Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones in Inferno, which the critics said wasn’t too hot.

It seems to have taken, in fact, several years and several clunkier books to get Brown the bad reputation he now enjoys among cultural commentators. “Like a terrific school field trip where you come home so full of knowledge and adventure that you stun your friends and family into glazed silence with great bursts of enthusiasm,” raved the Chicago Tribune. “The word is wow,” she wrote, in case the reader missed her point. Janet Maslin declared it an “exhilaratingly brainy thriller” in the New York Times. One thing that now seems hard to remember – even hard to understand – is that when the Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, it was very well-reviewed.

With this new novel, I am excited to take readers on a journey deep into this mysterious realm … a landscape of codes, symbols, and more than a few secret passageways.” Here is the sort of thing he says in interviews, this one with the Independent on the eve of Inferno’s publication: “Although I studied Dante’s Inferno as a student, it wasn’t until recently that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante’s work on the modern world. He recorded a few synthesizer albums – with titles like SynthAnimals, Perspective, and Angels & Demons – before deciding to move permanently into the world of letters.Īs a writer, Brown takes himself very seriously. As his Wikipedia page explains in excruciating detail, as a young man his ambitions lay not with literature.

You might say his life took an unexpected turn after graduation. He attended the fancy Philips Exerter prep school, and went on to the very well-regarded Amherst College, where once he reportedly shared a creative writing seminar with David Foster Wallace. They are less often asked of Brown.īrown came into this world with a posh pedigree. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstockīut why? Why even now, even as he has often been the butt of jokes, are Dan Brown’s books and movies still so popular? These are questions often asked of the Fifty Shades books, and of Twilight, and other dumb-but-fun global publishing hits. Surplice to requirements: Armin Mueller-Stahl and Ewan McGregor in Angels & Demons.

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