Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 12

  Gone with the Wind splits its time equally between Atlanta and Tara. While Peyton Place gives us short and crucial glimpses of life in Manhattan, the great percentage of the novel takes place in the semirural town of the title. To Kill a Mockingbird takes us on a long wallow in backwater America, with only a brief reference or two to the great cities that lie beyond its limits, while Valley of the Dolls takes us on a roller-coaster thrill ride through the exhilarating uppers and dismal downers of metropolitan life.

  Except for Michael Corleone’s jaunt to the countryside of the old country, most of The Godfather focuses on survival skills on the main stage of New York. Although Las Vegas and Los Angeles do have short walk-ons in the spotlight, there is no doubt where the lifeblood of those western cities originates: back east.

  Our nation’s capital, the home of American military power, is fittingly the backdrop for two of the war novels. Jack Ryan arrives in D.C. on the red-eye from London and works his military magic out of an office right down the street from where two priests are battling Satan for a young girl’s soul.

  In Jaws, the carefree island of Amity is only a half day’s drive from the avenues of Manhattan, so it becomes a tranquil getaway for harried city people—at least until that damn shark shows up.

  John Smith embraces the very New England small-town life that Allison MacKenzie and Anne Welles have so heartily rejected. Mitch McDeere leaves the relative safety of Boston to take his chances in the Deep South.

  Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson are our only characters with their hearts and souls rooted firmly in the American West, though neither of them is completely at home in those wide-open spaces. Our other Robert, Professor Langdon, jets from Boston to Paris to London, an itinerary that qualifies him as an überurbanite.

  SCARLETT’S TWO ROUND-TRIP JOURNEYS

  Not to be outdone, Scarlett makes the round-trip journey from country to city not once but twice. The first time she journeys from Tara to Atlanta it is her mother’s idea, a way to distract the poor child from the loss of her goofball first husband, Charles.

  And, exactly as her mother had expected, Scarlett is energized and converted to a city girl. Crowded Atlanta exhilarates her far more than the isolated plantation of Tara, no matter how dear Tara is to her. There’s a hum of excitement in the city that even Charleston with its gardens hidden by high walls is lacking. Scarlett is pumped and becomes a whirlwind of restless energy.

  If virtue resided in the country, as Horatio Alger believed, you couldn’t convince the highborn women of Atlanta of that, for by their lights, Scarlett O’Hara’s country ways are about as unvirtuous as they come. Indeed, her wayward nature seems to have more effect on Atlanta than Atlanta has on her.

  She’s not about to be bullied into upholding the fussy rules of a bunch of citified old maids. She’ll dance with whom she pleases even if she is a freshly minted widow. Like Scarlett’s later incarnations, Allison MacKenzie and Anne Welles, the heroines of Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls, Scarlett may be a small-town girl, but she has big-city ambitions and is not the least bit shy about fighting or flirting or flailing for what and whom she wants.

  During the siege of Atlanta, Scarlett’s courage eventually fails her. She decides she needs a shot of renewal and makes a desperate run back to the safety of Tara. But war has turned the world upside down, and now the countryside is not the regenerating paradise it once was. It’s full of gruesome hardships and challenges beyond anything she’s known. Back at home, Scarlett digs into the fertile soil of Tara, determined to revive the old ways of plantation life that originally made her who she is. A country girl first and foremost, a city girl as a last resort.

  City-born scalawags and carpetbaggers are determined to uproot her, levying taxes on Tara that make staying there impossible unless she can deliver an exorbitant sum to these folks from the urban North. So it’s back to Atlanta a second time, only now her mission is not consolation, as it was on that original trip. This time Scarlett is intent on marrying any man she can find who can pay her property taxes and allow her to reclaim Tara.

  Again, the paradigm holds, for this most American of American heroines will brave the perils of city life only long enough to acquire the cash and the husband(s) that eventually allow her to return to her rightful place, the heartland.

  For a novel that portrays the Civil War as a clash between the values of urban and agrarian cultures, it is fitting that Scarlett’s personal battle would mirror these very elements.

  SUMMER AT THE SHORE

  In Jaws they are known as “summer folk” and “winter folk,” but if you substituted the adjectives city and country, you wouldn’t be far off. When the city people begin their annual migration to the tip of Long Island every summer, Ellen Brody, the sheriff’s youngish wife, finds herself remembering the sophisticated city life she’s abandoned to live out on the island in cultural deprivation. Her father was an adman whose agency had transferred the family from Los Angeles to New York, so Ellen had her urbanity passport stamped twice before she trudged off to Mayberry. After marrying Brody and moving to small-town Amity, she tries a few times to reconnect with her city friends, without success.

  Ellen talked gaily about the community, about local politics, about her job as a volunteer at the Southampton Hospital—all subjects about which her old friends, many of whom had been coming to Amity every summer for more than thirty years, knew little and cared less. They talked about New York politics, about art galleries and painters and writers they knew.

  Like it or not, Amity is economically dependent on the annual influx of New Yorkers. As Scarlett so well knows, when you’re desperate for money, you either pack up your ball gowns and eye shadow, take a fortifying breath, and head for the city, or you find a way to lure the free-spending city folks to you. Money is in the city. Values are in the country.

  That’s how Amity works. Every June the summer people trickle back, drawn by the beach, the warm waves sloshing on the shore, boozy days in the sun. This is a town that goes to great lengths to stifle any news reflecting poorly on the community. If there are rapes, you won’t read about them in the local paper. Though the vandalism of summer houses by winter teenagers is on the rise, the newspaper is loath to report on it.

  Winter people depend so desperately on their summer cousins showing up and spending freely that Brody is overruled in his attempt to close the beaches after the first attack. The mayor and the board of selectmen will have none of it. One shark-eaten skinny-dipper more or less is not enough reason to sacrifice the local economy.

  But when the great white shark returns for a second course and gulps down a local boy, Brody, full of guilt, shuts the beach and lets the whole world know there’s trouble right here in Amity.

  Some of the summer people flee. The spineless ones. To make matters worse, as word of the shark attacks spreads, the regular summer folks are replaced by a ghoulish lot, a lower class of city dweller, tightfisted types who tow campers behind their cars. These are tabloid readers making the long journey out to the country in search of a cheap thrill.

  Sheriff Brody encounters such a family from Queens, who are deeply disappointed that the shark attack they just witnessed wasn’t fatal and the fins of the shark were so unimpressively small. The father of this trashy tribe sneers contemptuously and suggests to the sheriff that this whole shark attack thing has been some kind of publicity hoax meant to draw people like him to Amity under false pretenses.

  Brody explodes and calls the guy a jerk, then orders him to leave.

  In a parting shot that underscores the cultural clash at work in this confrontation, the sleazy gawker calls Brody an uppity “snot-nose.”

  It is a favorite dictum of writing teachers that stories are often set in motion when a stranger arrives in town, throwing all the well-regulated routines out of whack. Well, the great white shark of Jaws certainly qualifies as that stranger. But in this novel there’s a second outsider as predatory as the shark. Matt Hooper is his name—an
expert on sharky things summoned from his lab at Woods Hole to provide expertise.

  It just so happens that he hails originally from the same city as Ellen. He went to Yale, then after grad school he chased sharks around the globe. By golly, that sounds a lot like Rhett Butler, or Robert Kincaid, or even Robert Langdon, that famous Harvard symbologist. Dashing, a bit of a dandy, and just a little dastardly. A cosmopolitan, globalized kind of guy who’s at home anywhere. Quick, lock up your women.

  He swims past Ellen Brody’s defenses and gulps her down in a single swallow. They have a romantic lunch, followed by a motel room tumble. Though their romance tails away into narrative inconsequence by novel’s end, and never flickers to life at all in the film version, Hooper’s conquest of the sheriff’s wife is in its own way as damaging as the great white shark.

  But Ellen is not going to follow the city man back to the metropolis. She realizes her mistake and rationalizes that she was “driven to it by boredom, like so many of the women who spent their weeks in Amity while their husbands were in New York.” Though Ellen has tried to adapt to the rural ways of Amity, the long shadows of the city still have a corrupting influence.

  TIRED OLD TOWN

  Although the action in To Kill a Mockingbird is confined to small-town life, the sophistication and broad-minded values of the urban world play a crucial role in the outcome of the story.

  We are informed at the outset that Atticus has broken with Finch tradition by not staying at Finch’s Landing, the family homestead, and making his living by raising and selling cotton. Finch’s Landing was a humble farm compared with the ostentatious plantations around it. It would be a self-sustaining life, with all the luxuries like ice and store-bought clothes supplied by boats from the big cities upriver.

  Before settling in that “tired old town” of Maycomb, Atticus studied law in the state capital of Montgomery. In a state where rural folks outnumbered the urban population by nearly three to one, choosing to abandon the familiar comforts of country existence for city life even for a short duration was a bold act.

  Had Atticus abided by family tradition and assumed his duties as plantation master, the world would have lost an eloquent defender of the poor and unjustly accused. We can’t be sure, of course, but it’s likely that Atticus’s sense of justice was broadened by his exposure to the more broad-minded views in Montgomery, which would mean that his strength to resist the racist tsunami in Maycomb was in a pivotal way dependent on his urban education.

  RURAL REGENERATION

  There’s not much farmland or countryside or rural landscape described in The Exorcist. The novel takes place in Washington, D.C., and though the cityscape itself is not a major player in this novel of satanic possession, at a key moment when Father Lankester Merrin is summoned to join Father Karras in a final showdown with the devil who has inhabited the body of Regan MacNeil, Merrin is relaxing in a monastery in the countryside. He’s out walking in the woods he loves, listening to a robin’s song, watching a butterfly flitter onto a branch, when he receives the fateful telegram.

  His journey from this pastoral setting to America’s capital city will end in a victory over the devil, though Merrin’s life will be lost in that effort. Although it would be a mistake to overstress the thematic role that rural versus city plays in The Exorcist, it’s worth noting that in the final showdown between good and evil, it requires the combined efforts of a priest from the country and a priest from the city to purge Satan from this child.

  RURAL EVIL

  Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code casts his vote solidly for city values, in part because country people just can’t be trusted. As he explains to Sophie, the very term pagan has its roots in the Latin paganus, a word that meant “country dwellers.” The church was so threatened by rural folks that gradually, by the magic of etymology, “villagers” became “villains,” and the very language turned against those wicked agrarian types who place nature before the church.

  So by the lights of The Da Vinci Code, the word rural carries with it the dark fairy dust of its evil history. No way around it. Country people are suspicious, possibly dangerous, ergo city people are our only hope.

  Indeed, The Da Vinci Code spends nearly all of its storytelling energies describing cities, rhapsodizing about the architecture and the cathedrals and the gritty backstreets and the hidden treasures thereof.

  The longest visit Langdon makes to the countryside is his extended stopover in the “castle district,” where Leigh Teabing’s estate is located. Langdon and Sophie are on the run from some serious tribulations in the city, and Robert thinks Teabing’s place will be an “ideal safe harbor.” This guy Langdon might be a great symbologist, but hey, come on, he’s not the shrewdest judge of character. For Teabing will turn out to be the novel’s premier villain.

  In one of literally hundreds of similar sweeping proclamations, Langdon reassures Sophie that Teabing “knows more about the Priory of Sion and the Holy Grail than anyone on earth,” and he whisks her off into the pagan villages of the countryside.

  Like everything in The Da Vinci Code, Teabing’s crib is humongous. Like a replica of Versailles. And as the couple in peril arrive at this “modest castle,” Sophie experiences the quiet calm of the countryside affecting her central nervous system in the same way that Tara always affected Scarlett. She feels her muscles relaxing and a swell of relief to be away from the city.

  In the course of the evening spent in Teabing’s remote country place, Sophie and Robert are treated to a lecture on the Holy Grail and its connection to the painting of the Last Supper and Mary Magdalene’s surprisingly intimate role in Jesus’s private life—that Mary carried the blood of Jesus Christ.

  Sophie barely has time to absorb the implications of Teabing’s revelations when pistols begin to appear.

  With gunfire blapping behind them, Teabing, Sophie, and Robert Langdon flee their rural sanctuary with Silas, the evil albino monk, tied up in their backseat. Safe in their Range Rover, they plow through the forest branches until they are back to a highway, a short hop from civilization. Clearly Robert should have taken his etymology of the word rural more seriously and been a trifle more vigilant around those wicked country folks.

  THE NORTHEASTERN CORRIDOR

  If these twelve novels were all we had to go on, it would seem that the few American bestsellers not set in the Washington–Boston–New York corridor will be set in the Deep South. A megabestseller set in the American West is rare, and one set entirely in Europe is a downright aberration.

  This seems to suggest that the large population centers of the Northeast have greater appeal to the book buyer’s imagination than those of the West. Such a geographic tilt might also reveal a partiality that reflects in some measure the demographics of publishing interests and book buying itself. The literary agents who filter books, the editors who select them, and the publishers who promote and distribute them are based mostly in the populous northeastern corridor. That they would give preference to books set in the world they’re most familiar with is not surprising. And from this sampling of twelve gigantic bestsellers, it would also seem that a great many Americans, no matter in what far-flung provinces they reside, are fascinated by the mighty hum of the city.

  A quick look at the electoral map of any recent election will help complete the political dimension of this thematic tension. City folks tend to vote in one direction while rural folks vote in the other. The rift is there and has been from the first days of our nation. Healing the political estrangement between the farmer and the office worker is certainly not in the job description of popular fiction writers, but it’s clear that in these twelve bestsellers the tremors along the fault lines between one America and the other America resonate at the core of each story.

  IMMIGRANTS AND PIONEERS

  For all its political and financial power, the city world is still lacking half of what America requires for its complete entertainment. We are a nation that has made such a habit of glorifying our wes
tward expansion and those forebears who trekked into the wilderness to escape the civilizing pressures of the eastern cities that one of our highest national accolades is to call someone a “pioneer.”

  With nearly equal pride, we honor our immigrant past. All those travelers arriving at Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island have shaped America’s psyche and its mythology and its metaphors.

  It’s no surprise that American novelists have tapped again and again into this core of national identity. What might surprise some, however, is how often and how boldly bestsellers defy conventional expectations in this regard.

  Popular art is often thought of as the social glue that holds society together, focused on reinforcing the presumed values of the reader. But when you look at the way these twelve novelists dealt with one of America’s most enduring tensions—the conflict between urban and agrarian values—the exact opposite is the case. Collectively, the books argue both sides of the issue and every position in between. Scarlett challenges head-on the stuffy repression of city values, while the young protofeminists in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are thrilled to bask in the metropolitan way of life, though as any reader can see, the corrosive effects of city living play a major role in causing their personal tragedies. In Dan Brown’s world, the cityscapes of Paris and London are rich depositories of culture and art, while the rural side, sad to say, is wicked and villainous.

  Of all the books, The Da Vinci Code is distinctive in being set entirely outside the borders of the United States. How fitting that in this world-is-flat era, Robert Langdon emerges as a new globe-trotting version of the American pioneer, marching into a wilderness of universal symbols as dense and danger filled as any old-growth forest.

  FEATURE #8

  God Is Great, or Is He?