Comments on: Don’t Try To Critique Dan Brown

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:23:27 +0000

Your defence of Brown would have more credence if he hadn't used the same construction in the midst of some hackneyed prose poetry at the beginning of Deception Point:

"Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him."

The excuse that he's deliberately invoking journalistic style to sound more objective and authoritative rings less true when he does it in the midst of a paragraph that would make Edgar Allen Poe spit his coffee out.

And that ignores the many other bits of bad style in the opening scene alone, let alone the ones that reoccur throughout the novel. Pullum isn't the only linguistic to flag up Brown's stylistic ineptitude - indeed, one of my professors has done it to illustrate a point. The truth is that Brown, along with the likes of James Patterson and "John Twelve Hawks", is a purveyer of incredibly grey, shoddy prose that wants to be a screenplay, and his readers only demand prose that allows them to picture a film in their head. Until, that is, a film is made and the novel becomes utterly redundant.

By: Petroc

Petroc — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:00:09 +0000

The assumption that in his writing, Brown mimics the way nonfiction narratives would portray action sequences, is not entirely accurate. Brown's writing would not pass by the editors of a newspaper without significant revisions. They would advise him to be less formulaic and to--gasp--imagine he were telling a fictional narrative. Read this Baltimore Sun article, for example, about an undergraduate who killed an intruder with a samurai sword. It reveals details about the incident and the people involved in a less forced fashion. We don't learn until the second paragraph that Pontolillo is an undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins.

Also, the story does not pile on adjectives to the point of redundancy, in the same way as Brown. (The fact that he does this speaks to the novel's decidedly non-journalistic style. If he is writing in a newspaper style, why all the dramatic flourishes?) The article notes the length and sharpness of the sword, for example, but it doesn't expound on its worth, as Brown does with the Carvaggio. (A sword of that nature is no doubt quite valuable; Brown would have tried to use that fact to enhance the drama.)

Nonfiction narration can have good or bad style, too. Even if we assume this is the type of narration Brown is going for, it doesn't make his writing suddenly good.

By: Jim Davies

Jim Davies — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:18:30 +0000

Agreed. The Da Vinci last name business is especially annoying. Like art historians never say that a painting is "a Da Vinci" or that something is "one of Da Vinci's best works."

Better not call Hans Christian Anderson just "Anderson." You know it just means "son of Ander." That's like calling Angelia Jolie Voightson.

Better put down that manuscript of "The Anderson Code," Mr. Brown.