Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 7

  SUPERPOWERS

  Tom Clancy puts Jack Ryan on the largest geopolitical stage going: two superpowers using their highest-tech toys to play saber-rattling games somewhere in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans are trying desperately to locate a Russian nuclear submarine so quiet, so undetectable by conventional technology, it could shift the military balance of power once and for all.

  Though we know little about Jack Ryan’s inner life, he’s smart and well schooled in military matters, and though he’s reluctant to do so, he bravely answers his country’s call and uses his good old American common sense and his military savvy to avert World War III. How can we not care about such a man? And why do we really need to know more about the mechanics of his state of mind to be fully engaged with his bold and enterprising deeds?

  Mario Puzo gives us not just a story about a Mafia family, but a story about the Mafia. Like Gone with the Wind, The Exorcist, Jaws, and The Hunt for Red October, it’s a war story. One Mafia family at war against other Mafia families and the Corleones at war with the civilized law-abiding world.

  Part of the novel’s appeal is that it provides us with an exhaustive diagram of the power structure of a vast and widespread criminal organization that reaches into nearly every corner of American society. That we learn little of Michael Corleone’s psychodynamics or spend practically no time at all inside the Don’s mind seems a small price to pay for such a thorough tour of this network of killers and thieves.

  And what of Jaws and that great white shark that rises from the sea like … a supersilent, supersecret nuclear-powered submarine? It is not some puny fish, no, but the ultimate shark, the shark to beat all sharks, coming from earthshaking depths. It rattles the entire island town of Amity, from lowly fishermen to the haughty mayor, and the ripples of its passing spread well beyond the tiny town it’s taken such an interest in. A shark with scope.

  Then there is The Exorcist. Is it possible to find an antagonist of any greater scale than Satan himself? Not likely. It is Satan’s voice and Satan’s sickening smell and Satan’s horrifying possession of a young girl-child that calls forth the full weight of Christianity to exorcise it. Good versus Evil with head-spinning terror.

  Peyton Place is not simply a small New England town. It is every small American town with its secrets, its hypocrisies, its abortions, its incest, its teen sex, its pulsing, heaving, sweaty sexual violence. Peyton Place is America, the polite, mannered façade pulled back to reveal the squirming reality below. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is a broad examination of the corrupt mores and class warfare that Americans would rather not admit to. In that sense, it is far more than a lurid exposé of the naughty private lives of the citizens of a small New England town. It attempts to chronicle the principal social issues of the postwar era—primarily the repression and exploitation of women and the impoverished—and seeks to record their brave attempts at emancipation.

  In The Firm, John Grisham doesn’t just take us on a ride through the inner workings of a small southern law firm. He sends a top Harvard Law School grad, Mitch McDeere, to work for a firm so shady, so murderous, so utterly corrupt, that a man no less grand than the director of the FBI shows up in an isolated public park to recruit Mitch to exorcise this malignant multinational business from American life. As one FBI agent puts it to Mitch:

  “You can build a case from the inside that will collapse the firm and break up one of the largest crime families in the country.”

  Big, bigger, biggest.

  When Jacqueline Susann creates an early incarnation of Sex and the City, she plops her three young working gals into two of the biggest American cities, New York and Los Angeles, sending them off to mingle with the most glamorous celebrities and showbiz personalities of all time. We are dazzled by movie stars, Broadway celebrities, the most influential entertainment power brokers, and debauchery on the grandest of scales.

  In The Dead Zone, Stephen King sets John Smith’s story against a backdrop of political upheaval, the sixties and early seventies. Woodstock, Watergate, Kent State. John misses four years of that tumultuous period while in a coma and wakes to find the Vietnam War ended and Nixon hounded from office. Putting the novel in political context is crucial to the foreground story, for after John wakes from his Rip van Winkle snooze, he must decide whether or not to put his precognitive abilities to use in a scheme to assassinate Greg Stillson, a megalomaniacal politician with his eyes on the White House. By this point in the novel, John’s “second sight” has been widely publicized and his exploits have become the stuff of national news.

  In the smaller foreground story, set against this sweeping backdrop, John Smith realizes with growing dread that he must execute Stillson, because John has seen in one of his precognitive visions of the future that Stillson plays a crucial role in promoting evil. Stillson is about to become a Hitler or bin Laden, and John Smith is the world’s only hope to prevent a certain Armageddon.

  The stakes are high. They couldn’t be higher.

  FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA

  While Americans can stake no claim to the epic form, or to novels with panoramic sweep, we do have a national predisposition for expansiveness in general and a weakness for boastful, sprawling Whitmanesque stories. I am large, Whitman liked to say, referring to America. I contain multitudes.

  It seems that when book buyers decide to spend the price of a restaurant meal for a work of fiction, most want their stories to be more than just a plate of tapas. They want to gorge on big, bustling, manifest destiny, shining city on a hill, sloppy Joe calories. We want our books to measure up to our own supersized sense of what matters most.

  So it is that Scarlett and Mitch McDeere and Jack Ryan and Scout and their brethren are unmistakably American in the vastness of their aspirations and their outsized bravery in the face of enormous tasks and dangers. Though these characters are defined far more by their social class and their families and extended families and by their jobs than by the inner workings of their psyches, what they may lack in emotional dimensionality they make up for in scale.

  Just as I expected before I read any of these novels, their pages are populated with apparent stereotypes—the self-absorbed, superficial southern belle, the young lawyer on the make, the stalwart, stuffy CIA analyst, the guileless small-town girl who loses her innocence. So how is it that each of these characters blindsided me with such force that they made me question my cocky assumptions that psychological complexity was the sine qua non of literary achievement?

  My students and I came to believe that the answer lies partly in the wide scope of bestsellers. Because these characters perform against the vast backdrops of American politics and social upheaval, and because their personal destinies, their wishes, and their dreams are inextricably fused with the largest and most crucial concerns of the nation, Scarlett and Mitch and Jack and Scout and the others cannot help but stir us. They are ordinary American folks from humble roots who have answered some resounding call and risen beyond their limitations to impossible heights. If their battles had been smaller, less important, less connected to the national pulse, frankly, most of us wouldn’t have given a damn.

  FEATURE #4

  The Golden Country

  For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate [with] his capacity for wonder.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,

  THE GREAT GATSBY

  America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs in all our twelve bestsellers.

  It’s hard to top Fitzgerald when it comes to rhapsodizing about the New World, but here’s Thomas Morton in 1622, a more or less typical colonial settler, enthusing about the lush wilderness of America: “I do not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be parallel’d … so many goodly groves of trees; dainty fin
e round rising hillucks … sweet crystal fountains, and cleare running streams.”

  Nearly four hundred years after Morton stepped ashore, fictional portrayals of the natural world still have immense power to stir our American hearts. And it seems that bestselling authors have absorbed this lesson well.

  As my students and I were beginning to compare bestsellers from past eras, this feature was one of the first we spotted—images of a lost Eden. We came to refer to this recurring phenomenon as the Golden Country, a phrase we lifted from George Orwell’s bestseller Nineteen Eighty-four.

  The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country.

  In a time of perpetual war, with the thought police and Big Brother constantly spying, Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel, escapes frequently to this wistful, sexy fantasyland to reestablish his connection to a lost natural world he only vaguely recalls. It is a place of languid streams and verdant fields and swaying elm trees with leaves stirring “in dense masses like women’s hair.”

  What relief Winston feels from the pressures of his robotic routines is fleeting. Yet for the reader, the lyrical glow of these fragments stands out sharply against the no-frills prose Orwell uses throughout the novel to portray the drab and oppressive futuristic society.

  American writers typically portray Eden with a bit more ambivalence than the Englishman Orwell. Take the famous portrait of American paradise in Walden, Thoreau’s celebrated treatise on living in the wild. Utopian, yes. Edenic, yes. But Walden is at least as much a pragmatic how-to manual as it is an inspirational document. Thoreau was an American writer through and through, as interested in the utilitarian methods of surviving in the wilderness as he was in the rhapsodic descriptions of natural beauty. And so it is with the presentation of nature in American bestsellers, where we find Edens that for all their restorative beauty are both ephemeral and dangerous landscapes that must be mastered.

  AMERICA, THE OLD WORLD

  AND THE NEW

  American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself. Surely part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.

  By and large, our Puritan forebears were rapturous about the abundance and beauty of God’s handiwork that greeted them in the New World. They saw in the pristine forests an earthly paradise with all its pleasures and temptations. Later generations of Americans, both religious and secular, have seen our awe-inspiring mountain ranges and woodlands and great canyons as national monuments, roughly equivalent to the great cathedrals of Europe. Sure, we may not have Notre Dame or Chartres, but just look at those Rockies.

  The American wilderness forged our pioneer spirit and helped stamp us with an enduring rough-and-tumble sensibility that distinguishes us from our fussy cousins across the Atlantic. For Americans, nature is not just some sublime and misty mountain peak awash in a romantic glow, it is also the bronco that needs breaking, the rocky, stump-filled pasture that must be cleared if we are to plant our crops and survive, or that mountain range that must be conquered so our westward progress can continue. It is the dense forest where savages hide, where grizzlies, rattlesnakes, and other decidedly unfriendly creatures lurk.

  Such is the dangerous Eden that Michael Corleone stumbles into in The Godfather. After murdering an American police captain, the Godfather’s youngest son, Michael, flees to Sicily to lie low until the legal fuss blows over back home. It is a decidedly utilitarian and unromantic man who arrives in Sicily, an American pragmatist through and through.

  But during his idyllic interlude he encounters a primal young woman named Apollonia, and Michael is immediately struck by an emotional thunderbolt: “This was an overwhelming desire for possession, this was an unerasable printing of the girl’s face on the brain.…”

  After a brief courtship, the two are married and Michael spends a few blissful pages under the spell of Apollonia’s sensual aura as well as the lush primitivism of Sicily. One morning, Michael awakes and in a passage exceedingly unique in The Godfather for its poetic imagery, he seems more mellow, more vulnerable, and more stripped down to his essentials than he is at any other moment in the novel. “The Sicilian sun, early-morning, lemon-colored, filled Michael’s bedroom. He awoke and, feeling Apollonia’s satiny body against his own sleep-warm skin, made her come awake with love. When they were done, even the months of complete possession could not stop him from marveling at her beauty and her passion.

  “She left the bedroom to wash and dress in the bathroom down the hall. Michael, still naked, the morning sun refreshing his body, lit a cigarette and relaxed on the bed.”

  A page or two later, Apollonia is murdered, and Michael is badly injured in the bomb blast. Eden didn’t last long for Corleone, but in his short-lived stay in the sunny meadows and groves of Sicily, Michael’s character was redefined in a fundamental way. After his sojourn we see him as a man whose destiny is rooted in his ancestors’ native soil—a simple, primeval land that lingers in his memory and ours through the rest of the novel.

  Without this interlude in the Golden Country, a crucial facet of Michael Corleone’s character would go unexpressed and his complexity would be seriously diminished. The innocent yet powerful love he finds in the Golden Country establishes Michael as a man of tenderness and passion. From that moment on, Sicily stands as a crucial reference point, as though a tuning fork has been struck and for the remainder of the novel it hums its quiet note in the background of Michael’s consciousness.

  Michael Corleone is expelled from Eden and in the process is forced to confront a deeper awareness of man’s brutality. His loss of innocence transforms him into a man of resolve, a harder, more cynical hero who is unlikely to know again the depth of love he found in Apollonia’s arms. He’s become a warrior, and as he marches forth from Sicily, the shield and spear he carries have been forged in the fiery explosion that brings his peaceful idyll in the Golden Country to an end.

  His loss of Apollonia gives his future acts the feel of justifiable vengeance and subtly brings us into his sympathetic orbit. No crime he later commits, no thuggery he’s involved in, seems as sinful as it would have if Michael had not been baptized in the ancient waters of the Golden Country.

  TARA BEFORE THE WAR

  Again and again in twentieth-century bestsellers, the Golden Country is used as a baseline, the true homeland that our hero or heroine is tragically alienated from and in some way is struggling to return to.

  Part of what makes Scarlett appealing beyond all her faults, and what makes Gone with the Wind rise beyond its literary limitations, is its primitive insistence on the importance of the emotional over the intellectual, the simple and raw over the cerebral and refined. For Scarlett is no fragile southern belle who haunts only the parlor and ballroom. Like her outdoorsman father, she is equally at home roaming the grounds of Tara, her stately house surrounded by cotton fields and lush primeval forests.

  But her love of the land is severely tested when Scarlett returns to Tara and must bring the fields back to life if she and her family are to survive. Despite the wearying labor, her spirits rise as the cotton grows and eventually is harvested. Cotton reassures her, steadies her, just as Gerald had forecast a few hundred pages earlier.

  The land and its bounty lift her spirits. Scarlett becomes aware of the power of the natural world to humble as well as elevate. Both aristocrat and common man are rendered equal before the crucial, life-sustaining soil.

  In class terms, an intimate knowledge of nature favors the sons of toil over the lord and lady, for it is the common man who regularly gets his hands dirty and it is the common man who lives more closely and more respectfully with the natural world and is able to make it bear fruit.

  Cultivated, that word we’ve appropriated to describe the hig
hly evolved aristocrat, at its root has as much to do with agriculture as with high culture. In a literary form that since its beginning sought an audience of ordinary folks, an emphasis on earthy matters is no coincidence. The novel’s roots reach deep into our shared agrarian past.

  Of course, the Golden Country’s clearest expression in Gone with the Wind is the plantation life at Tara before the outbreak of the Civil War, an antebellum paradise of mindless parties and summery ease. Without those early chapters that give us vivid portrayals of a land both bountiful and uncomplicated, Scarlett’s desperate passion to return to her childhood home and rebuild it would be meaningless.

  Just as Michael Corleone never fully recovered from his stay in the Golden Country of Sicily, Scarlett O’Hara is forever marked by those years of lazy, eye-batting coquetry in the Edenic plantations of the prewar South.

  She too is exiled from her land, sent packing to the muddy streets of Atlanta, where she will test herself against another set of obstacles entirely. But what strength she has, what resources she is able to muster, are all rooted in her connection with the Georgia dirt, a landscape as luxuriant as it is treacherous.

  For Michael Corleone, there is murder lurking just behind the olive groves and rocky hillsides of Sicily. Eden always has a snake. In Scarlett’s case, “the little negro boy … is part of the picture of Tara.” What rips apart the utopian antebellum dream is the harsh hiss of slavery. No Eden can last. Eventually the original sins of our fathers, or our godfathers, implicate us and we are all expelled from the garden, and the only way we can return to our version of Tara is to travel there as Winston did in Nineteen Eighty-four, in our imagination.