I know, I know, nobody’s ever going to confuse Dan Brown’s body of work (Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code) with great literature. But I read them and thought they were entertaining enough for the cost of a paperback. So, when I heard that there was another art-history puzzle book out, The Rule of Four, I thought, “That might be fun.”
How terribly, terribly wrong I was.
Here are a dozen things that I learned from The Rule of Four:
1. People are trustworthy in inverse proportion to their financial means. Poor people are saints. Rich people range from disaffected to dishonest to just plain evil.
2. Old people are untrustworthy altogether. Either they Just Don’t Understand, or they’re desperately jealous of the rich promise of youth, or they’re bitter, craven failures.
3. Scholarly rigor is entirely the province of undergraduates.
4. Scholarly rigor dramatically limits one’s chances at a happy personal life.
5. Women instinctively perceive scholarly rigor as “the other woman” and become unreasonably jealous. (Whether the inverse of this is true remains unclear, as none of the women portrayed seem concerned with their own scholarly pursuits.)
6. Princeton doesn’t take enough reasonable steps to keep its students out of life-threatening situations.
7. The reasonable steps Princeton does take to ensure the safety and security of its student body are best viewed as inconveniences to be sidestepped.
8. Undergraduate senior projects are sufficient motives for theft and murder, not just binge drinking, poor personal hygiene, and procrastination.
9. Just because a big word is available doesn’t mean its use is desirable or particularly effective.
10. There is no plot twist so novel that it can’t have the crap kicked out of it by pretentious writing.
11. I hate first-person present-tense narration.
But the most important thing I’ve learned from The Rule of Four?
12. Future books by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason are to be avoided at all costs.
(On the subject of decoding ancient works, my partner was telling me about something he saw on PBS about a series of unusual circumstances that led a Russian to decipher the Mayan alphabet. Does anyone know of any good accounts of this story? I’d love to read about it.)