Do you like Paulo Coelho? You’re in good company. Acolytes range from Will Smith to Madonna, and, more recently, Joe Jonas, who said of Coelho’s most famous book, The Alchemist ‘‘[The book] is a story about the endless search of finding out who you truly are … it brought some stability into our wild ride of a life." In his ‘‘Author’s Note’’ to The Alchemist, Coelho mentions that Bill Clinton and Julia Roberts are also fans.

The celebrity endorsement is a crucial part of Coelho, Inc. But it’s not the only ingredient in his myth-making enterprise. Every paperback edition of his sixteen books has a three-page ‘‘Author Biography’’ printed at the end, a hagiographic summary that informs us that the author has always been a ‘‘seeker of the new.’’ In case you missed the point, the bio concludes that Paulo has ‘‘touched the hearts of people everywhere.’’ This is hardly PR overreach; it’s how Coelho himself talks of his life and his work. He puts his writing forward as profound meditation on the meaning of life, death, and God. One hundred and forty million people have bought his books.

If you’ve absorbed any of Coelho’s incredible commercial success, without actually reading the 65-year-old, Brazilian author, it’s genuinely shocking to realize just how shoddy and lightweight his books are, how obvious and well-trodden their revelations. It’s tough to pick the most clichéd lines when there’s such choice, but here are a few of the best. From The Alchemist (1988): ‘‘Why do we have to listen to our hearts?’ the boy asked. … ‘Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.’” From Veronika Decides to Die (1998): ‘‘And all of us, one way or another, are insane.’’ From The Zahir (2005): ‘‘God knows that we are all artists of life.’’

But the vapidity of Coelho is not his greatest sin. Nor is it the relentless self-promotion. At the heart of Coelho’s ostensibly encouraging philosophy is a brutal logic: If you’ve made it, your success is thanks to the mystical powers of positive thinking; if you haven’t, it’s your own fault for not trying hard enough. No credence is given to luck—good or bad—to geography or family background, to the substantial difficulties of economic and social mobility. All of these factors can be subsumed by focus and drive and single-mindedness. It’s a strikingly callous denial of reality, hedged in cuddly fairy tales.

What is it in Coelho’s writing that has convinced so many millions of readers of his sagacity? In part, it is the universality of his central theme: A young person sets out on a spiritual quest, discovers that his elders are no wiser than he is, and ultimately realizes the power for change comes from within. In The Alchemist it’s a shepherd boy, in The Witch of Portobello an orphan, in Brida an apprentice witch. But if you read more than one Coelho, it quickly becomes clear that he is not interested in the nuances of various spiritual awakenings; he’s really only interested in his own. A structure that might do what the best bildungsromans do—chronicle growth, enlightenment, expansion, discovery—becomes a narrow celebration of the author. Plenty of fictional writers include versions of themselves in their work—Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Charlie Kaufman, etcetera. But what makes Coelho’s version so insufferable is that it has evolved into mere brand management.