Actually, the book got the same kind of reviews, and it is wildly popular. I think if you liked the book, you will like the movie, which is pretty much what I read in some reviews. Here is a pretty interesting article from the Chicago Sun. He pretty much says that the book should have been a failure based on all the reviews, but just the opposite happened. I foresee the same for the movie. And the religious zealots opposed to the film are just helping to drive up ticket sales.
'The Da Vinci Code': Is it worthy?
May 15, 2006
BY KEVIN NANCE Arts Critic
Greater than any mystery contained in The Da Vinci Code, the Dan Brown thriller whose film version opens on Friday, is the riddle of the book's mindboggling popularity. Publishers and would-be best-selling authors are racking their brains to discover (and reproduce) the recipe for one of the greatest publishing phenomena of all time, which has sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover and has now settled in for what's expected to be a reign of Victorian proportions at No. 1 in paperback.
Is it Brown's canny combination of religious conspiracy theories, secret societies, code-cracking and art-historical mumbo-jumbo? Has it tapped into a wave of anti-Catholicism following a rash of sex-abuse scandals in the church? Does it satisfy an emerging hunger for feminist theologies? Is it the novel's choppy but breathless pace, with nearly every one of its 105 brief chapters punctuated by a cliffhanger? Or is it, by now, chiefly a case of snowballing fame, with many readers buying the book just to see what all the fuss is about?
Experts can't figure out how Dan Brown's so-so writing has produced such a blockbuster. Call it a miracle. (TIM BOYD/AP)
'DA VINCI CODE' WEEK STORIES
• Leo's timeless images crop up everywhere
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• Churches take crack at 'Code'
• Experts set record straight on 'Code' claims
• Why is this book a blockbuster?
• Chicago's own art mystery
• Evangelical passion for 'Da Vinci'
• Europe: Decoded
• Bettany: 'Da Vinci' is 'just a fun thriller'
It's a puzzle that might stump even Brown's Harvard sleuth, Robert Langdon, but one thing is certain: Whatever the secret of The Da Vinci Code's success, it's not the book's literary qualities.
With its flat prose, stick-figure characters, wooden dialogue, perfunctory scene-setting and an unfortunate tendency to interrupt the action with momentum-killing lectures, the novel is in some ways the unlikeliest of best sellers. Many Chicago writers, critics, scholars and book-industry insiders are flummoxed by the book's success.
"I read 50 pages and put it down," says Bill Young, president of Midwest Media and a frequent escort of authors who come to Chicago for book-signings and other appearances. "I had Dan Brown in town and liked him, but I was just amazed that his book took off to the extent that it did."
Author James McManus, who teaches creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes about poker for the New York Times, had a similar experience with The Da Vinci Code. "It's painful to read stuff like that," he says. "Give me some Novocain."
Deborah Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, agrees. "His dialogue's pretty clumsy, his sentence structure is monotonous, and even the pace of the novel, which is a big part of its appeal, I found sort of wearing. It's relentless -- every two and a half pages there's a cliffhanger. It actually got to be tedious, because every other page or so, I knew somebody was going to have a gun in their face."
Then there are those endless digressions, often on arcane (and sometimes inaccurately summarized) topics such as obscure corners of art history and religion.
"It seems to be written like this: Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-stop. Lecture. Resume bams," says Patricia Monaghan, a book critic, scholar, poet and professor at DePaul University. "It does have a narrative push, but I also felt there was some sort of weird grafting of a nonfiction book onto a thriller, as if it were written by two authors. If I were that person's writing teacher, I'd say, 'Let's have some transitions between the action and the lectures, OK?' "
Everything's 'astonishing'
The list of Brown's literary crimes and misdemeanors ranges from the merely irritating, such as his overuse and occasional misuse of ellipses, to the downright maddening, such as his tendency to over-hype his story even as he's telling it. In something like the manner of Rachael Ray, the chirpy Food Network chef who keeps insisting that her recipes are "awesome," Brown continually assures his readers that his ideas and plot developments are "astonishing."
"He's telling you the story and then telling you what to think about the story," says Donna Seaman, associate editor of Booklist, a review journal published by the American Library Association. "He's always preaching."
And unlike the best of his mystery-writing colleagues, who understand a reader's desire to do his or her own mental detective work as the story unfolds, Brown leaves precious little to the imagination.
"One of the most irritating parts of the book is the fact that it has to keep telling you how intricate it is, even though he's explaining every single clue as it comes your way," Nelson says. "A good author of this type of book assumes that his reader is intelligent enough to catch some of the innuendo or parse some of the clues. Brown doesn't have that faith."
Then there are his lapses of characterization, including a lack of psychological depth and what some regard as an insensitive tendency to correlate the characters' personal qualities to their physical descriptions.
"There's no interest in psychological complexity, depth, growth, development," says Barbara Newman, a professor of English, religion and classics at Northwestern University. "And I want to say this also: The two villains in the book turn out to be an albino and a cripple, which I think is regressive and prejudicial in a very nasty, stereotypical kind of way. The beautiful people are good; the people who have distorted bodies also have distorted souls. A book that prides itself on being so progressive should have a more enlightened consciousness about disability."
'Not the worst, not the best'
It would be misleading and unfair, of course, to compare Brown's work to that of literature's greats, since literary and popular fiction have different goals and standards. But within the spectrum of popular fiction, many experts say, The Da Vinci Code fails torise above the level of mediocrity; in the thriller genre, it's fair to say, Brown is no John le Carre or Graham Greene, or even a Robert Ludlum.
"Is this person a Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison or Philip Roth? That's the wrong question," Nelson says. "But I'm quite open to a lot of different kinds of writing, including a lot of genre fiction, which can be brilliantly written and often is. But Dan Brown is a mediocre practitioner of his genre -- not the worst, but certainly not the best."
Seaman, of Booklist, ranks Brown just below Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) in the pantheon of best-sellerdom. "He's blander than Sparks, but that's about where he hits, I think," she says. "If he hadn't picked such an attractive subject, nobody would be reading him, because he's just not good enough."
Not that Brown is guilty of any felonies against literature. "It's basically competent writing," says Ann Hemenway, a professor of fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. "It doesn't offer much in terms of language or character development or deeper psychological issues, but it gets you where you're going, keeps you turning the pages. Certainly in terms of commercial fiction, The Da Vinci Code isn't the worst thing I've ever read -- it's not a Harlequin romance, after all. No one can say that Dan Brown has done terrible things to the world of letters."
But McManus, for one, argues that the Da Vinci Code phenomenon isn't good for the cause of literature in a broader sense.
"As a person who knows a lot of talented people who write wonderful books and can't get them published, as well as published writers with only a tiny audience, I regret the herd mentality in which everyone needs to read one particular book, leaving so much strong work unread," he says. "It's an unfortunate aspect of human nature that there's so little independence of mind about choosing one's reading material. People are such lemmings, and it's pathetic."
And the Da Vinci Code craze may have hastened another disheartening publishing trend: the inability of "midlist" (read: non-best-seller) authors to get into print and stay there.
"It used to be that the Stephen Kings of the world helped literary writers by subsidizing the midlist, but apparently that's happening less and less," Hemenway says. "Now publishers aren't looking for good literary writers they can develop over time. They're looking for more Dan Browns."
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