Off-the-cuff links: What's in the next Dan Brown book?
Samanth Subramanian -
Monday, September 07, 2009 1:46 PM
New York magazine goes at least part of the distance towards answering that question, in a very entertaining interview with Dan Burstein, editor of Secrets of The Widow’s Son, a book that tries to figure out what Brown's The Lost Symbol is about. Go read. I particularly loved this exchange:
"Q. Why did it take him so long to write this one?
"I’ve met Dan Brown once, and it’s presumptuous to say I understand him, but I think there’s a set of personal issues. He always wanted to be a writer. If you go back to his days at Amherst—he was in a creative-writing class with David Foster Wallace. Imagine you’re sitting there with this incredible intellect and trying to figure out how you can become a writer. And what he discovers is that he has a real gift for potboilers. And then suddenly you have four books on the best-seller list, and people are suing you for plagiarism when you haven’t plagiarized anything. It only took six years. It’s not like he’s Thomas Pynchon."
More here.