The new issue of The New Yorker arrived today. We started subscribing last month after getting a full-year offer for 25 bucks. I do read the copy and not just peruse the cartoons.
In the current, May 29, issue, Anthony Lane makes mush of ridiculous book, the Da Vinci Code—and his objective was to review the movie! I consider the Dan Brown novel to be the worst fiction book I’ve read or likely will ever read. The writing has no style, the plot follows (yawn, yawn) obvious paths and the history is nonsense (and I say that with no gripe about Jesus marrying Mary M.). Anthony does better ripping the book than I did.
The New Yorker reviewer writes in movie review “Heaven Can Wait” about the Da Vinci Code: “No question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03”.
Someone lent the Da Vinci Code to my wife more than a year before I got around to reading it. And I only finally grabbed the so-called novel to read on a trip. I should have suspected something amiss when after a year the lender still hadn’t asked for the book back! Maybe the book’s popularity results from massive lendings, so that people don’t have to feel so guilty about reading something so obviously stupid. They wasted good money on a bad book because everyone else they knew had read it. H-e-l-l-l-o-o-o! Popularity doesn’t make something good. Ask the guy dying of lung cancer in his sixties that started smoking in his teens because it was cool if popular is the same as good.
Anthony continues, “Should we mind that forty million readers—or, to use the technical term, ‘lemmings’—have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text?” He goes on the jab at the “crumbling coarseness of the style” and “rubble of the prose”. He rightly asks if people read the book “because everybody on the subway is doing the same, and, if so, why, when they reach their stop, do they not realize their mistake and leave it on the seat, to be gathered up by the next sucker?”
From the first page, I could see that the Da Vinci Code was going to be a bad book. If there was reason to reading, it was taking great delight in repeated, hysterical laughing. People don’t watch “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” because it’s good. They watch because it’s so bad.
I know there was that lawsuit about source material. Maybe J.J. Abrams should be the suer, because the book reminds me more of the Milo Rambaldi conspiracies of “Alias.”
As for Dan Brown, I’d like to suggest that he read a very good book written by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.
Photo Credit: David Reeves