Author of the week: Dan Brown

last updated 8 January 2015

The mystery of why Dan Brown took so long to write a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code has finally been solved, said James Kaplan in Parade. In short, the pressure got to the former schoolteacher. “The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who’s had success, is that I temporarily became very self-aware,” Brown says. Though he had started a new book even before The Da Vinci Code was released, in 2003, progress on his planned fourth thriller was frozen by the runaway success of his whodunit about the Holy Grail. “Instead of writing and saying, ‘This is what the character does,’ you say, ‘Wait, millions of people are going to read this.’ It’s sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke—you’re temporarily crippled.”

Don’t snigger, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. The Da Vinci Code will never be mistaken for great literature, but its successful formula isn’t easily duplicated. Brown deserves credit for shaking off his self-consciousness and delivering another “breathless treasure-hunt story” that uses a single profound idea as “a pretext for escapist fun.” In his new book, The Lost Symbol, he still relies heavily on the use of italics and chapter-ending cliffhangers. But this time the action transpires in Washington, D.C., and the story’s big revelation can be read as a sweetly optimistic affirmation of human potential rather than an unveiling of shadowy intrigues. It turns out that Dan Brown isn’t a conspiracy theorist at all. “Not in any way, shape or form,” he says. “I’m just a guy who tells a story.”