in defense of Dan Brown

Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, came out last week. Over a million people bought it. I was one of them. It’s been interesting to see the sort of division the novel has caused in reviewers. Some seem to view it as the next progressive step in Dan Brown’s career as a writer of intellectual thrillers, while others seem to view it as the coming of the Anti-Christ. Even one trusted friend of mine seemed to think that I needed to give back my English degree if I was going to go anywhere near the novel, let alone read it.

Well, I read it. I’ve also read everything Dan Brown’s published. And I still have my English degree. So, I’m going to try to articulate here why I think Dan Brown is worth your time, and why he is not, in fact, a harbinger of the death of the American novel.

To draw comparisons to another titan of modern publishing, I want to say, unequivocally, that Dan Brown is a much better writer than Stephanie Meyer (the author of the Twilight series of novels). Both writers sell almost unfathomable amounts books and have, for better or worse, become two of the few rock stars of American letters. The largest and most important distinction between the two of these writers, however, is this: Dan Brown is a good writer; Stephanie Meyer is not.

Neither of them write particularly challenging books, and neither of them will ever be considered great stylists, each of them preferring simple sentences, often with painful attempts at variety. For example, Stephanie Meyer needs a thesaurus to rectify the fact that the world “perfect” appears in Twilight some forty times, and Dan Brown’s editor should have explained to him that using an ellipsis to establish tension in a singular sentence is clumsy and cheap. At a basic sentence level, neither author is going to blow your hair back. Some sentences may even make you cringe.

However, Dan Brown’s books do not actively seem to assume that their readers are dumb. What Brown lacks in lexical acumen he more than makes up for with his keen sense of narrative momentum, of giving the reader enough intriguing plot and enough fascinating historical information that he can’t help but continue reading. He builds tension and interest, so that the reader wants concurrently to know what is going to happen next and also to proceed to the next historical oddity that Brown has uncovered in his research. Conversely, Stephanie Meyer spent the first 400 pages of Twilight setting up a stunted, unsatisfying conclusion. Up until that point in Meyer’s book, not really happens. In Dan Brown, stuff is happening from the first page. In a genre piece, whether it’s a thriller or a vampire novel, or science fiction or a mystery, stuff needs to happen, and stuff needs to continue happening in a logical succession of events. Brown understands this basic plotting notion; Meyer appears to be simply winging it.

There is a craftsmanship apparent in Brown’s novels that is almost entirely absent from Meyer. Sure, Brown’s books are formulaic, but most genre fiction, to an extent, is. What matters is not that a reader may anticipate what will happen in a book, but rather how the author delivers to reader to those events. Spoiler alert, but, at the end of The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon, the brilliant Harvard symbologist, saves the world. I know. I just blew your mind, right? That’s just the way these novels work. In that sense, before we even begin reading, we already know the ending. But it is the scaffolding of intrigue that Brown creates, how he propels readers from one event and twist to the next that marks him as a very capable practitioner of the thriller genre. Even though we know how it all ends, we want to see how Brown delivers us to that inevitable conclusion.

Brown’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but he’s totally not trying to. Casino Royale was an amazing spy movie, but it totally wasn’t trying to win the Best Picture Oscar. I don’t read Dan Brown for the same reason that I read someone like Michael Chabon or William Faulkner in just the same way that I don’t watch Clerks for the same reason I watch THe Godfather–but all of this stuff nonetheless trigger certain happy-making parts of my mind. I read Brown for an educated, intelligent thriller with interesting insights in art, history and science. I don’t read it for spiritual edification.

And, in that regard, The Lost Symbol is a terrific read. It doesn’t have the break-neck sense of urgency found in Angel & Demons, but I think it’s content about Noetic science, the founding of the United States, and the Masonic conception of God has the potential to be as every bit as controversial as the Christian history explored in The Da Vinci Code. It will be interesting to see if people have a reaction to the ideas presented in the novel’s final fifty pages.

There’s of course much more to be said here about reader expectations and about why people read what they read, and even about the conventions of genre fiction versus literary fiction. But for now I’m content to know that I had a really fun reading experience.

If the books you’re reading aren’t fun, then, seriously, why would you read them?