Sniggering at Brown

Normally I don’t like picking on Dan Brown – it feels like taking away a kid’s crutches, or sniggering when someone walks out of the toilets dragging a couple of metres of toilet paper on the bottom of their shoe – I feel like I ought to leave the poor guy alone.  But the Times last week had a parody that was just too good – “My Week: Dan Brown (according to Hugo Rifkind)”.  It begins thusly:

Monday I could feel a nose that was about to sneeze, and I knew it was my own. I’m going to sneeze. “Have a tissue,” said my 47-year-old literary agent who was wearing a red and green striped tie and a brown corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows and other stuff that I’ll mysteriously not mention despite being so incredibly specific thus far. “Thank you,” I said, and I sneezed like I did the first time we met over a decade ago when I had no idea that I would one day be the incredibly famous bestselling 45-year-old author Dan Brown who wrote The Da Vinci Code. Today we were meeting to discuss my next novel which will be a bestselling story about where all the odd socks go. “That’s a rubbish idea,” said my agent. And even when I told him that the mystery would be solved by an intelligent and beautiful Harvard sockologist who looks like Angelina Jolie he did not change his mind. “The famous author is disappointed,” I told him. “You don’t need to tell me that,” said my agent. “I can infer it from the look on your face and the general circumstances of the situation.” “I don’t understand,” I said. “I know,” said my agent.

You can see the whole thing here.  With thanks to Matt for the tip.