MORE ON DAN BROWN

By William Urban

Readers know that I consider Dan Brown is a terrible writer. Terrible, but a crowd pleaser. This opinion was recently shared by Robert Pogue Harrison in the October 24 New York Review of Books, commenting on The Inferno.
Pogue writes about Professor Langdon’s opening lecture on Dante, “Like everything else in this astonishingly bad novel, Langdon’s lectures lacks verisimilitude. Delivered in a great hall to over two thousand people who gasp, sigh, or murmur at every commonplace remark, it serves as a narrative ploy to convey rudimentary information about Dante to the uninformed reader.”
I’ve taught the Inferno often enough to both recognize its incredible richness and my limitations in understanding it. The language isn’t the problem, since there are many very good translations. As for nuances that are difficult to translate, anyone who knows Italian can read a well-footnoted edition that explains the obsolete words and obscure references. The problem in reading the text in any form is the combination of social norms in a medieval society, the Catholic theology of the late 13th century, and the tumultuous politics as described by an intensely partisan poetic genius.
Let it be noted: seldom do poetic geniuses stand back dispassionately and observe the contemporary scene. Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, does. Or thinks he does. However, he is only a pseudo-genius that represents Dan Brown’s view of himself as intellectual superman. Alas, Brown only writes as well as he thinks, and he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
As Pogue says, “Brown’s novel has a cast of characters, to be sure, yet it has no interest in tracking the inner motivations of the souls or probing the muddled sources of their motivation. His characters are so thoroughly vapid and cartoonish that one suspects that Brown deliberately refrained from giving them any psychological density for fear that this would merely create friction on the high-speed rails on which his thriller races along.” Then the killer line, “The good news, for readers who go along for the ride, is that the novel reaches its destination quickly.”
None too quickly for me, though I will probably plow through his next novel. There is something about a terrible accident that makes people crowd in to look. The Warren County library aids and abets in this by buying the most popular audio books.
Now, why do I care? Because literature is the heart of a liberal education, and one must read bad literature to know what good literature is. If there were no hell, could we properly appreciate heaven?
Well, Dan Brown has more hell for us. He is now reissuing his earlier novels — the ones that were good enough to print fifteen years ago, but not exciting enough to attract the public. It is easy to see why. His 1998 Digital Fortress begins thus: “It is said that in death, all things become clear; Ensei Tankado now knew it was true. As he clutched his chest and fell to the ground in pain, he realized the horror of his mistake. People appeared, hovering over him, trying to help. But Tankado did not want help – it was too late for that. Trembling, he raised his left hand and held his fingers outward. Look at my hand!”
Where is Mark Twain when we need him? Or even an editor with a blue pencil? I think that Tankado probably clutched his chest in pain and that he realized his mistake with horror. Two awkward statements in only six lines, but pretty typical of Dan Brown’s style.
There were comments about his bad writing back when Digital Fortress first appeared, but he didn’t take them to heart. He filled The Da Vinci Code and The Inferno with crappy sentences, and there is nothing in The Lost Symbol to make anyone care about Masons.
Clearly, Brown doesn’t care what the critics think. As he said a few years ago, “I do something very intentional and specific in these books. And that is to blend fact and fiction in a very modern and efficient style, to tell a story. There are some people who understand what I do, and they sort of get on the train and go for a ride and have a great time, and there are other people who should probably just read somebody else.” Good advice.
Why was Digital Fortress reprinted? First, his publisher knew that Brown’s name would attract buyers. This had its down side. One reader who liked the Da Vinci Code wrote, “I wanted to jump into the book and slap the characters around because they were so annoying. Everything about this book is annoying. The coincidences are just too many; the characters are predictable. I knew exactly how it will end three chapters into the book!”  Another wrote, “This book is painful to read. Most of the facts, much of which are crucial to the plot, are just flat out wrong. Dan Brown does not know very much about computers, cryptography, guns, or intelligence work, and it shows. His research was pathetic. This alone will turn off many technically-savvy folks.” He then added, “The climax was one of the worst I have ever read in any techno-thriller novel, and that is saying a lot considering how crowded this field became after Tom Clancy made it big.”
One reader from 2004 summarized the problems, “Wow, where to begin. This is the second Dan Brown book I’ve read and I’m guessing it’ll likely be the last. To begin, if you plan on reading this book, forget suspending your disbelief, rather tie up your disbelief, take it out back and shoot it lest it resurface while you’re reading the book.”
That prediction, of course, was wide of the mark. It seems that the worse Brown writes, the larger the number of satisfied readers. Many reviewers give Digital Fortress one star (the lowest possible rating), but others give it five-stars.
The second reason for the reprint is the increased public awareness of computer hacking and the NSA’s collecting data on just about everyone. Digital Fortress is suddenly relevant at the same time that Dan Brown’s name is well-known. We can count on huge sales, and more exposure on the History Channel (right up there with UFOs, crop circles and documentaries on Hitler).
Are the positive reader reactions another proof that our public schools have been a failure? Or that people read thrillers so fast that they don’t notice the writing at all?

Review Atlas (Oct 24, 2013), 4.

Readers of my columns in the Review Atlas will be familiar with my opinion that Dan Brown is a terrible writer. Terrible, but a crowd pleaser.

This opinion is shared by Robert Pogue Harrison in the latest New York Review of Books (Oct 24, 2013). [Don’t ask me why they mailed their issue so far ahead of the delivery date.]

Pogue writes about Professor Langdon’s opening lecture on Dante, “Like everything else in this astonishingly bad novel, Langdon’s lectures lacks verisimilitude. Delivered in a great hall to over two thousand people who gasp, sigh, or murmur at every commonplace remark, it serves as a narrative ploy to convey rudimentary information about Dante to the uninformed reader.”

I’ve taught the Inferno often enough to both recognize its incredible richness and my limitations in understanding it. The language isn’t the problem, since anyone who knows Italian can read a well-footnoted edition that explains the obsolete words and obscure references, but the combination of social norms in a changing society, Catholic theology in an era of stress, and tumultuous politics as expressed by an intensely partisan poetic genius.

Let it be noted: seldom do poetic geniuses stand back dispassionately and observe the contemporary scene.

Langdon does. Or thinks he does. This paper cutout that represents Dan Brown’s view of himself, alas, doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

As Pogue says, “Brown’s novel has a case of characters, to be sure, yet it has no interest in tracking the inner motivations of the souls or probing the muddled sources of their motivation. His characters are so thoroughly vapid and cartoonish that one suspects that Brown deliberately refrained from giving them any psychological density for fear that this would merely create friction on the high-speed rails on which his thriller races along.” Then the killer line, “The good news, for readers who go along for the ride, is that the novel reaches its destination quickly.”

None too quickly for me, though i will probably pick up his next novel. There is something about a terrible accident that makes people crowd in to look.

Literature is the heart of a liberal education, and one must read bad literature to know what good literature is.

If there were no hell, could we properly appreciate heaven?

THE SIMPLE LIFE III

By William Urban

The sustained call for sustainably makes me aware of how few people know anything about their families’ rural roots, back when sustainably was a fact of life so pervasive that everyone merely called it being frugal. Every family in the small Kansas towns of my youth had chickens in the back yard or neighbors who did. Kitchen scraps going over the wire fence was instant recycling that led to eggs and drumsticks appearing on the table.

If today we allowed free range chicken to roam fenced yards, we would use a lot less weed-killer and fertilizer. Of course, the dog problem would remain. My grandparents had to give my big dog — my father’s favorite — to a farmer because he chased chickens. Ginger had come with me when I was sent to Kansas for two years while my mother recuperated from an incredibly complicated gall bladder operation. (She had grown up drinking ultra-hard water that outsiders simply couldn’t swallow.)

There was much to praise in small town life then. I remember summer evenings watching the village elders playing horseshoes and competing in super-serious croquet matches. There were three clay croquet courts in my grandparents’ town of 800, each with a concrete border, stakes that were in to stay, and balls that could have been used by Civil War cannon. (My grandfather’s heavy mallet and ball, alas, were stolen by a renter who stayed in our house while we were overseas.)

There were downsides, too. My grandparents did not have hot water, and while My grandmother would heat water on the stove, a bath was still nothing for a dust-covered six-year-old to look forward to. No one who has ever had to pump water in winter or feed a wood fire would be likely to complain that electric power was bad.

Well, few people complain about electric power per se. Only that produced by coal, oil, nuclear fission, and more recently, natural gas. I grew up with windmills. No cattle rancher could do without them. But they didn’t fix themselves, and when they didn’t work, the cattle suffered.

I’m told we shouldn’t be eating beef anyway. That is a viable principle today, as long as we have the ability to bring in vegetables and fruits from a distance — another no-no in the sustainability theology. Back in the day — not so long ago, actually — everyone canned whatever was in season. Before air-conditioning this meant boiling the jars in a summer kitchen, and that was only the start.

Today many gardens produce only lettuce and tomatoes, which make for nice salads until it gets hot. In the past a salad wouldn’t have sustained any working man or woman. My family used to say someone ate like a harvest hand. Since few farmers could afford a thresher that would sit around unused for fifty weeks of the year, most hired crews that made an annual trip from Texas to Canada. (I remember my father’s frustration in trying to pass one line of threshers after another on hilly two-lane highways each time he took my younger brother and me from Oklahoma to spend the summer in Kansas.) Feeding a dozen hands required a crew of women and lots of chickens.

I never got to ride into town on a wagon, but my Bohemian great-uncle remembered coming to Kansas from Nebraska in a covered wagon. He spent more than half his life looking at the rear end of a horse. In town this meant that everyone had to smell the horse hockeys that were ground into the dirt streets. Women with long skirts hated getting their hems soiled, and women with short skirts hated the flies.

Paved streets and automobiles changed all that, but both relied on petroleum products. I visited some oil fields when I was just old enough to look around for post-high school employment. Crude oil everywhere, and the work was so hard the workers boasted about it. But it wasn’t that hard, I later learned. When I was laying pipe, unemployed oil workers would quit after a day or two. The improved wages ($1.25 an hour, less taxes) didn’t make up for the ten hour day.

By then I owned a VW bug that didn’t have a gas gauge. I was a little upset the day I started on a short trip right after work and ran out of fuel. I couldn’t understand it. I had filled up two days before and hadn’t driven it, and why was the emergency switch to use the last gallon turned over? The next day I learned that my little brother had practiced his driving without telling me. Without leaving that little town, he not avoided getting within my eyesight. I still can’t imagine how he burnt off that much gas.

Gas was pretty cheap, just over thirty cents a gallon, but that eight gallons was a big hit for my wallet. Cokes were a nickel and hamburgers a quarter, but they were free at my grandparents’ house and I needed to save everything I could for college. Scholarships were few in those days, and I was not about to make a division I football team. I read my grandfather’s two Kansas City papers every day, but never saw any mention of Division III colleges in any context. My mother had gone to Kansas Wesleyan on a combination piano scholarship and a job as a waitress — where she probably perfected the sharp tongue that was family folklore — but I had no talent in either area. Moreover, all my friends were going to big universities. The herd instinct is powerful, even when the choice is between different herds.

What every young person had in common was an intense desire to get out of the small towns. They were great places to grow up, but not for making a living. Even the sons of farmers, who knew that they would inherit a nice place in twenty or thirty years, did not hang around for the old man to push off. Besides, there were the brothers and sisters to consider. Each would get a share of the inheritance. Would there be enough left to make a go of it? In the meantime, would they end up among the ageing bachelors at the pool hall or the old maids tending their sustainable gardens?
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Review Atlas (Sept 5, 2013), 4.