A Completely Impartial Review of Dan Brown's Novel The Da Vinci Code...

...as well as my own total lameness picking up a book and reading just because the rest of America is. God, I'm a sheep. And making things worse, I even went to the Da Vinci Code website and played the little "Can you break the Da Vinci Code???" game they've got set up there.

I don't think that everybody necessarily loves a good conspiracy so much as everybody gets uppity when we hear bits and pieces of stuff that the ubiquitous "they" don't want us to know. We get that I'm-an-outsider feeling, that same feeling that creeps up on you when everybody else is at a party and you're sitting in front of your computer masturbating. Not that I'd have any familiarity with that.... But there's gripe number one: the book is freaking manipulative. Brown doesn't merely start the reader off ignorant, reflecting his protagonists' confusing, which is totally cool; he's gotta be an asshole and tell you he's keeping secrets. I'd include a quote here, but the book is already back on the shelf and I don't feel like getting it; besides, I'm no longer in college, so I just spout random bullshit without having to support my arguments. It's wonderful.

In that spirit, I'll say that all the puzzle stuff was intriguing. Not as intriguing as, say, the puzzles in Myst or a crossword puzzle that you have to solve yourself, but intriguing nonetheless. Like any decent storyteller, Brown's psychic manipulation worked and I wanted to find out the solution to this puzzle and move on to the next. (Admittedly, the website didn't function psychologically in quite the same way — finding out the solution to each remarkably superfluous puzzle just felt like a perfectly good waste of my life.) The problem is that the book has, as William Safire puts it, a multi-dimensional plot and unidimensional characters. So, you don't really get involved with the characters; the book itself is essentially a verbal crime scene and you're a detective whose only concern is piecing the clues together. Who cares if the characters reach their goal, so long as you, the reader, reach yours.

And here's where Brown gets stuck. As the reader, you become invested in the puzzle; when the book ends, the characters might live on, but the puzzle is decidedly over. (Until the sequel, naturally.) But you, dear reader, have nothing left to be invested in. Like the lady in the commercial says, the only thing better than doing the crossword puzzle is finishing the crossword puzzle — except here, you don't get the satisfaction of finishing the puzzle because you didn't actually do anything. Brown wrote the puzzle and solved it for you.

Things are just as bad when the ending is open-ended, like with Pynchon's (infinitely superior) The Crying of Lot 49. Okay, you don't have to give up the puzzle just because the book's over, but you've pretty much lost all hope of progressing with it, too. Futility or emptyness, what a choice. It's almost enough to make me want to pick up Harry Potter.

By the way, the butler did it.

"Is he joking???" :-D