number freak. Attach a few of them to a pitcher's or batter's record, and I'm off in Rotisserie or SABRmetrics dreamland. Ahh, slugging percentage! Oooh, WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched)! Those numbers have meaning, personality, clout. They lend biographical nuance and historical comparison to the game of baseball...
...what do you learn from Sudoku? Where's the allusive fun? The numbers in a Sudoku box are dry, curt, numbing; they live only in their own, square, self-contained universe; they refer to nothing but themselves. Numbers lack the allusiveness of words, their reverberations, their playfulness - how they rub up against one another and transform themselves. Add an S to comic and get cosmic; add one to laughter and get slaughter. You don't get this alchemy with numbers...
...that I've finished this story, I'll go relax my nerves and stir my cerebrum with a good cryptic. The rest of you, try a Times crossword. And to Pat Corliss, happy Sudoku-solving. Sorry I never did figure out the appeal of that numbers game...