The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown

Confession.

I read The Da Vinci Code.

Here’s how it happened. We were at my parents’ place back in June and they mentioned that they’d seen the movie and asked if I’d read the book. I said no and made my standard joke about probably being the only person on the planet who hadn’t read it.

Then: “We have it,” Dad said. “You can borrow it.”

I was cornered. I couldn’t use the excuse that Dan Brown didn’t need any more money. I was uncomfortably overcome with the feeling that I was being a terrible literary snob by not reading it.

So I read it.

I hear Brown teaches creative writing. I hope he’s a “do as I say, not as I do” type, because he has numerous annoying habits including, but not limited to: overuse of exclamation points, overuse of italics, extremely short chapters, an almost complete reliance on “as you know, Bob” dialogue, and a need to end every chapter with a “cliffhanger.” I wasn’t thrilled with the “Matlock”-style confession from the implausible villain, either.

I do enjoy a good page-turner. But this book… yawn. I was ahead of the characters in figuring out a lot of the clues (zzz), found the shocking revelations not all that shocking (powerful men revised history to suit their own purposes? No!), and thought the ending was incredibly lame: after all his conspiracy-theorizing, he lets the church off the hook, pins the whole thing on rogue academic (WTF?) and goes “haha!” (use best Nelson* voice) at his readers and declines reveal the Big Secret (probably because he couldn’t come up with anything good enough) that his characters had spent the entire book searching for.

But here’s what really bugged the crap out of me: there are precisely two female characters in the entire story, and one of them doesn’t come into play until late in the book. (Oh, wait, there was another bit player who was female. But she was just there long enough for a male character to kill her. Typical.) So mostly one. And that female character is referred to as “Sophie,” (despite the fact she’s an agent of the French police) while the male characters are all referred to by their last names. Arghhh!!! He couldn’t call her by her last name too? That was too great a leap? Really?

And, of course, there are the usual cliches: male lead protects female lead, male/female leads fall in love at the end (but by the next book in the series, he’ll have moved on to someone new and she’ll never be heard from again, natch). Now granted, Brown’s chauvinism is of the ingrained sort epidemic in our society, but given that the major theme of the book was the “sacred feminine,” you’d think that someone (his editor, if not he himself) would have taken pains to work on the more obvious indicators.

*from The Simpsons