Sobre el nuevo libro de Dan Brown

Poking fun at the clunky prose style of a best-selling author is one of the small joys of book reviewing. In our time, that author is Dan Brown.

• It's easy to pastiche Brown's prose, with its infectious italics ("What the hell is going on?!") and its action-prodding, single-sentence paragraphs. ("Langdon stared in horror.") The clichés line up outside the dust jacket and are whisked in pairs to a table down front: "In the heat of the moment, Capitol police officer Nuñez had seen no option but to help the Capitol Architect and Robert Langdon escape. Now, however, back in the basement police headquarters, Nuñez could see the storm clouds gathering fast." Add Brown's habit of inventing where no invention is needed--there are no departments of "symbology," but there are departments of semiotics, where Langdon would fit right in--and you have a surface less commercially calculated than genuinely eccentric.
  (Adam Gopnik, "Read All About It." The New Yorker, Sep. 28, 2009)


• The writing is as bad as Brown's admirers have come to expect: imagine Coke gone flat. Characters--"systems security specialist Mark Zoubianis" and "sys-sec Rick Parrish," for instance--come with occupational tags, since they're only memorable as the plot's functionaries. They converse with a lack of idiomatic verve that would embarrass an automaton. "Are you familiar with the private air terminal at Boston's Logan Airport?" someone asks Langdon. (He replies: "I am," though I was hoping he'd say: "Affirmative.")
  (Peter Conrad, "The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown." The Observer, Sep. 20, 2009)


• It's easy to run Brown down, because his writing isn't very deft. He introduces new characters with a kind of electric breathlessness that borders on the inadvertently hilarious ("Newly hired security guard Alfonso Nuñez carefully studied the male visitor now approaching his checkpoint . . ."). And the unfortunate sentence "His massive sex organ bore the tattooed symbols of his destiny" should itself be forcibly tattooed on Brown's massive sex organ. Worse, Brown's scholarship reads like the work of a man who believes what he reads in Wikipedia.
  (Lev Grossman, "How Good Is Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol?" Time, Sep. 15, 2009)

Admit it: unless it's our own work that's under assault, praise of any kind is seldom as much fun to read as exuberant criticism.