A desultory and unreadable appraisal of Dan Brown and writing style in general

I ordered Dan Brown's Inferno on Amazon after reading Rio's review of it. I think I can do with a Dan Brown this summer. Unlike many, I don't really have anything against him as a writer. I wouldn't say he's the cream of this generation, but I might just be wrong on that. I hear that it's not very difficult these days to pass for a writer. I confess that I mostly read his works to increase the number of pages I've read on Shelfari without putting in much effort. Still, I did find the books in his Robert Langdon series singularly engrossing, almost in a decadent, self-indulgent way. I only wish they were historically accurate. (Go back and hover over that last sentence for links. Gosh, I really need to change link colors on this blog.) Now, Dan Brown's prose certainly doesn't aim to imitate illiteracy. (Unlike, say, David Baldacci's. How that man was ever allowed access to writing implements will remain one of the world's greatest mysteries.) But something must be off, if even the venerable and highly learned Professor John Lawler (the man who stands on the street corner of English Language & Usage on StackExchange, waving his PhD and professorship at the University of Michigan in the faces of passersby with a whorelike defiance), who normally undertakes to reduce the English language to a set of meaningless grunts and snorts with missionary zeal and the aid of well-chosen pieces of jargon that are impenetrable but to the initiate, and with the sort of intellectual self-assuredness that can only be begotten by a neurotic fear of not being taken seriously, large glasses sliding down large nose to find its progress thwarted by a wart, thinks Dan Brown's writing style is "awful".* Dan Brown's style is impossible to characterize, because it is a product of the modern obsession with the idea that style is a slave to substance. That isn't really a bad thing (unless you're a belle-lettrist, I suppose), but it doesn't mean that style is not important at all. Its importance depends on the work. Wodehouse and Lovecraft, for instance, though they were so different as writers that it would be hard to find anything in common between them, both depended for the success of their art on style. Even good writers whose writing styles don't obviously affect the reading experience tend to exert an influence over their readers through something quite other than the content of their works. Jeffry Archer has a unique style, too, though he tends to use it to make up for a near-complete lack of wit, and his stories generally leave one gnashing one's teeth. It would be impossible not to mention Gore Vidal in this connection, since he was perhaps the single most gifted writer in the latter half of the twentieth century in the use of style - after that eternal genuis Vladimir Nabokov, of course. To put it unsatisfactorily simply, style, as I see it, is, among other things, the ability to know when it is appropriate to use a certain word rather than a near-exact synonym in a context where it wouldn't matter superficially which you used. (I suppose the number of commas in that last sentence was a poor stylistic choice.) I think I shall end this peroration before I start bloviating. (I believe President Harding was fond of that word.)

*I apologize for this short tirade. John Lawler is genuinely a good linguist, but his occasional pontifications on issues of usage are rather irritating.