The Bad Boy's Anger
One opens
The Atlantic Monthly and is promptly introduced to a burst of joyless contrarianism. Tiring of it, one skims ahead to the book reviews, only to realize: this
is the book review. A common experience for even the occasional reader of
B.R. Myers, it never fails to make the heart sink. The problem is not only one of craft and execution. Myers writes as if the purpose of criticism were to obliterate its object. He scores his little points, but so what? Do reviewers really believe that isolating a few unlovely lines in a five hundred page novel, ignoring the context for that unloveliness, and then pooh-poohing what remains constitutes a reading? Is this what passes for judgment these days?
If so, Myers would have a lot to answer for. But in the real world, instances don't yield general truths with anything like the haste of a typical Myers paragraph (of which the foregoing is a parody). And so, even as he grasps for lofty universalism, Brian Reynolds Myers remains
sui generis, the bad boy of reviewers, lit-crit's
Dennis Rodman.
Myers came to prominence, or what passes for it in the media microcosmos, via "
A Reader's Manifesto," a long jeremiad against "the modern 'literary' best seller" and "the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose." It earned notice primarily for its attack on the work and reputation of novelists lauded for their style -
Cormac McCarthy,
Don DeLillo, and
E. Annie Proulx, among others. Many of these writers were ripe for reevaluation, and "A Reader's Manifesto" was read widely enough to land Myers a contributing editor gig at
The Atlantic. It was subsequently published as
a stand-alone book. Yet the essay was itself little more than an exercise in style, and not a very persuasive one at that. It was hard to say which was more irritating: Myers' scorched-earth certainties; his method, a kind of myopic travesty of New Criticism; or his own prose, a donnish pastiche of high-minded affectation and dreary cliché.
I can't be the only reader who wanted to cry out against the manifesto being promulgated on my behalf, but Myers had insulated himself in several ways. First, he had been so thoroughgoingly tendentious, and at such length, that to rebut his 13,000 words required 13,000 of one's own. Second: his jadedness was infectious. It made one weary of reading, weary of writing, weary of life. Finally, in the
The Atlantic's letters section, he showed himself to be no less willing to resort to pugnacious misreadings of his correspondents than he had been of his original subjects. "I have no idea why Jed Cohen thinks I have disparaged a hundred years of literature..." he wrote, in an exchange about his
Tree of Smoke review. "Saying that reputations must never be reviewed would place reviewers above criticism."
No, one wanted to object.
Saying that reviewers
must never be reviewed would place reviewers above criticism.
Mr. Cohen is himself criticizing a reviewer. But to argue with Myers was, manifestly, to summon his contempt. And so he whirled mirthlessly on, flourishing the word "prose" like a magic wand, working pale variations on his Reader's Manifesto. In your face,
Toni Morrison!
To date, I have yet to read a comprehensive debunking of the Myers bunkum. But his
recent review of
Jonathan Franzen's
Freedom really does seem to invite one - not so much because
I liked the book and he didn't, or because it
caught the eye of
David Brooks and from there spread to the far corners of the Internet, but because of the willfulness of his misrepresentations to the reader, and the radical degree of projection involved. To the long-time Myers watcher, the review, titled, "Smaller Than Life" looks to be a giant mirror: what Myers takes to be the philistinism of contemporary literature is an enormous reflection of his own.
Close Reading
Myers premises his complaints against
Freedom on the "smallness" of its characters - their likeness to "the folks next door." In support of these descriptions, he tenders a few details from the text: Patty Berglund bakes cookies and is "relatively dumber" than her siblings. Her husband Walter has a red face and his "most salient quality . . . [is] his niceness." Richard Katz is a womanizing punk musician. See? Tiny. Insignificant. "Nonentities." But even at this early stage of the argument, what should be obvious to even unsympathetic readers of the book is the smallness of Myers' imagination. Set Richard Katz aside for the moment (maybe Myers lives next door to some priapic indie rockers). Isn't "relatively dumber" - an elaboration of the idea that Patty's siblings "were more like what her parents had been hoping for" - meant to tell us more about Patty's self-image than about her IQ? Patty will return to the theme in her whip-smart autobiography, after all. And mightn't some readers find this will-to-averageness "interesting," psychologically speaking? Also: Isn't Walter's most "salient" quality (carefully elided in Myers' quotation) actually "his love of Patty?" And "salient" for whom? Not for the author, but for the subtly anti-Berglund neighbors on Ramsey Hill, whose point-of-view mediates the novel's opening section, "Good Neighbors." Either unwittingly or purposefully, Myers has made a cardinal error. He has mistaken the characters' angle of vision for the novelist's.
As if to compensate for the oversight, he hastily concedes that the "insignificance" of its principals (again, insignificance to whom?) need not doom a novel itself to insignificance: "A good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody, as
Madame Bovary demonstrates." Invidious comparison alert! But Myers seems to have not read
Madame Bovary, or, at best, to have paid it the same glancing attention he pays to
Freedom. For the former has more to tell us about the latter's style than about its "storytelling."
Though Franzen's temperament is warmer - he doesn't aspire to
Flaubert's fearsome objectivity - his technique relies to an unusual degree on the free indirect discourse
Madame Bovary pioneered. Flaubert inhabits his characters,
Lydia Davis tells us in the introduction to her new translation, in order to "[hold] up a miror to the middle- and lower-middle-class world of his day, with all its little habits, fashions, fads." Irony is everywhere present, especially, she writes elsewhere, "in the words and phrases in the novel to which he gives special emphasis" - that is, underlining or italics.
They appear throughout the novel, starting on the first page with
new boy. With this emphasis he is drawing attention to language that was commonly, and unthinkingly, used to express shared ideas that were also unquestioned.
Freedom, too, aims to be contemporary - perhaps even, as Myers puts it, "strenuously" so. But the scattered instances of "juvenile" glibness and vulgarity he portrays as its mother-tongue ("the local school 'sucked'. . . Patty was 'very into' her teenage son, who, in turn was 'fucking' the girl next door") are not unexamined symptoms of "a world in which nothing can happen." Rather, like Flaubert's common, unthinking phrases, they are necessary constituents of the novel's attempt to show that world its face in the mirror. And if Franzen "hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically," it's only because he assumes his readers have read other novels written since 1850, and so already possess that frame themselves.
Not that Myers has any apparent trouble "judging the prose"; Franzen's is "slovenly," he insists. Nor is this the only place he seeks to have it both ways. The vulgarity he imputes at first to Franzen he finally does get around to pinning on Patty...but only to demonstrate that she "is too stupid to merit reading about." Conversely, Franzen's attempts at eloquence reveal him to be one of those people "who think highly enough of their own brains" that they must "worry about being thought elitist." (Stupid people, smart people, "middlebrow" people; is there anyone who doesn't count as a "nonentity," in B.R. Myers book?)
It would be a mistake, however - a Myers-ish one - to read too much into this incoherence. The simple fact is that Myers' conception of language is itself vulgar. "Prose," for him, equals syntax plus diction, and is expected to denote, rather than to evoke. He positions himself as prose's defender. But when he uses the word, or its cousin, "style," what he's really asking is for it to give way to more and faster
plot. (It's a preference Flaubert would have regarded with some amusement. "'These days, what I really adore are stories that can be read all in one go,'" he has his protagonist say. "'I detest common heroes and moderate feelings.'") Myers dismisses one of Franzen's showier metaphors - "Gene...stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman" - as "half-baked," with no consideration for the way it connects to the Minnesota Vikings-themed rec room of the opening pages, or the Vikings garb these Minnesotans wear, or ultimately to "the old Swedish-gened depression" Gene's son, Walter, feels "seeping up inside him . . . like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake." Similarly, Myers writes off
Freedom's ornithological tropes as clichés, while giving us, in his own voice, sinking hearts, pushed luck, "busy lives," "[getting] a pass," "aspects of society," "interesting individuals" - shopworn phrase following shopworn phrase "as the night the day."
(This is not to mention the larger cliché of think-piece provocation - the
You thought it was black, but really it's white school of journalism. It's no coincidence that "A Reader's Manifesto" appeared in a magazine that was clawing back market share with cover slugs like
Is God an Accident? and
Did Christianity Cause the Crash? and
The End of White America? and
The End of Men. The approach would be codified, with no apparent irony, in the 2008 relaunch slogan: "The
Atlantic. Think. Again." But is "thinking" really
le mot juste here? It's surely no commendation for a critic that we know what he's going to say about a novelist before we've read the review. Or before either of us has read the book.)
Remarkably, Myers even manages to be wrong when he tries to concede something positive about
Freedom. "Perhaps the only character who holds the reader's interest is Walter," he writes. But the adult Walter is by far the novel's least fully realized character. Of course, this late softening in the review is probably, like the invocation of Emma B., purely rhetorical, but I'll condescend, as a demonstration of my own fair-mindedness, to grant Myers exactly the same degree of benefit of the doubt he imagines he's extending to Franzen.
He is absolutely correct that contemporary book reviewers are far too "reluctan[t] to quote from the text," but he confuses close-reading with mere assertive quotation. He consistently shows himself, here and elsewhere, to be deaf to point-of-view, tone, and implication. Indeed, he seems to revel in this deafness. (He quotes a line of capitalized dialogue - "I KNOW IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN" - and then confesses, with italics. "I have no idea what this is meant to
sound like.") This is sort of like an art critic trumpeting his glaucoma. Or like a restaurant reviewer who can't stomach meat.
Who's Down in Whoville?
Of course, Myers' real target isn't Jonathan Franzen, or even "the modern literary bestseller," so much as it is "our age, the Age of Unseriousness." The old values - truth, civility, Seriousness - are seen to be under attack from "chat-room[s] . . . Twitter . . .
The Daily Show . . . the blogosphere," and "our critical establishment." Extremism in their defense can be no vice. But, as with conservative pundits of many stripes, Myers is perfectly willing to be "truthy," uncivil, and unserious himself, when it suits his purposes. "I especially liked how the author got a pass for the first chapter," he huffs at one point, with the sarcasm of a high-school Heather. Thus does he participate in the destruction of value he claims to lament.
Moreover, Myers has, symptomatically, mistaken a signifier for the thing it signifies. The underlying cause of the contemporary ills he keeps alluding to is not the coarseness of our language, but our narcissism, whose most "salient" form (as I've
argued elsewhere) is a seen-it-all knowingness that inflates the observer at the expense of the thing observed. In this sense, B.R. Myers couldn't be more of-the-moment. It's no wonder he's baffled by those turns of phrase by which the novelist seeks to disappear into his characters.
Finally - and most damningly - Myers has little to tell us about beauty. For Flaubert's contemporary
Baudelaire, beauty was
made up of an eternal, invariable element . . . and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be. . . the age - its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion.
In his dyspeptic disregard for what might be amusing, enticing, or appetizing about the world we live in - his inability, that is, to read like a writer, or write like a reader - B.R. Myers has placed contemporary literature
in toto beyond his limited powers. He offers us, in place of insight, only indigestion.
I am on record, both in this magazine and in my local newspaper, as an enthusiastic defacer of books. Recently I had a new kind of marginal experience that I would like to share: the pleasure of joint, or (as they say in grad seminars) “dialogic” marginalia.
For the last few years, I’ve been telling people that “Angels and Demons” is the trashiest book I’ve ever read (no small achievement). It’s nice to know that Brown has persisted with his style of banality, incredulity and ponderous literary/historical scavenging – without actually having to read his books!
Lousy writing is so much fun!
So instead of spending your time, money, and energy on, say, a terrific yet under-the-radar writer, you purchased Dan Brown’s latest book, read it, made “amusing” comments in the margins, and then wrote an article with the revolutionary premise that Dan Brown is a shitty writer. (If I had been able to write a snarky comment in this essay’s margins, it would have been: Thanks for this invaluable and thought-provoking cultural contribution!)
There is something terribly depressing in this image of the literary intelligentsia sitting on their thrones and ironically reading bad books. Come on, Sam and Dave, don’t give up on literature just yet!
I could likely do something very similar with DFW’s works as well.
While we’re on the subject of poor writing, please let me edit out the word “basically” from this margin note: “I basically haven’t been able to picture anything he’s described.” Thank you.
My friends and I did this in high school with some kind of series aimed at teen girls that revolved around cheerleaders. If you were fourth or fifth in line to read you would cry with laughter all the way through.
Every time I read the banal comments about my own writing, I look at reviews for Dan Brown. And I rage, “How did this man get published and all I get are rejections and criticism about my cliches and grammar errors. Of course, having a sane and dependable proof reader and an editor would help those things… but they also stop my books from being professionally published. How does Brown do It? And how can I convince his readers my stories are at least moderately better?
This article, while not revolutionary, serves a similar purpose as Brown’s novels. I was much more entertained by this than I was ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The DaVinci Code,’ particularly David’s “EAT SHIT” annotation.
For 20 years I worked at a publishing house that makes recorded books, and I learned more from about good writing from hearing books read out loud than I did getting a BA in English. And O! Does this piece remind me of those days! We had no choice but to read these things and margin-comments were our way of relieving the agony. What we figured out is that anybody could get anything published if they are persistent enough (and this was in the days before self-publishing on a massive scale.)
I think most people just scan and miss the silliness of so much writing and therefore don’t understand what we’re making a big deal about. I often feel like I’m speaking a different language when I discuss actual quality of writing, even with people who love reading, so I get comfort from stories like these!
And Shannon, it also comforts me to know that there are high school kids care too.
Our favorite person to pick on, btw, was Piers Anthony. There are some people in my city that very seriously wish he’d die so he won’t write more books.
@Zach. No you can’t. Just go and pick up Infinite Jest next time you’re in a book store and think about what you wrote.
First off, great read, I love this kind of MST3K approach to glossing works, hope to see more of it in the future.
Secondly, I thought I’d repost my comment from a reddit discussion going on about this very article. It took me much longer than I planned on investing in it, and I would hate to see all that effort potentially buried under what I can only expect to be a torrent of downvotes.
My response:
People have problems with Dan Brown’s writing because he so consistently and persistently ‘gets it wrong’. And people who do care about things like characterization, plausibility, and intelligent prose are going to have problems with his writing. Most just shrug and look the other way, but others are genuinely concerned that something with so many issues can achieve such unparalleled success.
I don’t personally think it’s a problem to read Dan Brown, and I take issue to people who say “Don’t read this book because it’s bad”, but the problem is when people start throwing all these nonsensical adjectives praising Dan Brown. I have a BA and an MA in English Lit, so I guess it’s fair to say I can easily be chucked in with the book snobs of this world, and though I will admit I’ve read all of Brown’s works for fun, I cannot concede that either his writing style or his books have any value beyond being an in-flight read. At very least his prose is terribly sloppy, to say nothing of his blatant disregard for coherent characterization. A sentence like “Atop a control tower in the distance, the Turkish flag fluttered proudly–a field of red emblazoned with the ancient symbols of the crescent and star–vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, still flying proudly in the modern world” shouldn’t have made it past the first draft stage, much less made it past the editor. As the article above points out, it’s a repetition for starters (we get that the flag is fluttering), but the big problem for a grammarian like me is this:
The antecedents of “vestiges” are “the ancient symbols of the crescent and star”, but since these two terms appear in the parenthetical phrase “a field of red…”, this means they don’t function as part of the grammar of the sentence. So what we really have written here is “Atop a control tower in the distance, the Turkish flag fluttered proudly, vestiges of the Ottoman Empire…” HUH? The ‘flag is vestiges’? Grammatically that’s nonsense. Ok, so the control tower with the flag are vestiges of the Ottoman Empire? That doesn’t make any logical sense, a control tower is not a vestige of the Ottoman Empire. So clearly he meant the ancient symbols are vestiges, but his awkward and broken syntax has rendered the statement illogical and grammatically incorrect.
Doing this once would be fine, but Dan Brown does this a lot, and then makes a lot of money for this kind of writing. But this is his profession. It’s his job (if not to get this right, then at least to try. It’s not like it’s his shtick to flaunt the flaunt the rules of grammar and syntax, if it was I would shut up). If a factory worker messed up like this, and did so consistently, we might not fire them, sure, but we certainly wouldn’t be giving them a massive raise and calling them one of the best workers in the field. Or, if we did, a lot of his fellow workers (and perhaps even a few laymen) might start to wonder just what the hell some people were thinking, and they might take to a forum (like the internet) to express those valid concerns. But again, that doesn’t mean Dan Brown shouldn’t be read, or even enjoyed; people can do whatever they want. But the problems with his prose are alone the reasons why his works will never be compared favorably to Moby Dick.
TL;DR English major tries to explain a potential reason why people take issue with Dan Brown’s writings.
Frankly, the writer sounds like a little bitch, but maybe that’s just me. Like Brown’s writing or not, there has to be better things to do with one’s time.
@T: there has to be better things to do with one’s time
Like calling a stranger a “little bitch”?
@Sly
Infinite Jest is unimpeachable in its totality (and one of the few books I love with no reservation), but Broom of the System has room in the margins for no little snark. It’s the kind of freshman work that should have stayed in a drawer–not because it’s so bad, but because it’s the clearly underdeveloped work of someone whose later talent renders it disappointing in retrospect. Plus there is some real boring shit in it.
Anyway. Writing about Dan Brown on the Millions is like showing a latter-day Adam Sandler vacation home movie at Cannes. Yes, he is a writer of books, and this is a website about books, and there ends the common ground.
What if I wanted to read Dan Brown’s book to learn about history in a fun setting? All the facts in his books are verifiable (especially in the day and age of all mighty Google) so what’s wrong with that?
Please do a similar one on Paul Auster!
DB’s writing is dumb and boring and he doesn’t develop any interesting ideas that are clearly his own. The only thing that makes him of interest to me is that he raises the question of what publishers are looking for and why. Once in a while no-talent hacks rise to fame and fortune for no good reason, they just happened to know somebody and show up on the right day.
@Rastaman426
Reading Dan Brown to learn about history is like those people who read sparknotes on classics so they appear to be well-read. Besides, that’s what Dan Brown does. He skims the surface of history looking for little anecdotes he can adapt into a story or simply boring filler to boost his word count. There are some entertaining history and autobiographical texts by real historians or influential people. You’re better off learning and being entertained by first-handers and people who actually know what they’re talking about. Perfect example: Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And yet, Dan Brown has made way more $ than the author of this article. Oh, and people have heard of Dan Brown’s name whereas nobody knows who ‘Sam Anderson’ is. Lol.
We have three dogs named (from left to right) Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and The Hardy Boys. Thanks for giving them a shout out on the DEATH MASK page. They’re great dogs and they are not fans of Dan Brown either.
some seriously dickish comments here. i liked brown as a child, but recently listened to Inferno on a long road trip. rolled my eyes so much it was a driving hazard.
Deliciously funny. It reminded me of Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
Danikova sounds an awful lot like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
Thank you for so humorously capturing the ridiculousness of this book! Will you please do The Lost Symbol, too? There are so many great moments in that one, from the breathless students in his Harvard lectures to the female character that he uses every synonym for “fat” to describe any time she appears.
I feel so validated. For my community college Creative Writing final, I used to make my freshmen and sophomores read the first chapter of the DaVinci Code and tell me why it was crap. Now I do it with Stefani Meyer’s Twilight. Thank you for writing this.
“And yet, Dan Brown has made way more $ than the author of this article. Oh, and people have heard of Dan Brown’s name whereas nobody knows who ‘Sam Anderson’ is. Lol.”
Well, that settles it then. Brown’s books have made him very rich. He must be right and Anderson must be wrong, because we all know that money is the final determination of literary quality.
Move along people.
Nothing else to see here.
For being an artisanal pencil sharpener, David’s red pencil doesn’t seep all that sharp…
Both hilarious and sad. The latter, because there are so many writers out there who can write much better than this but do not get to make even a small percent of Brown’s millions. It makes you sad for what this means for our culture, our humanity….. (ellipsis intended).
Anyone read the 50 Shades of Grey books? They are *worse* than Dan Brown
@weasel soup:
I haven’t read 50 Shades, but, in 2012, I did come across this hilarious blog where the blogger did a close reading of them, chapter by chapter, and blogged her thoughts. I found her posts very entertaining and wonder if they might sell more if made into a book. But, that’s not likely to happen, sadly.
http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2012/05/announcing-bad-idea.html
You’ll have to browse through using her labels / categories as it’s not easy to find the posts chronologically.
Apparently, there have been similar deconstructions of the Twilight books online too, though I haven’ read those.
@Ryan Ries
So instead of spending your time, money, and energy on, say, a terrific yet under-the-radar writer, you purchased Dan Brown’s latest book, read it, made “amusing” comments in the margins, and then wrote an article with the revolutionary premise that Dan Brown is a shitty writer. (If I had been able to write a snarky comment in this essay’s margins, it would have been: Thanks for this invaluable and thought-provoking cultural contribution!)
There is something terribly depressing in this image of the literary intelligentsia sitting on their thrones and ironically reading bad books. Come on, Sam and Dave, don’t give up on literature just yet!
LITERATURE!!! ;__;
Yeah, you guys! Why do you have to be so negative? Can’t you be more positive? Okay, so you don’t enjoy Mr. Brown’s writing. Well, lots and lots of people DO enjoy it! They can’t all be wrong, can they? So why don’t you guys write about a book that you DO love instead of one that you DON’T love. Then SHARE that love with all of US, so that we can all enjoy that love, TOGETHER!
If you did that, it would be a really beautiful thing.
Chemondelay
Yes, don’t give up on literature, as in, don’t waste your time on lazy, lowest-hanging-fruit essays like this and instead challenge yourself to find and celebrate a real piece of art.
@ Jenny Bhatt
Thanks for the link! I can in turn recommend the recaps at http://jennytrout.wordpress.com/jenny-reads-50-shades-of-grey/ and http://www.snarksquad.com/category/books-2/fifty-shades too (that’s a lot of recaps, but they’re both great takedowns as well.
I guess I like the schadenfreude of reading about why bad writing is bad…
Seriously, this hit Broadway musical idea of yours sounds amazingly spectacular and I highly encourage you to do it.
LOL Good work The Millions! Spoiler Alert: Dan Brown’s next book is a “Choose Your Own Ending” (remember those) published by Scholastic and sold to unsuspecting middle schoolers….
Sam and Dave.
Love it.
Now I want “Sam and Dave Go To The Opera”
Having gotten over my initial mirth, I am now wondering, rather glumly, about the publishers and editors who allowed so many glaring issues to see the light of day. I mean, really, didn’t someone at Doubleday say, sure, it’s bestselling Dan Brown, but, you know, let’s have someone read the thing before it goes to print. Or, did they just decide that there would be plenty of readers who wouldn’t care for decent writing, so, why bother? Either way, shouldn’t these careless publishers and editors be held just as responsible as the writer for inflicting this stuff on the reading public?
Someone should get a Doubleday rep on the phone/email/Twitter, present them with this marginalia and at least pose the question.
@haints
“They can’t all be wrong, can they?”
YES. They can. They are. They will be. Just because one knows how to read, doesn’t mean one need be thoughtful or even smart. Reading well, however, reading with even a smidgen of critical input, reading with the responsibility to complete the circle of the story that the writer has started—doing this takes more than scanning words with the same attention one gives to a Sharper Image catalog or a copy of Varmint Hunter.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while. And reading humorous takedowns of prose we know is bad often does more good for me as a writer than reading a good story. I know, it shouldn’t be this way, but by the end of the piece I was thinking that a great craft book could be entitled ‘Just Don’t(…)” – then it could be filled with DB excerpts (and zillions of other authors) and the red and black marginalia from this wonderful duo. Over many years of reading accepted good writing, arguably passable writing, and certain bad writing, I often revisit my own work most effectively and with more confidence (less vitriolic self-criticism?) after reading first-draft-unedited-but-shockingly-published stinky garbage like Dan Brown.
To know you might have a chance of penning a better than average story, a story that might have some legs, a story that proves you have more talent than Dan Brown or your other favorite ham-handed typer, you only have to read his line, ‘Apparently a background in drama could be a versatile weapon.’ If you read that with your mouth full and you don’t choke on your food with a gut laugh and think ‘Holy shitballs, my cat writes better than that when she runs across the keyboard,’ then you haven’t a chance on earth.
Thanks, guys. This was a gas.
PS – @Ryan Ries – I’m pretty darn sure Sam and David didn’t make “amusing” comments. They made amusing comments.
But, there is such a thing as paroxysmal positional vertigo. I have no idea what the book is about…..is it still dumb even though this is a real condition? Not defending the book in any way.
Keep it up. This is funny and righteous. I also recommend: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html
Would have enjoyed The Da Vinci Code SO much more if I’d taken this approach. Instead I just cursed all the way through.
What an indulgent prat Dan Brown has proved to be – I just finished reading – no sorry, skimming, this ridiculous book and I wanted to post a reflection of my anger and sheer frustration that this nonsense could actually be published – shame on the publishers, shame on the editors – you have sold your souls for a few unworthy shekels. Shame on you.
DB sounds like the literary equivalent to Thomas Kincade.
Ah, Mark, my comment was intended as a satire. I liked this piece and was making fun of the “why can’t you just say something positive?” people.
However we have been able to create a fantastic tour of Florence based on the Dan Brown’s novel :-)
I don’t find it ironic that the majority of those who trash Dan Browns novels online are the same people who spend most of their time facebooking, blogging and twittering strangers online also.
They spend so much time twittering about themselves, they cringe at the prospect of celebrating someone else.
Celebrating someone who’s genuinely successful.
To enjoy Dan Brown, you need to have a reasonable attention span and at least an above average grip of the English written word.
In medical school we had a saying “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”. I guess in this case it should be “those who can, write books that sell, those who can’t, make fun of those who can”
“In medical school we had a saying “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”. I guess in this case it should be “those who can, write books that sell, those who can’t, make fun of those who can””
Right, because the only way to truly judge the quality of a work is by how much it sells. That’s is why Van Gogh sucked while he was alive, and then suddenly got really great after he died …
Yet another example that a medical degree is no guarantee of intelligence …
Sir!
Per my recent Tweetage, https://twitter.com/MamurphyMaureen/status/498867059980525569 I am Outraged and full of Umbrage that the great name of Mr. Dan Brown has been so sorely maligned by you and that Malignant Sharpener of Pencils.
What next, an attack on the Modern Prophetess of Human Improvement, Amy Chua? My Faithful Biographer Moe Murph will be regularly reporting back to me on the Outrageous Stream of Verbiage and the Attendant Most Impertinent Comments.
Sir, were I but yet Corporeal and not a being afloat on the Etheric Twitter Cloud, I would thrash you both soundly.
Harrrrumphhh!
Senator Kefuaver F. Tutwiller, IV (1823-1913)
Etheric Twitter Cloud
Book? Inferno isn’t a book, it’s an infomercial cobbled together by the makers of tweed jackets and gin.
I just finished reading the book and I found the story enjoyable. I guess I read for an enjoyable story rather than a literary orgasm. I also don’t have a B.A. in English so I don’t pick apart his writing. After seeing your margin notes though I can completely understand where you are coming from. Especially the bit about how you had trouble imagining whatever he was trying to explain. At times I’d just Google the damn thing. Other than that, the flaws went right over my head.
I figure it is a lot like painting. When I see a painting it is either ugly or beautiful, but to an artist they see every brush stroke, colour, technique, etc. and then make their judgement.
A lot of his success did come from how “controversial” his second book was. Since then everyone will pick up whatever he writes now and he doesn’t even have to try.
Since Dan Brown is forever ruined for me and I am amongst literary scholars, enlighten me to a well written thriller with a good story. :) I’d appreciate it!
I just love the pompous BS you hear form the “intellectual” elite. If you were so perfect and incredible a writer, I would assume it would be you and your friend who were making millions of dollars “entertaining” the masses.
You are entitled to your opinions of course, as such perfect writers you both are in your own minds. However, I don’t think many people really care what your opinion is at all. I know I certainly do not (chuckle, chuckle “…”).
Well, well. look at my typo in my previous response. Guess I’ll get ton of crap about that. Oh well.
How did I miss this? O joy! LOVE
TO WES – RE: “Since Dan Brown is forever ruined for me and I am amongst literary scholars, enlighten me to a well written thriller with a good story. :) I’d appreciate it!”
Hi Wes, just noticed this. Sir, you have a wry and funny natural writing voice and I would vouchsafe that many of the “literary scholars” are not as sly and witty as you, so please do not undersell yourself! Given the damage that has been done by our silly comments, may I offer some suggestions below:
a.) The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon
b.) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – John le Carre (accent missing)
c.) The World At Night – Alan Furst (Note: Mid-90’s — I am not that familiar with author but many good words from other readers)
d.) The Third Man and other Stories – Graham Green (The Master — God, what a writer)
e.) Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith (Wonderful, best of the “Renko” series)
f.) Lee Child – “The Killing Floor” (Lee Child, Lee Child, unstoppable force, who has addicted every member of the Murphy family. I am ashamed to say I haven’t read him yet and at Thanksgiving, the entire family shook their heads and sighed)
Hope you enjoy!
Moe Murph
Only really, really stupid people–and by that I mean people like you Thomas–equate popularity with quality.
This article made me chuckle. I have never tried to read Brown’s more famous works – I’ve only read ~1/3 the way through Deception Point, at which time my incredulity at the “science” he proposed (I am a professional researcher in the geosciences and get to work a lot with aerospace engineers) in his book, and prefaced it with something to the effect of “all of the technology in this book is possible and real”, caused me to put the damn thing down and never pick it up again. Zero desire. It was just so goddamn bogus. It remains one of three fiction books I have never finished reading, nor do I plan to.
It just wasn’t enjoyable, because it wasn’t believable. This coming from a guy who loves fantasy and sci-fi; for whom suspension of disbelief comes easily. I think maybe you can have a shitty plot, but good writing, or a good plot, and shitty writing, but not both. Maybe the success of bad literature lies in the combination of mediocre plot + shitty writing (+/- controversy?). Perhaps that’s the sweet spot.
I have read all but the latest of Dan Brown’s books and must admit that I enjoyed most of them. Like it or not, he writes books that people read. Recently, I stopped reading a “well-written” book less than half-way through because it bored the hell out of me. I just finished Brown’s first book, Digital Fortress–a complete mess. The mystery here is how this one got published at all. Bad books by established authors are nothing new, but this was his first novel. Who did he have to blow to get it on the market? I want his name and number, because I have a book that’s nearly as bad and going nowhere.
Clark – now there’s a positive approach to discovering bad popular literature. :-)
and DB sells a lot of books !
the obvious seems to have escaped everyone including the publisher of the book and the producer of the movie, maybe even Dan Brown himself, that in the end there really is no book or movie here at all other than the usual travelogue of historical places in Italy. Because if the villain wanted to release this on the world he simply would have done it and THEN announced it if he needed his hubris satisfied. It’s not like he’s Blofeld holding the world for ransom. The book is maybe a bit less pitiful, because it turns out the villain released it a week before he said it would, and it was “only” to sterilize a third of the world’s population. Either way it strains credulity to anyone who even thinks once (much less twice) about the plot.