My Editor and My Wife Criticize "The Da Vinci Code"
When I got home I told my wife about the conversation and she agreed with my editor. She said, "It's not a very good thriller." "Then why did you read it?" "I read a lot of bad thrillers." I asked her to elaborate. She said, "It's badly written, formulaic, cliched, clunky, and shtik-driven. The book he wrote before has exactly the same structure. I think it's about the Pope."
I asked her why it was so successful—because of the Catholic church? She said, "No. It's the business of a thriller to make something scary up about something. You can say that the Nazis are going to rearm and take over Germany. That's what a thriller's supposed to do." I asked her again: "Well then how do you explain that it's been such a big hit?" "I can't. I'm mystified."
I don't usually stump my wife. I gotta get to the bottom of this.
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I only know it be reputation, but my impression is that spiritual types like it because the story is a "what-if" fictional premise built on some relatively recent scholarship in the history of religion.
Can't disagree with your wife ("formulaic, cliched, clunky," etc). Or with a.o. scott who, in his movie review today, summarized the book as dan brown's primer on how not to write an english sentence. Nor did I like the book myself--it was so bad it was hard to keep reading. But I did keep reading, or skimming, and there's no big mystery about why: lots of christian women respond to the book because it throws mary magdalene in the face of the church and says that women are really really important in the story of jesus and that marriage (read: sex with women) is a good thing not a bad thing (a viewpoint still not 100% signed off on by the cardinals, two milennia after the death of jesus.) The christian Magdalene story blends in with the pre-christian Femina elements, in an amalgam we've seen succeed before, in a mammothly popular book called Avalon, about priestesses in semi-pagan arthurian england. In other words, woman power. That said, the book was also admired by my brother-in-law, a middleaged jewish guy not usually given to historical, feminist, or christian musings, who finished the book, then called me up and asked me to tell him more about this whole jesus-was-married thing. This gnostic gospel view of things is much more human and believable than the version of church history passed down by the early christian fathers, and people connect with it whenever it's presented to them in relatable form (e.g., not as weird scrolls found in jars near the Red Sea but in pop fiction). In other words, I get why those Holy Blood Holy Grail guys decided to sue...it was their stuff (not that it was really theirs) that gave this book its selling power.