Dan Brown and David Foster Wallace: Workshop Partners?

(Hat tip to The Rumpus)

It is hard to think of two famous American writers who’ve had more divergent paths than David Foster Wallace and Dan Brown. The former has been lauded by the literary world as one of the greatest writers of his generation, a massive intellect and a compelling stylist famous for books so dense and full of textual play that many people fear even attempting them (those people shouldn’t, David Foster Wallace is hilarious and perfectly accessible, just…long-winded at times). The latter is mostly known for being a laughably bad prose writer whose diet-fluff novels are so full of sloppy history, cliche and incoherence that many book lovers seem visibly angry that he is one of the best selling authors of all time (read 20 of Dan Brown’s worst sentences).

So, it seems an amusing twist of fate to learn that the two authors were in a creative writing workshop together at Amherst college. Can you even imagine the workshop comments they gave each other? Here is the relevant passage from Boston Magazine’s piece:

He reached Alan Lelchuk, who taught the creative-writing seminar that Brown later credited with helping him become a novelist. Brown’s writing from the class left little impression on Lelchuk. Of course, it would have been easy for anyone to be eclipsed by the enormous talent of fellow student David Foster Wallace, the heady prose stylist now regarded as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. “With Dan, he was not the star of the class, as David was, as were one or two others who were really quite good,” Lelchuk told Storrs.

“Dan was good,” he finally admitted, as if for the sake of politeness. “But in a much quieter way.”