Da Vinci Code Snobbery
So, it appears that the Da Vinci Code film is a bit of a dud, judging by the ratings on IMDB and the few criticisms of it that I've read. Disappointing. I, like two billion other people, really enjoyed the book and was looking forward to the movie. I'll still watch it, I suppose (especially for 5 yuan) but I've lowered my expectations considerably.
What is interesting though is that pundits have used the film's release to snark about what they consider to be the book's inferior quality. Here's A.O. Scott in The New York Times:
"The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on
Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take
longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished
a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"),
have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture
his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was
now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with
long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the
fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only
on the page.
Last time I checked, A.O., you were being paid to write film reviews, not opine on best-selling novels from your lofty perch at America's newspaper of record.
Scott's scorn pales in comparison to that of someone named Andrew Brown, writing for the Guardian's new group blog Comment Is Free:
But there is a class of author where even this kind of explanation
breaks down: Dan Brown, Dennis Wheatley, and some other thriller
writers like Robert Ludlum fall into this category. They all produce
books so aggressively badly written that no virtues of plot or
characterisation - even if they existed, which they clearly do not -
could make up for the deficiencies of style.In this case, I think we have to admit that the badness of the prose
style is integral to the books' attraction; if better written, they
would sell worse. This explanation requires a special sort of bad
writing. It is not vulgarity, not mere inelegance and certainly not
lack of refinement: it transcends all these flaws. It requires that
every sentence throw up obstacles to comprehension, that every other
word be redundant.To read such books is rather like reading the transcripts of a
telephone conversation, except that they contain words and
constructions no one could ever use in ordinary speech. They have the
redundancy of ordinary speech without any of its naturalness.I labour the point, but this resemblance to ordinary speech (except
for the small matter of being unspeakable) is, I think, the secret of
these books' success. It is not just that they are written by people
who can't, in any interesting sense, write; they are read by people who
have not properly learned to read. I don't mean their taste is
uneducated, or that they can't spell, or that they have trouble with
long words, though all those things may be true; I mean that they have
not internalised the activity of reading so that it feels natural. (h/t Buzzmachine)
So, apparently the success of books like The Da Vinci Code can be blamed on the semiliteracy of the book buying public. Right.
I consider myself an avid reader, and I enjoy reading books from quite a broad range of genres. Every so often, I'll pick up a novel that someone proclaimed a "classic" or "beautifully written" and find it so dreadfully boring that I can't even finish it. Perhaps my literacy isn't yet complete, either, though it didn't prevent me from detecting that Brown's comment was utterly horseshit.
This is the same sort of thing as people only watching movies at the art house cinema, or people refusing to listen to any band signed to a major label.
I'd like to think Dan Brown is reading these insults while flying on his private jet to some Caribbean island, chuckling all the way to the bank.
