Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 5

  Forget about calling a plumber, girl, get yourself a priest and quick.

  The furniture mysteriously takes new positions, the clothes in Regan’s closet are rearranged, the youngster herself is talking to an imaginary being. Nothing too extreme, but any vigilant reader knows something nasty is slithering our way.

  The threat of danger that opens The Exorcist or Valley of the Dolls is not even close to the bloodcurdling predicament Jacques Saunière, curator of the Louvre, finds himself in in the opening pages of The Da Vinci Code. I’ll skip a recounting of the early violence and threats of violence. Suffice it to say that on the structural level, the novel is a breathless series of high-speed chases and cliff-hanging feats of derring-do and ricocheting bullets, interlarded with hundreds of disquisitions on matters arcane and distressing, much like a meaty lecture tucked inside the warm bun of suspense.

  THE BIG CLOCK

  The power of the ticking clock to seize our attention and stress our hearts dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when men and women of the soil, who’d always earned their bread the old-fashioned seasonal way, migrated to the city, where their usefulness was thereafter measured by the merciless heartbeat of a machine. Modern man has come to react to the pressures of time in ways so reliable that writers of popular novels had to take notice. And did they ever.

  The barbecue party at Twelve Oaks has hardly begun before the thunderclouds of war that were gathering all afternoon begin to rumble. We are roughly one-tenth of the way into Scarlett’s story when the boys saddle up, and with a whoop and a holler they ride away to glory.

  Events speed up accordingly once the Big Ben of the Civil War begins to gong the hours. Scarlett is married and becomes a widow in a single sentence at the beginning of chapter 7. Thereafter, the steady march of the Yankee army gives the novel its subliminal pulse. Like clockwork, the invaders inch toward Atlanta, and every new crisis in Scarlett’s romantic journey seems timed to the next footfall of their approach.

  The war brings deprivations and hardships to the good southern ladies; it forces them to spend their hours amusing other ladies like themselves (and therefore engage in their own version of an uncivil war); from time to time, the advancing war fills the dancing floors with dashing uniformed men on leave, then fills the hospitals with sweet young boys with missing limbs; then, as that giant clock ticks on, the war finally shows up in all its gruesome glory on the outskirts of the city.

  Naturally, Scarlett waits till the last possible second before fleeing amid explosions and chaos, and the advancing front lines of the war race her back to Tara. Then comes the terrible aftermath of the war, with its scalawags and new racial order ticking off the final hours of the Old South.

  Without this ever-moving second hand constantly raising the anxiety level, all the romantic skirmishes in the novel might easily become tedious and harebrained. It’s unlikely that even the escapades of a man-hunting genius like Scarlett, who was “constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself,” could keep us enthralled without the hypnotic beat of that dreadful drummer boy.

  Each of the other books finds an ingenious way to up the ante by forcing its characters to beat the clock. Francesca and Robert, the adulterous lovers of The Bridges of Madison County, must time their affair to the fixed return of Francesca’s husband. John Smith is watching the hours tick by until election day, which will likely mark the end of his chance to assassinate Greg Stillson. The clock is running out on Mitch and Abby, minutes flying by as fast as the Xerox machine spitting out incriminating documents that may or may not save their lives. The Soviet submarine heading to the shores of America is making damn good time as well, and before another day or two, Jack Ryan’s last chance to intercept the ship at sea is gone. Regan MacNeil can’t hold out much longer, as Satan has his way with her. It’s a toss-up who will die first, the sweet, innocent girl or the exhausted priest who’s trying to save her.

  FEATURE #2

  Hot Buttons

  When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

  —WILLIAM HAZLITT

  One surefire way to rile up folks is to raise the controversy du jour. Whether it was a conscious strategy or not, the authors on our list raised one or more highly contentious topics of their day.

  If ripping a story from the headlines were all there was to it, anyone could sit down with The Washington Post and construct a novel that sold a million copies. The formula would be simple. Select an issue that makes the blood boil in many normally levelheaded Americans. Old reliables like abortion, gay marriage, church and state, global warming, school prayer, gun control, race relations, immigration policy, or capital punishment are always handy. Then gather up the loaded language of that subject matter. Create a simple story line that idealizes one position and demonizes the other and you’re ready to roll.

  But there’s a crucial second half to this hot-button equation that deepens and broadens the subject matter, an approach that all our bestsellers employ to one degree or another. For a hot-button issue to have real wallop, it also must express some larger, deep-seated, and unresolved conflict in the national consciousness.

  Take the Civil War. Now there’s a hot-button winner. Thousands of books about the Civil War, fiction and nonfiction, have mined the same vein but have failed to exhaust the supply of combustible material. Why is that?

  Rarely does a month go by in our national discourse that we aren’t treated again to a tooth-and-nail wrangle over the Confederate flag or the role that slavery played in the war between the blue and the gray or some other iteration of that long-ago conflict. The subject still raises hackles because all the sympathies and antipathies that divided us as a nation back then divide us still, though usually in more subtle and less violent forms.

  HOT BUTTON #1

  Hate Her and Love Her

  It wasn’t just the glorification of the Old South and its racial politics that made Gone with the Wind controversial. Scarlett’s ruthless, money-grubbing resourcefulness during and after the war also gave the novel a hot-button hook.

  Published in 1936, the novel reenacts a story that was painfully familiar and fresh in the minds of readers of that era who had just witnessed their own version of financial collapse. Scarlett’s scrambling, hustling survival skills were vividly recognizable to a generation who’d so recently had to resort to every manner of improvisation simply to subsist.

  Her calculating, survive-at-any-cost morality and slippery situational ethics were perfectly suited for the time this novel appeared. To many, Scarlett’s cutthroat lust for cash and power and the freedom they brought was an embodiment of all that was wrong with capitalism, while to others she was a symbol of all that’s right. To many it was both at once.

  And for a woman to dominate her male counterparts in both the boardroom and the bedroom also made many bristle.

  As the film critic Molly Haskell says about Scarlett, “You hate her and you love her, a heroine of ambiguous morality who is revolutionary … in that she refuses to be chastened, brought to heel.…”

  These issues, of course, are still with us and still have the power to boil our blood.

  HOT BUTTON #2

  Gray Flannel Hot Pants

  Peyton Place caused a lot more blood to boil. In particular, midcentury New Englanders were outraged and offended that their folksy cover had been blown and their steamy bedrooms laid bare. In the conservative age of Eisenhower and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, this gaudy novel of drunks and incest and sexually permissive single moms and Peeping Toms and masturbation and teenage petting and illegal abortions set hearts atremble.

  “Everybody knew that the South was degenerate,” Merle Miller asserted in the Ladies’ Home Journal, but they were unprepared for Peyton Place, which according to Merle presented the view “that Puritan New England has all the southern vices and a few others that not even William Faulkner had come across.”

  These days it�
�s harder to profitably press the hot button of sex because that button has just about been worn out from overuse. But in 1956, Grace Metalious, who pressed it hard and often, managed to create an incendiary blend of several of America’s favorite hot-button issues, sex and race and class and the emancipation of women.

  HOT BUTTON #3

  Whistling at a White Woman

  Five years before To Kill a Mockingbird was published, in a state adjacent to the one where Scout grew up, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan named Emmett Till was visiting his extended family when he made the fatal mistake of whistling at a white woman. He was beaten and murdered and his body thrown in a river. The trial that followed was a farce. An all-white jury acquitted the two white men charged with Till’s murder. The case caused widespread and heated debate and helped fuel the fledgling civil rights movement.

  At about the same time, in Montgomery, Alabama, where the fictional Atticus Finch went to study law, a very real black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat and move to the “colored section” at the rear. Martin Luther King was rising to prominence about the same time and played a significant role in leading the ensuing boycott of the Montgomery bus system.

  To anyone living and breathing and reading novels in 1960, there was no doubt which headlines Harper Lee was ripping. Headlines much like those we still find in our newspapers a half century later.

  HOT BUTTON #4

  Sexploitation

  The same could be said six years later, when Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s roman à clef sexploitation novel, was published. Following in the tradition of Harold Robbins, whose Carpetbaggers was once described by a reviewer as “a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex,” Susann’s novel was groundbreaking, at least in gender terms. Peyton Place had paved the way for an American woman to write bluntly about sex, but no woman had yet graphically depicted the erotic lives of the rich and famous in fictional form.

  Was Helen Lawson, the over-the-hill diva, actually based on Ethel Merman? Did Ethel Merman, the Hollywood star, have a hot and sweaty lesbian affair with Jackie Susann back in the day when Jackie was a wannabe actress? Was Neely O’Hara’s fictional persona really Judy Garland, or maybe Betty Hutton, who did in fact have a contentious understudy relationship with Merman (as Neely did with Lawson)? Following this?

  Well, they were certainly following it in 1966, when the novel was published. This was all salacious gossip column material. Toss in issues that were trendy at the time like alcoholism and pill popping, then hint at other big names like Marilyn Monroe and JFK and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and you have a prescription for tabloid sensationalism.

  If Valley of the Dolls seems more dated than the other novels on our list, it might be due to an overdependence on the topical issues of its day. After a few years passed, and those newspapers yellowed, and Ethel Merman was replaced and replaced again by new generations of divas, the elements that sustain a novel’s long-term survival simply were not present in the same abundance as we find them in the other bestsellers. That’s because Susann tilted the hot-button equation a bit too far toward the faddish, gossipy side and didn’t fully take into consideration the long-term simmering cultural implications of her own material.

  HOT BUTTON #5

  New Vein

  Frank Sinatra had a return engagement three years later in The Godfather, this time portrayed as the character Johnny Fontane. The Kennedy family also takes a turn. To many readers, it was obvious the Kennedy estate in Hyannis Port was Puzo’s model for the Corleone compound, which helped further the suggestion that these two powerful families with shady backgrounds were echoes of each other. But the novel’s notoriety didn’t grow out of gossipmongering. It was a hit because it struck a new vein in a very old mine.

  The exploration of the shadowy, illicit side of American moral life has been with us since Hawthorne outed Puritan hanky-panky. The new vein discovered in that old mine was, of course, the first appearance of the famiglia mafiosa.

  These days when we are all so fully versed on folks like the Sopranos and their ilk, it’s hard to imagine a time pre-Godfather, even though it existed for most of recorded history. What Puzo did was give us the photo negative of the American success story. The dark doppelgänger to the bootstraps myth.

  By conjuring up long-standing legends about the Kennedy clan and other prominent American families, Puzo pressed another hot button that was then and still is a subject that spikes the blood pressure of many Americans: the story of an immigrant father so determined to see his family prosper in their adopted land that he resorts to any tactics necessary, including extortion, robbery, bootlegging, political bribery, and violence.

  HOT BUTTON #6

  Maharishi

  The Exorcist tackles an altogether different cultural flashpoint of the late sixties, the clash between traditional religious faith and the rising tide of secular humanism and swamis and maharishis and all manner of religious kooks. Representing the new agers, we have Sharon Spencer, the pretty blonde in her twenties who tutors Regan and acts as Chris MacNeil’s social secretary and who is experimenting with self-hypnosis, transcendental meditation, and Buddhist chanting, all the while filling the upstairs of the MacNeil house with the hippie-dippy reek of incense and the dronings of some Far Eastern mantra.

  Chris is a proud atheist and single working mom and Hollywood star, a job that brings her into contact with the likes of Burke Dennings, a film director who was once studying to be a priest himself but has swung about as far the other way as one can swing. He’s a drunk and disbeliever who calls the priesthood a bunch of “fucking plunderers.” Throw in a Jesuit priest who no longer believes in God’s existence and you have to ask yourself, Is it any wonder that Satan picked this brownstone to make a house call? These are exactly the kinds of nonbelievers Beelzebub prefers, folks whose religious laziness needs a ruthless test.

  At a time when death-of-God theology was featured on the cover of Time magazine, this novel, which challenged the beliefs of nonbelievers, hit a cultural nerve that was already raw.

  HOT BUTTON #7

  Evildoers

  In the case of Jaws, there’s a civic tension at the crux of the story that is as old as our nation itself. Before he can close the beaches and protect the citizens of his fair town, Sheriff Brody must get the approval of an unsympathetic mayor and town council. The politicians who run the island don’t want to yell “Shark!” at the town’s most profitable time of the year. By pitting government-supported greed against populist forces and the general welfare of the common man, Jaws tapped into both the long-term American mistrust of political authority and its contemporary manifestation, which at that point in our history had reached hot-button proportions after years of cultural clashes over the Vietnam War and the recent resignation of Richard Nixon.

  Given all that, it was no wonder that elected officials were seen by many as the greatest evildoers, right up there with sharks, men who had only the interests of the wealthy and powerful in mind when deciding policy. At the same time, almost as many readers were sympathetic to the opposite position, a belief that the conventional structures of power should hold firm against dangerous counterculture lawlessness.

  The central conflict of the first third of Jaws fits that pattern perfectly by reenacting a moral sellout of its citizens by its political leaders, a conflict that split the nation back then and splits it still.

  At the same time, from its very first scene the novel raised another topic that was about as hot-button as it got back in the dawning of the age of Aquarius, when one female member of a group of pot-smoking, orgy-loving Woodstock types has some liberated sex right out on a public beach, then goes swimming nude in the ocean, where that young lady gets exactly what she deserves. Eaten.

  HOT BUTTON #8

  News That Stays News

  Ezra Pound, that modernist poet and literary kingmaker and political nut job, had a good one-liner for poetry that seems appropriate h
ere. He called it “news that stays news.”

  By that he meant something similar to what I’m saying about hot-button issues that stay hot. Good writing passes the spoilage test. It doesn’t smell after a year or two of being left out on the counter.

  That’s the sort of writing that characterizes The Dead Zone, in which Stephen King snagged the attention of many contemporary readers by providing a very hip up-to-the-minute social history of the four-year span when Johnny Smith was missing in action, hospitalized in a supernatural coma. Poor Johnny missed a lot of stuff, but it was mostly the kind of news that grows a little rank after a week or two.

  Nixon was reinaugurated. The American boys started coming home from Vietnam.… The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go.

  A lot of this, King seems to suggest, is well worth sleeping through. The ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the coming and going of one political outrage after another. This news-crawl vision of current events is the background against which the monstrous rise of the Hitlerian Greg Stillson is set. Stillson is the news that stays news, a hot button that will always be hot. He’s an election year archetype, the second coming of the Antichrist, the rough beast whose hour has come round at last.

  HOT BUTTON #9

  Hush-Hush

  Becoming President Ronald Reagan’s favorite book brought The Hunt for Red October out of the depths of obscurity. But for that missile of good fortune to lock on to its target and blow sales records to smithereens, this novel had to deliver a payload that folks beyond the D.C. Beltway cared about.

  Clancy accomplished that by using such an abundance of technical detail and by being so fluent in military protocol and seafaring lingo that he created the illusion he might be privy to national Defense Department secrets. He seemed to know stuff that was so hush-hush, so explosive, so supersensitive, it was easy to believe the actual reason the POTUS summoned Clancy to the White House was to have him debriefed by the CIA.