Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Read online

  All the heroes in these novels are men and women of deep conviction and fervent, stubborn resolve, capable of passions that rise well beyond the normal range of human experience. Even the seemingly laid-back and world-weary Robert Kincaid in The Bridges of Madison County is stirred to proclaim to his lover Francesca, “I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time.… And through all those years I have been falling toward you.”

  Even the waffling priest Father Damien Karras and the long-winded professor Robert Langdon find the strength within themselves to become men of action as the danger before them erupts. In the end, this clarity and intensity of purpose, and the decisive actions these men and women undertake, differentiates the main characters of bestsellers from those thoughtful, inward Hamlet types who often parse and debate and dither and vacillate before rising from the couch to take a swat at the problem.

  We are told by the latest scientific research that readers respond empathetically to fictional characters. (This is news?) Cognitive scientists and literary scholars have been teaming up lately to try to unravel the chemistry and biology behind our attraction to folks like Scarlett and Mitch and Michael Corleone. One of their scientific methods consists of sliding novel readers into MRI machines to see what regions of their brains light up while they are reading texts of different levels of difficulty. (I’m not inventing this.) While preliminary results are a little sketchy, there seems to be a connection between activity levels in the brain and those novels that require the reader to decipher the secret thoughts and motives of their central characters.

  Allow me to propose a simpler and less expensive testing method. Take a handful of fictional characters that have proven track records of stirring the emotions of millions of readers and ask what common threads run through them. One answer jumps out.

  The most frequently recurring characteristic that Michael Corleone and Scout and Scarlett and our other protagonists share is a high level of emotional intensity that results in gutsy and surprising deeds. These actions may not always take the form of swashbuckling heroics, but rest assured, not one of these heroes or heroines sits idly on the sidelines pondering or strikes endless matches to watch them burn while stewing about the great issues of the universe. There’s nary a navel that gets gazed upon. Our heroes and heroines act. They act decisively. They go out in creaky boats to hunt for enormous sharks. They devise plans to save their skins by outwitting both the FBI and the Mob. They are on the front lines, shoving and jostling and pushing forward against the barriers. They are all pushed to their emotional breaking point and beyond and forced to stay at the outer limits of what they can endure for page after page.

  No magnetic resonance imaging required.

  MATTERS OF THE HEART

  The fierce loyalty readers feel for certain characters grows out of a shared connection with the character’s emotional journey. A reader has to understand and sympathize with the driving force at work behind a hero’s actions. Without that connection, a fictional character’s emotional intensity can seem as senseless as a live wire spewing sparks.

  From the first pages of Gone with the Wind, we suspect that Scarlett’s father is right about Ashley. He’s not the man for her. But Scarlett won’t hear of it. Because her love for Ashley is based on a childish whim to win the heart of an unattainable man, we find ourselves pitying this naïve child, fearing she’ll crash against the rocks of her foolishness. In other words, we start to care. Start to give this headstrong lass the benefit of the doubt. She’ll figure it out, realize her mistake. We start to warm to her, start to anticipate the trouble she’s inviting if she doesn’t wise up.

  At first her love for Ashley overshadows everything, even Tara.

  “I don’t want Tara or any old plantation. Plantations don’t amount to anything when—”

  Gerald cuts her off and roars that land is the only thing that truly matters.

  It takes a while, but eventually Scarlett sees Gerald’s point. Tara is worth fighting for. Tara is worth marrying a man you don’t love or a man like Rhett Butler whom you actively hate.

  Despite all its contradictions and its association with slavery, Tara has a value most readers can appreciate. It is home, the place where Scarlett was once happy. Its soil is fruitful, and there are poignant echoes of Scarlett’s parents everywhere. What matters most to Scarlett is something that matters greatly to many of us. Whether she winds up in Rhett’s arms or Ashley’s or someone else’s doesn’t matter nearly so much as Tara. It is the worthiness of Scarlett’s love for Tara that makes a reader’s fierce loyalty to her possible.

  In The Dead Zone, Johnny slips and falls and bumps his head while playing. He just wanted what we all want, a little joy, a little pleasure. He’s not doing anything foolish or mean-spirited out on that pond. He’s simply a kid the way all of us were, testing out this slippery world with a perfectly ordinary gusto.

  His fall is everyone’s fall. His suffering and confusion and the missing years that flow from that incident are horrors we can identify with.

  Though Johnny’s accident eventually leads him to an extreme state of mind, we tag along because we’ve come to care about this kid who was once perfectly normal, skating on a pond. And when Johnny begins to formulate a murder scheme, we may have our doubts, but we’re still beside him. Pity and fear, Aristotle said, pity and fear are the great emotional engines for tragedy.

  And sure enough, each of our novels is powered by those twin reactors.

  In Peyton Place, Allison MacKenzie comes to visit Selena because Selena is her friend. She hadn’t come to peep through the window. The curtains were open. The violence and sexual abuse she witnesses is the equivalent of her own fall on the ice, an accident that sends her off on her own long journey to an outlandish and scary place: Manhattan. We pity her naïveté and fear for her safety as she navigates that treacherous town.

  All but the sociopaths among us have a natural tendency to empathize with those who suffer. Especially those who inadvertently bring suffering upon themselves, those who cause their own tragedies. We understand that, because most of us have made our own choices that turned out poorly, changed the course of our lives, and cost us something we cherished.

  Anne Welles, the heroine of Valley of the Dolls, sets off on her journey to the big city looking for excitement, experience, and love. Who cannot admire her for turning away from a safe but suffocating future with a fiancé she has no feelings for? She’s not some gold-digging hussy looking to snag a rich sugar daddy. She wants what we all want, nothing more, nothing less. Her tragic fall is all the more painful to watch because she seemed to be doing nearly everything right.

  Scout is determined to hold on to the freedom and independence of childhood, and we can’t help but root for her although we know her wish is doomed. Childhood’s end is inevitable. We pity and fear her certain loss of innocence. But it’s even worse than we could have imagined. She’s yanked viciously from her youth and forced to confront the worst that human nature has to offer: racial hatred, incest, murder. Though she stands tough against it all, we know how much it’s hurting her. And we can’t help but feel her pain.

  Michael Corleone also wants a future most can appreciate. He intended to marry a good girl, settle down, and enjoy the fruits of his legitimate labor. In so doing, he meant to keep his distance from the dark whirlpool of his family business. It’s most everybody’s story. We may not come from a crime family, but most of us understand the wish to make a clean break from our nest.

  So when he crosses the fateful line and commits his first act of violence, we cringe. Michael isn’t going to be able to break free after all. Gradually we come to understand that Michael, like his father, has taken this step to protect his family’s survival, a goal most of us would consider worthy, and as this becomes increasingly clear, our emotional bond with him solidifies again. We look on in horror and fascination as he grabs the reins his father has dropped. Fear and pity.

  Like every
hero and heroine in these twelve bestsellers, Michael seems for a while to be overmatched. The task before him appears so daunting as to be nearly impossible. We can’t imagine what strengths of character he will summon to survive the savagery and duplicity of an all-out Mafia war. Like the sheriff on the shark boat, like Jack Ryan drafted to solve an international crisis, like young Mitch McDeere who takes a job beyond his wildest nightmares, like the doubting Father Karras who’s sent into hand-to-hand combat with Satan, Michael seems out of his league.

  Francesca Johnson also finds herself in over her head when she steps across the fateful line into adultery. Moral beliefs may keep some readers from full approval, but who cannot sympathize with a woman with a dispirited heart who seizes a chance at love? And when she chooses to forfeit the love of her life for the dull normalcy of her family, our old friends pity and fear are present at the moment of her decision.

  The emotional dynamics of all these twelve bestsellers are similar. A character’s intense commitment to his or her cause, while not always pure and selfless, is ultimately a goal most of us find worthy and important.

  If what matters to Mitch McDeere doesn’t matter in some important way to the rest of us, his story is not worth our time. If Robert Langdon’s mission were simply an intellectual exercise in decoding ancient documents, most readers would not be emotionally aroused. But partly because the fate of a passionate young woman, Sophie Neveu, hangs in the balance, a reader finds a solid reason to engage with this tale about unraveling old secrets.

  Bestsellers have a primal aim—to stir the reader’s heart and to make us forge a powerful emotional bond with a fictional character that is, more often than not, composed of one part pity, one part fear.

  MECHANICS OF SPEED

  “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner may have been right, but one of the elements of speed my students and I identified in bestsellers is that references to the past are mostly pared down to essential information. By streamlining the narratives and minimizing the use of what Hollywood refers to as “backstory,” these twelve novels keep the reader’s eye fixed to the page much the way good Hollywood films keep us transfixed by the images on the screen. We don’t want to miss what happens next, because something is always happening. No dead space, no long asides, hardly a moment to catch your breath.

  This is not an easily measured factor, but over many years of classroom study, I was regularly struck by how little background information was provided about the previous lives of characters like Mitch McDeere or Jack Ryan or even Scarlett O’Hara. They seem to arrive fully formed on the stage before us, and we learn about them mainly through the things they do and say in the here and now.

  A SERIOUS BUMP

  Another device that grabs our lapels and accelerates the pace is the use of suspense, in particular the threat of danger. Without fail, some form of serious peril, be it physical or psychological, appears within the early pages of each novel and our pulse is given a serious bump; then, as the pages go by, this giddy arrhythmia gradually accelerates.

  Although half of the biggest bestselling novels of all time are novels of suspense, the other half are not. However, when you examine all twelve books side by side, whether they are coming-of-age novels, love stories, or thrillers, the techniques of suspense they employ are remarkably similar.

  The Dead Zone opens with Johnny Smith skating on an icy pond. He falls and bumps his head. His mind clears quickly, and he’s back out on the ice in no time. But the foreboding is palpable. That minor accident has changed Johnny. We’re not sure exactly how, but he’s not the same cheerful kid he was before the fall. In the chapter immediately following, we meet Greg Stillson, who’s selling Bibles door-to-door when he’s confronted by a growling farm dog. Stillson brutally murders the dog without a second thought, and at that moment, less than ten pages into the novel, we realize these two men will eventually cross paths, and from that instant forward the reader’s anxiety level is jacked up and continues to be jacked up, notch by notch by notch.

  Atticus Finch takes on the rape case of Tom Robinson, a black man accused by a white woman of raping her, thus initiating a series of growing threats against the Finch family. When Atticus accepts the case we are one-quarter of the way into the story, at a structural point that a modern screenwriter would consider plot point one, that watershed moment when the story line takes an unexpected yet inevitable turn.

  Scout’s anxiety level follows a rising arc along with these increasing tensions, from racial taunts at school, to the facing down of a lynch mob, to the high drama of the courtroom scenes, then to the aftermath of the guilty verdict when Bob Ewell, who feels he’s been humiliated by Atticus on the witness stand, first spits on Scout’s father and then later threatens to kill him. Suspense builds as Ewell stalks the perimeter of the Finches’ lives until these threats reach a climax when Ewell attacks Scout and Jem as they’re walking home in the dark after a school play.

  It would be difficult for all the other elevated issues of social justice and racial intolerance that give the novel its moral heft to capture our attention without the load-bearing underpinning of that suspense story.

  Early on in chapter 3 of The Firm, we learn there are microphones planted within the walls of Mitch and Abby’s home; the couple’s conversations are being recorded, their views of the firm analyzed. And we also discover there were multiple mysterious deaths among Mitch’s predecessors at the firm. These warning signals are in place early, and they spice the early chapters with an unmistakable creepiness, made more suspenseful because the reader is privy to facts that Mitch and Abby are not. This is what literary types call “dramatic irony,” a private exchange between author and reader, a device that when it’s working well can create increased sympathy in the reader’s heart for the unsuspecting hero.

  In Jaws, a great white shark sucks down a skinny-dipper before you’ve had time to draw your first breath. And without further ado, any reader knows the shark has fixed its sights on the juicy citizens of Amity. That primordial threat hovers over every scene thereafter, until the shark returns to eat again at this well-stocked human buffet.

  The dangers of the small and outwardly charming town of Peyton Place are also established early. We discover right away that this town is “highly sexed” and has a volatile tension among the folks living on opposite sides of the tracks. We’re less than a fifth of the way into the novel when Selena Cross, an adolescent girl, is sexually attacked by her shiftless, drunken stepfather, an act that her school friend Allison MacKenzie happens to witness. The seeds of danger have been planted, and the consequences of this violent act roll through the story, galvanizing the two main female characters and causing the central dramatic events of the novel to unfold, including a court trial much like the one in To Kill a Mockingbird, which does much to shape the destinies of the main characters.

  We’re barely a tenth of the way into The Godfather when that celebrated horse’s head winds up on the pillow next to its owner. A classic cringeworthy moment. If somehow a reader has not already sensed the book’s direction, this outlandish threat of violence makes it clear both to Jack Woltz, the owner of the horse, and to any reader that the Godfather is a man capable of extreme acts of brutality. Henceforth, we are on full alert.

  Within the first few pages of The Bridges of Madison County, readers are forewarned that the story we are about to read might be considered “tawdry,” but despite the danger that it could sully the reputations of a husband and wife, it is too “remarkable” and “worth telling” to ignore. Once Robert Kincaid has arrived at Francesca’s front porch and finds this beautiful lady is temporarily absent her husband, the sexual tension kicks in, as does the inevitable anticipation that a nosy neighbor—or even worse, Francesca’s husband—will walk in unexpectedly and catch the couple in flagrante delicto. Is this threat as physically dangerous or as primal as the ones posed by The Exorcist or The Dead Zone? Well, farmers have been known to be mighty protective of the
ir spousal units. Shotguns, pitchforks, and all that.

  The threat is established early in this slender romance, just as it is from the start of the tragic story of Anne, Jennifer, and Neely, the dauntless and doomed heroines of Valley of the Dolls. Each of these young ladies will face hazards that are as life-threatening as anything offered up in the other novels. Their heads will spin because they’re drugged on love and out-of-control ambition and caught in a spiral of self-destructive chemical addiction. They will each be bitten in half by the razor-sharp teeth of exploitive men.

  The character at the center of the novel, Anne Welles, has escaped the dangers of a loveless engagement to a fiancé she can’t stand and fled a suffocating middle-class existence back in Lawrenceville for an adventure in the city; but before she makes her getaway, she is warned of an even greater danger awaiting her in the wider world. “There is no such thing as love,” Anne’s mother counsels before Anne sets off, a dire “beware the Ides of March” prophecy that Anne will verify in the cruelest of ways. Within hours of her arrival in Manhattan, Anne is cautioned a second time by her new employer about a certain aptly named scoundrel, Lyon Burke: “Lyon keeps blinding you with that smile and it fools you at first. You think he’s friendly. But you can never get really close to him. No one could.”

  The red flags are rippling wildly. There’s a shark out there, he’s big and bad and circling closer, beware, beware his empty smile. But does any of this keep Anne Welles from paddling out into ever-deeper water? Oh, no.

  Within a few pages of the opening of The Exorcist, Chris MacNeil hears something spooky rapping and tapping inside the walls of her sleeping daughter’s bedroom. The sounds “were odd. Muffled. Profound. Rhythmically clustered. Alien code tapped out by a dead man.”