The Dan Brown cult

Why haven't I read The Da Vinci Code? Blame my students. Not all my students, of course, but the small percentage who insist that Dan Brown's book is not fiction but history. This heartfelt faith in Dan Brown is so deep and widespread that it approaches cult status; someday we can expect to see supermarket tabloids speculating about the secret lovechild of Dan Brown and Madonna.

I didn't realize just how pervasive this belief is until last semester when I felt the need to spend some class time explaining to a room full of students in a sophomore-level literature class how to distinguish between poetry and prose. The problem came to my attention when several students referred to Moby Dick as a poem. By the time a person gets to college, he or she ought to be equipped to recognize that whatever Moby Dick might be, it is certainly not poetry; however, instead of bemoaning the gaps in my students' college preparation, I decided to devote half a class period to a crash course in conventions of poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction.

The class was receptive...until a student asked about The Da Vinci Code. "You can't call it fiction," said one student.

"Yes, I can," I said, "because that's what it is."

"But it's true!"

It soon became clear that nothing I could say would shake this student's conviction that Dan Brown is a historian and not a novelist. He expressed his assurance with such religious fervor that I expected him to praise Brown in ecstatic tongues or burn his professor as a heretic.

I suppose it's not Dan Brown's fault that so many readers confuse fact and fiction, but that kind of category error frightens me. So until my students can distinguish between fiction and non-, count me out of the Dan Brown cult.