In Defense of Dan Brown

Brown's new book doesn't offer award-winning literary prose. But intellectual snobbery and review elitism is foolish in an era of growing cultural ignorance and counterproductive political sneering.

Klementinum Library, Prague, featured in Dan Brown’s new thriller.

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Two weeks ago, I grabbed a book from a stack on the table of my local Waterstones (after a suitably defensible peruse of the new nonfiction sections). Looking around for anyone I knew, I slipped the book on the counter, face down.

“Good to see you again,” the bookseller said. “How did your book signing go a few months back? We’ve still got a few copies of Fluke, I think.”

I froze. He had recognized me. There was no socially dignified means of escape: he knew. I, an allegedly serious academic and author, had come, on release day, to buy The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown.

“It’s not Dickens or Austen,” I muttered, “but he’s pretty good at plot.”

“We don’t judge here,” the bookseller replied with a knowing smile. “Would you like a bag?”

I nodded, looking away. Some little secrets of secrets are best kept hidden.

I: The Haters

Let’s get a crucial fact out of the way: Dan Brown’s writing is an…acquired taste. His talent for mixed metaphor is commensurate with his inexplicably stubborn affinity for excitement conveyed through over-description, ellipses, interrobangs, and italics. (From the third page of the new thriller: “Why are you doing this?!” Gessner had screamed in panic. “Who are you?! What are you?!”)

But Brown is an effective author. Books do not have a one-size-fits-all purpose. The best books are beautifully written, but plenty of good books merely entertain or intrigue us. We can go to the theater for King Lear and Book of Mormon; there’s enough room on the silver screen for Seven Samurai and Cocaine Bear. I read Wittgenstein and I also have organized fantasy sports leagues for countless seasons of The Bachelor and The Great British Bake Off.¹ We contain multitudes.

And while Brown’s writing is flawed, his ideas—even the sloppily executed ones—are at least more ambitious than most thriller writers. In place of endless explosions and sex scenes, we get smatterings of religious history, philosophical explorations of artificial intelligence, the Miller–Urey experiment, neurotransmitters, fringe theories of consciousness, and code-breaking.

These may be bubble-gum, error-ridden simplifications of intellectual concepts, but this certainly isn’t mindless slop. (Hundreds of thousands of people who previously had no knowledge of neuroscience will become interested in the study of consciousness after reading The Secret of Secrets, even if some of the ideas are fanciful.)

Whenever a Dan Brown thriller is released, millions of readers get excited. Some are looking forward to a bit of escapism, a fun beach or airplane read. For others, it may be the only book they read this year. Roughly 46 percent of Americans don’t read or listen to any books in a given year; the corresponding figure for Britons is 40 percent. That’s civilizational decline, bottled in one statistic. And yet, Reddit forums are full of user comments about how The Da Vinci Code was the first book that hooked them, beginning a lifetime of reading. That’s more than most authors can boast. And it’s unequivocally good for society when reluctant people get enticed to read.

(Since Dan Brown would describe his own new book as a “hefty tome comprised of precisely 675 pages printed on high-finish 120gsm Stora Enso paper and weighing it at an impressive 891 grams,” The Secret of Secrets offers lapsed readers plenty of time to discover or rediscover the joy of reading.)

However, despite the renewal of reader enthusiasm and a gateway drug to untapped joys of the mind for less naturally committed readers, Brown’s new books also unleash a familiar intellectual ritual: snobbery through vicious reviews.

Punches, I assure you, are not pulled: “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad…he writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching”; or “worse than AI-generated fiction”; or “He takes what might be charitably described as a loose view of the relations between nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates, between words in general.”

There is even an amusing genre of Dan Brown review that doesn’t engage with the book at all, instead parodying it with the reviewer’s own mimicry of Brown’s writing style. In 2013, Michael Deacon went viral for a review in The Telegraph with paragraphs like these:

Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

Sam Kriss, as adept with biting prose as Brown is with italicized exclamation points, dabbled in Brownisms as follows:

The tall brown-haired man walked into the room. The man was Chad McRib, who was tall. The attractive woman Slavojina Zizek clung to his arm. The whirr of a VRF (Variable Refrigerant Flow) air-conditioning unit hung in the air, which was suffused with the hum of a VRF (Variable Refrigerant Flow) air-conditioning unit.

These are, I admit, very funny. And they’re funny because they’re based on truth. Decades into a bestselling writing career, Brown stubbornly inverts the writing maxim of “show, don’t tell,” one of his most easily mocked literary sins.

But writing need not be dogmatic and art is subjective. I like reading Brown’s books. Social stigma be damned: I’ve read all of his books and I don’t regret it. Hell, at one point I even read The Da Vinci Code in French to dust off my language skills. His books are fun. (On the other end of the spectrum, reading can be excruciating but intellectually rewarding. I don’t regret reading dense academic papers, even though the act of wading through bad scholarly anti-prose can feel like being forced to buzzsaw an opening into your own skull to affix a prickly hair shirt to your brain.)

The point is this: cultural creations serve different purposes. It’s a big tent.

II: Literary Strays

Targeting Brown is easy because he’s so successful; it’s never punching down. (I recently fired up my 14-inch Apple Macbook Pro with M4 superprocesser and an excessive 16 GB of RAM memory on precision, laser-cut semiconductors to discover the astonishing fact that The Da Vinci Code is the tenth bestselling book of all-time.)

And sure, Brown doesn’t do himself any favors by sharing peculiar details about his life. (“His computer is programmed to freeze for 60 seconds each hour, during which time Mr. Brown performs push-ups, situps and anything else he needs to do” or that he has a hidden button on his library bookcase that, when pushed, rotates a secret compartment to reveal “The Giraffe, the Pig, and The Pants On Fire,” a book that he wrote when he was five years-old.)

But when new or infrequent readers, dazzled by Brown’s fast-paced travel adventure plots and historical puzzles, fire up their own Macbooks to read about the book they’ve just happily devoured, they catch a literary stray: they’re indirectly getting mocked for enjoying something that isn’t highbrow enough for a literary gatekeeper. (Kriss and Deacon playfully skewering Brown with clever parody strikes me as being on the right side of the line compared to countless vicious, mean-spirited reviews that I haven’t quoted here.)

I won’t cry for Dan Brown and his hundreds of millions of dollars. But some of the over-the-top snobbery is indicative of a broader trend of reviewers and other cultural gatekeepers who feel they must be cruel to destroy books they dislike, not recognizing that others may love them for precisely the same reasons they loathe them.

Ruthlessness is fair enough if the book is Kristi Noem’s tell-all about murdering her dog or Melania Trump’s presumably ghostwritten memoir, written in bad faith for cash and full of malicious ideas that either endorse or could lead to real-world harm. (The harshest comments I’ve written about a book are probably those here or in Chapter 13 of Fluke, in which I ridicule The Secret, a purported self-help book that is dangerous and amplifies a toxic worldview blaming victims for their own misfortunes before telling them that their suffering is purely from a lack of mental conjuring.)

But many books that get savaged in pompous reviews are written in good faith, by earnest people pouring themselves, for years—even decades—into their creation. Their ideas are often either mostly harmless at worst or can help us better understand our world at best. And those books are often disparaged because the reviewer has an axe to grind or because the author didn’t write the exact book that the reviewer would have written themselves.

But it’s not just the author’s feelings we need be concerned with; cultural policing can have political consequences, none of them good.

III: The Murder Review

Mean reviews are, alas, nothing new; in 1896, Jean Lorrain said that Marcel Proust was “one of those pretty little society boys who’ve managed to get themselves pregnant with literature.” A duel ensued, but both failed to hit their rival. Nobody died.

One more recent high-profile review—of a thoughtful, insightful, well-written, and intellectually rigorous book that made me think differently about the world—was so poisonously sadistic and egregiously unfair that it made me lose all respect for the reviewer, not the book. This was—with good reason—referred to by the victim in this instance as a “murder review,” maliciously aimed at killing the author’s career:

In the end, the reviewer wasn’t aiming for a rigorous assessment of a book. He was aiming to entertain readers with a small festival of literate carnage. But its closest parallel wasn’t the public beheadings or disembowelments of heretics and criminals that many tweets referenced, it was a public shaming where a malefactor is stripped and ritualistically abused, all while being pelted with rubbish and insults by a delighted crowd.

Other times, it’s unclear whether the reviewer has even read the book.

I once was on the receiving end of a book review for How to Rig an Election, in The Times, that was largely positive, but claimed the book fell short because it didn’t cover the reviewer’s favored example: elections in Azerbaijan.

This would have been weird enough already, given that a book can’t possibly cover every conceivable example. But this critique was laughably bizarre. Azerbaijan is mentioned on the first page of the book—he needed to make it a mere 83 words before “Azerbaijan” appeared in text. The country is also used as a case study to open one of the later chapters. (This was the only time in my life I’ve written to a book reviewer; I didn’t receive a reply.)

However, reviews should not be exclusively positive; at that point, they become equivalent to blurbs or press releases. (“A must read!” is blurb code for “I didn’t read this, but here’s some generic praise!”)

There’s a skill in effective, fair reviewing. It doesn’t lie in showing how much smarter you are than the author, nor in displaying a sort of ritualized shaming toward their work while insisting on your implicit superiority.

Rather, the art of reviewing requires theory of mind, not just the subjective reaction of thumbs up or thumbs down. Who would like this work? What would they get out of it? What are the pitfalls that might be worth knowing before diving in? None of those questions requires cruelty toward good faith authors.²

IV: The Perils of Cultural Policing

Beyond reviews, it’s an insidious facet of intellectual culture—particularly among well-educated liberals—to try to police or shame others for their preferred forms of cultural consumption.

E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class wrote that “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” But this dynamic need not be tied to money. Political identities can be forged—and often are—in opposition to social forces that make someone feel a lack of dignity or respect.

Our social brains have a remarkable aversion to those who sneer at us. When it comes to morally odious political agendas, there is a difficult balance to strike, with ridicule, ostracization, and condemnation on the one hand and an attempt to understand, accept, and persuade on the other. But when it comes to cultural consumption—of enigmatic, over-the-top thrillers, for example—gatekeeping and intellectual policing can needlessly repulse people from otherwise inclusive politics.³

Such forms of snobbish gatekeeping can become a self-perpetuating form of repellent elitism, turning political agendas that purport to help the disadvantaged into cultural agendas that make the disadvantaged feel like idiots because they like the “wrong” books.

You like reading romantasy? Great! I like reading cozy murder mysteries. It’s not because we’re stupid. It’s because we’re human.

Dan Brown’s prose is clunky, his characters so thin that they occasionally resemble crepes with speech bubbles. But Brown’s writing also connects with millions of readers, delights them, and stimulates their minds with topics that are worth thinking about. And that is justification enough for me, a thirty-something human man typing feverishly with flesh-colored fingers on his Macbook Pro Apple M4, to take my copy of The Secret of Secrets out of its paper bag.

Isn’t it enough for you?!

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1. The scoring system for the latter is idiosyncratic, but let me just say this: the elusive Hollywood Handshake confers mega points.

2. There are obviously legitimate substantive critiques of Brown’s work: getting things wrong, misrepresentation or simplification of ideas, and conveying the world as one giant shadowy conspiracy. But few of the savage reviews are about those topics. And it’s thriller fiction, anyway. How many naive readers actually assume that Brown’s books should be treated like textbooks?

3. I do have an aversion and a particular dislike for what I call “the surefire mediocre,” by which I mean cultural outputs that aim to simply replicate past successes with a convergence toward sludge, but no innovation or risk-taking or novelty. I don’t have any issue with those who try, but miss, in pursuit of something that’s a bit different, nor do I judge anyone for their own personal cultural tastes (so long as the ideas they’re consuming are not, for example, harmful, bigoted, or cruel).