Da Vinci Code Suckage

Joshua over at Strip Mining for Whimsy tried to read the Da Vinci Code and found it unreadable. He thought he was getting a Truly Bad novel, but all he got was boil-like, painful pustule, ass-griping bad.

Reminds me of when I make the short lived efforts to read White Oleander and The Red Tent. I don't have The Red Tent here to make fun of, but I do have White Oleander. Get a load of this diaper's worth of dialog. This is page one - mother to daughter (the daughter is "I"). I've cut out all but the conversation. These are the first lines of the book with no speech deleted:

"Oleander time," she said. "Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind."

"You should get some sleep," I offered.

"I never sleep," she said. "We are the wands," she said. "We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental."

"The wands," I repeated.

"We received our coloring from Norsemen," she said. "Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are."

And this is ALL on the first two pages of the book. I'm sorry all ye who read this book and thought it was genius . . . I can't account for Oprah's taste . . . but this dialog SUCKS great big black-hole suckage. No light escapes this horrfically sucking dialog. This conversation could suck a ping-pong ball through a 100 foot garden hose. Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - talks that way.

For one thing, the daughter is at least ten years old, so it's not like she would have never heard all this bogus, clap-trap family history before. It's obviously being re-told for the reader's benefit. It's plot exposition at it's WORST. It's not even up to soap opera standards. And it's histrionic ca-ca. Yeah, I KNOW the character is supposed to have a Histrionic Personality Disorder, but even the descriptions between snippets of over-wrought dialog are torqued and forced and almost Rococo in their convoluted perversions. It is ghastly.

I have never read past this conversation on pages one and two of this gad-awful pile of tripe because every time I get to " . . . and hung the flesh from trees" I just want to scream at Janet Fitch "Give me a friggin' break! You have GOT to be kidding me! How did this awful crap make it out of your weekend writer's workshop?"

But then the heartbreaking truth hits me -- this load of shat was a bestseller and they made a movie out of it. Just like The Da Vinci Code.

The humanity!