Great Expectations

On September 15, Dan Brown’s sequel to
The Da Vinci Code and Jon Krakauer’s biography of Pat Tillman
were released, the day after Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir went on sale. Immense stacks of the books littered Elliott Bay Book Company,
so even the idiots could find them. More idiot-proof stacks of books
filled gaudy window displays in Borders and Barnes & Noble. QFCs
that day had tables with the books pyramided on top and a big yellow
sign trumpeting a 40 percent discount. It was almost easier to buy the
books than to not buy them.

Over the last decade, adults have only cared about publishing on the
release of hugely popular children’s books like Twilight or the
Harry Potter series. Which is why it’s so extraordinary that September
15 was possibly the biggest day the adult publishing industry has ever
seen, a day in which tens of thousands of people, including tens of
thousands of people who probably never buy books at all, walked into
bookstores with specific titles in mind.

Kennedy’s battle with a malignant brain tumor helped elevate his
upcoming memoir to the biggest political autobiography since Bill
Clinton’s My Life. Krakauer’s follow-up to Under the Banner
of Heaven (his best-selling true-crime novel and historical account
of the seamy underbelly of the Mormon Church) is about the sketchy
death-by-friendly-fire of a football star and American icon. Brown’s
cryptographic thriller starring symbologist Robert Langdon
is—with the possible exception of the conclusion to the Harry
Potter series—the most anticipated book of the new millennium. It
immediately broke sales records on its release, with one million copies
sold in the first 24 hours, easily crushing Bill Clinton’s record for
single-day adult sales.

On the big day, I bought all three books at Elliott Bay Book
Company. The bookstore sold 20 copies of The Lost Symbol that
day. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a strong showing for a store
that famously doesn’t discount titles in the way of the big-box
bookstores. (The books were available for as much as 75 percent off at
some retailers.) And Seattle’s reputation as a city of literary snobs
is accurate: Several local independent booksellers report that the
Kennedy and Krakauer books are outselling The Lost Symbol, at
times by a huge margin.

I read all three in a week: That’s 1,424 pages, six pounds of words.
The urgency of plowing through the same books that everyone in the
world has to read Right Now made the act of reading feel less like a
thoughtful endeavor than watching a popular movie that is favored to
win the Oscars. Nobody is watching those movies because they’re feeling
especially curious about the Holocaust; they’re watching them to earn
cultural currency at the water cooler.

Dan Brown sends critics into seething fits
of epilepsy. He’s popular, but nobody can claim with a straight face
that he writes quality prose; his sentences are clumsily constructed
transporters of trivia and plot points, and they barrel into each other
awkwardly. During action scenes, they move too quickly, and so the
sequence of events can be confusing or underdeveloped. During
expository scenes, they stutter to a stop before it’s time, abruptly
creating cliff-hangers to force our protagonists to run again.

“I can’t believe we didn’t see it! It has been staring us right in
the face… Dean Galloway,” Katherine said. “If you read the ring it
says—”

“Stop!” The old dean suddenly raised his finger in the air and
motioned for silence… “Leave me in darkness for the moment. I would
prefer to have no information to share should our visitors try to
force me.”

“Visitors?” Katherine said, listening, “I don’t hear anyone.”

“You will,” Galloway said, heading for the door. “Hurry.”

His vocabulary is meager and threadbare: Every character in The
Lost Symbol “chuckles,” either menacingly or warmly, on what seems
like every other page, leaving the reader to pray for the sudden
appearance of a guffaw or a chortle or even a braying whinny.

But nobody expects good writing from Brown. They expect action and
suspense. They expect whole airplane rides to disappear. The Lost
Symbol is narcotic in its way, perhaps because of the way the
writing shines when Brown writes about consumer products. He lovingly
describes Langdon’s “collector’s edition Mickey Mouse watch” that his
parents gave him to remind him “to slow down and take life less
seriously.” People don’t just drive trucks—they drive shiny,
GPS-equipped Escalades. They talk on i­Phones and Blackberries and
make references to the much-­coveted secret formula for
Coca-­Cola Classic. The book’s burnished surfaces glow like a
brand-new catalog.

Symbol begins, promisingly, with a severed hand providing a
ghastly clue that might just unlock the ancient mysteries built into
Washington, D.C. Many of the standard Brown-isms are on display, like
his fetish for skin disorders. The Da Vinci Code had an albino
monk and Symbol has two oddly skinned characters: a man with
tattoos all over his body and a tiny CIA agent who suffers from “a
dermatological condition known as vitiligo, which gave her complexion
the mottled look of coarse granite blotched with lichen.”

Whereas Code was a lean whippet of a thriller, Symbol sprawls too far and overreaches too often. Brown makes an unpleasant
foray into winking self-awareness with an editor who desperately wants
Langdon’s long-awaited next book, and parts of the story involve
What the Bleep Do We Know!?–style feel-good physics. A
climactic plot twist involving the evil tattooed man is so painfully
obvious, it makes everything that came before seem dumber. Much in the
way that The Da Vinci Code served as an unauthorized
fictionalization of an earlier book (the pleasantly loony Holy
Blood, Holy Grail), Brown lifts a major plot twist from a
science-fiction movie and nods to his source in the same passage. (“In
1989, TLV technology made a dramatic appearance in the movie The
Abyss, although few viewers realized that they were watching real
science.”) But you know what you’re going to get when you buy a Dan
Brown thriller: improbable plot twists, unexciting main characters
slowly cracking codes, and a tidy, exposition-heavy ending.
Symbol has so much more of these elements that it gets a little
boring in the latter 200 pages—which, for a Dan Brown book, is a
cardinal sin.

Ted Kennedy (and his ghostwriter, Ron
Powers) displays a Brown-ish eagerness to please in True
Compass. His (their?) tone is easy and genial and forgiving, as an
old man should be at the end of his life, and politically like-minded
readers can’t help but be charmed by his calm good cheer.
Compass doesn’t ring with the twinkling Irish bravado of, say,
Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, but the stories fly by with
competence and clarity (an early anecdote about how as a child Kennedy
found his arm elbow-deep in the mouth of a hungry zebra is
appropriately absurd and hilarious).

Kennedy displays a disappointing lack of self-awareness (he admits
to drinking to excess on various occasions, but offhandedly denies a
drinking problem, even as he discusses drunkenly leading people in
“childish chants of ‘Eskimo Power!'” on government aircraft), and
political junkies looking for juicy tidbits will no doubt feel
unsatisfied. Kennedy relates a story about a clueless Ronald Reagan
twice derailing a conversation about the shoe industry by telling the
same meandering story about cowboy boots, but he ultimately equivocates
by concluding these memories with a lukewarm “I feel that Ronald Reagan
led the country in the wrong direction.”

While Kennedy shows some signs of contrition for the events at
Chappaquiddick and a few political failures, that’s about it in terms
of insight—the sexy gossip will no doubt come in a thick
biography sometime soon. Compass succeeds in the way that it
intends to succeed: It’s a fond, rose-colored recollection by an
enormous figure in American history, and it’s appropriately
sentimental: “Atonement is a process that never ends. I believe that.
Maybe it’s a New England thing, or an Irish thing, or a Catholic thing.
Maybe all of those things. But it’s as it should be.” It’s genuinely
touching.

Readers expecting political fireworks in
Where Men Win Glory will be let down. The 9/11 conspiracy
theorists have long postulated that the United States government
assassinated Pat Tillman because he had grown displeased with the way
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were being handled. Although he
acknowledges Tillman’s disillusionment with America’s response to
September 11, Jon Krakauer doesn’t support the execution
hypothesis.

More disappointingly, the first part of Glory is a poorly
structured mess. Krakauer tries to tell the story of Tillman’s rise in
professional football concurrently with the rise of Osama bin Laden and
the Taliban in Afghanistan until they intertwine on September 11.
Although the reader knows that Tillman will ultimately die in
Afghanistan, the juxtaposition of the two backstories can be awkward,
as when Krakauer writes a bridging sentence that attempts to connect
the deaths of 17 United States soldiers with a personal triumph for
Tillman: “Three days after the attack on the USS Cole, Tillman
made nineteen tackles in a 14–33 loss to the Philadelphia
Eagles.” Since Erik Larson’s cunning The Devil in the White
City, it has become de rigueur for authors of nonfiction books to
intertwine two narratives into one cohesive whole, but Afghanistan is
too large a subject to fuse easily with Tillman’s story. The immense
lesson in geopolitics makes the biographical sketch seem frivolous.

Krakauer also indulges in some unprofessional hero worship, and his
clear affection for his subject muddies the storytelling in a way that
didn’t weigh down his previous books—especially the raw,
unsentimental portrait of Christopher McCandless in Into the
Wild. This results in some uncharacteristically bad writing:
“Although imbibing was certainly one of Tillman’s great pleasures, his
favorite beverage wasn’t alcoholic. It was coffee, which ran through
his life like the Ganges runs through India, lending commonality to
disparate experiences and far-flung points of the compass.”

Halfway through, Tillman joins the U.S. Army Rangers, and Krakauer
the journalist takes the reins again. The book becomes a superbly
reported account of all the things that can go wrong when you give
righteous young men weapons and send them into a foreign land under
false pretenses. The Krakauer of the second half—more analytic
and less florid—paints the tragedy of Tillman’s life far better
than the too-respectful Krakauer of the first half ever could.

All three of these titles try to elaborate
on myths and legends: the Kennedys, the football player who went to go
get bin Laden, the sequel to the biggest-selling adult fiction book
since, well, the Bible. And each of them are confounded—and, in
some ways, defeated—by the huge expectations they brought to
their publication. For one week, the publishing industry wrestled with
the kind of enormous financial and cultural expectations that the film
industry deals with every week of the year. These expectations are too
much for publishing to bear. Event books like this—enormous,
mass-market affairs that are hyped to the heavens before their
release—almost never satisfy in the way that they should. If
there’s something to learn from this steroidal week in publishing
history, it’s that books are best when they’re quiet, less urgent, and
not so much of a spectacle.