Literary Snobs

Today, a Mr Michael Deacon (no, I hadn't heard of him before either) pens a heartfelt satire of Dan Brown's work, pointing out all the flaws in his writing.

I can't help wondering how much of his life Mr Deacon wasted penning that useless, uninformative, unimaginative bit of tripe. The whole thing smacks of jealousy.

"How dare Dan Brown, a multi-million selling author, not live up to my expectations of literary brilliance, while I, who does live up to my own exacting literary standards, am still struggling to break through! It isn't fair, goddammit!"

He'd have been better to spend those few hours trying to come up with an engaging plot and interesting characters for his own novel, rather than tearing down someone who has succeeded, in an attempt to make himself fell better about his own lack of success.

What Michael Deacon doesn't seem to realise, is that most readers simply want an enjoyable story, not a literary tome that is so brilliant, that one has to keep a dictionary handy and then decipher the hidden meaning behind each scene.

I suspect what Mr Deacon forgot is that his "article" (and  use speech marks for article, as it doesn't live up to any definition of journalism that I know of) isn't just insulting Dan Brown, but is also maligning every single person who has read and enjoyed one of his book. 80 million people read the Da Vinci Code; what astonishing arrogance it takes, to believe that you know better than 80,000,000 other people.

Someone needs to tell these literary aficionados that rather than coming across as a wise, educated and intelligent people, they sound more like elitist twits, who are completely out of touch with the majority of readers out there.

Dan Brown tells a good story. Michael Deacon does not.


P.S. If you have time, pop over to the Wall Street Journal, and read how one literary snob rediscvered his love of all fiction, and realised how much he'd been missing out on.