On one level, there seems little point in reviewing a Dan Brown book. He’s big enough now that he’s critic-proof, and my little barbs will penetrate his mighty armor of public adoration not one jot. But you know, sometimes criticism isn’t about influence; sometimes, it’s a matter of conscience. And on the matter of The Lost Symbol being a terrible book — abysmally written, ludicrously plotted, resting on a foundation of knuckleheaded historical speculation and flat-out pseudo-scientific wrongness — I will not be silent.
You don’t have to be a great writer, Lord knows, to achieve popular literary success. But has there ever been a worse writer than Dan Brown to ever become so successful? It’s a trick question, of course, because there’s never been a writer quite as successful as Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than all four Twilight books put together — more copies than the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fa chrissakes. J.K. Rowling has sold more books overall, but no single volume of the Harry Potter series has racked up Da Vinci Code numbers.
Besides, Rowling is — despite her huge and glaring flaws as a prose stylist and a systematic thinker — pretty good with character and mood. She’s still a terrible writer, but she’s a slightly more lustrous shade of terrible than Dan Brown. True fact, The Da Vinci Code is not a good book, and Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, carries on in the tradition. And if you haven’t read it and intend to, be warned: from this point on, I will be SPOILING like mayonnaise in a hot car.
I have a theory. It’s not a literary theory, but a theory of personality — Dan Brown’s personality, to be precise. See, I figure Dan Brown probably enjoys all the perks of being a writer (who wouldn’t?), but is not much interested in the craft of writing. The Lost Symbol is all plot and ciphers (one using the “pigpen” code from that one issue of Boy’s Life, another apparently created in MS Word with Zapf Dingbats), told with about as much verve or emotional heft as a Will Shortz back-page puzzle from the Times. Or maybe — and this is perhaps a better comparison — as Myst; the structure and lack of emotional affect make the whole enterprise feel like a video game. Stuff happens. Puzzles are solved. Move to a new location — a new level — and start the process again. (more…)
