About a year ago, when the film version of The DaVinci Code was about to come out, I wrote here about my sheer contempt for the novel. I’m a Tom Hanks fan (That Thing You Do is one of my favorite light and fluffy movies), but the DVC film was, by all accounts, a disaster. (I must admit that I did not spend the $9.00 charged by Northern Virginia cinemas to see the thing.)
An entry today in the brilliant linguistics-related blog Language Log reminds me exactly why I hated the novel so much. A post by Geoffrey K. Pullum about a BBC interview with Jesse Sheidlower pointed, in a footnote, to an earlier post about DVC. In November 2004, Pullum took Brown to task for his facile use of an anarthrous noun phrase to open just about every one of his novels.
Reading Pullum’s post was a wonderful validation of my contempt for Brown’s work. A year ago I had developed the uneasy feeling that I was a strange fish for not liking DVC. Everybody else seemed to, after all.
But renowned linguist Pullum’s post reminded me why: Brown’s a hack. (See the November, 2004, post to understand the joke in that last sentence.)