Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers Page 8

  After Scarlett is expelled from Tara, she spends the rest of the novel pining to return. Michael Corleone is expelled from Apollonia’s Sicily and for the remainder of the novel devotes himself to getting even for the loss.

  A BITE FROM THE APPLE

  In To Kill a Mockingbird, the eviction is just as violent and sudden, but Scout is exiled not from a sheltering natural place, but from a more general state of innocence.

  The Golden Country in To Kill a Mockingbird is evoked by the lazy days spent lolling in the grass, those scenes of summery indolence that open the novel when Scout and Jem are joined by Dill and are swept up in his “eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”

  For Scout, that Golden Country also holds a form of gender equality that she is to lose as soon as Jem grows into adolescence and becomes embarrassed by his kid sister. But for those few perfect summer months, Scout enjoys full membership in the gang of three, and their “routine contentment was: improving our tree house that rested between giant twin chinaberry trees in the backyard” and acting out roles in dramas they’d read or invented. It is a time of creativity, gender neutrality, naïveté.

  This stage of childhood innocence can’t last, and the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, brings Scout’s brief stay in the Golden Country to a premature and ugly end. With Atticus Finch defending the black man in the face of boiling racial hatred and even an attempted lynching, Scout must confront a heap of harsh lessons, and in the process her innocence dissolves and her childhood is effectively brought to a close.

  What she discovers during the course of the trial about bigotry and decency, cowardice and bravery, and the limits of justice to transform the hearts of men forces her to mature more quickly than she would have otherwise. But once again, it is the lingering memory of the Golden Country from which she is banished that defines her character thereafter.

  The trial that rocks Maycomb County, Alabama, might as well have been the Civil War refought a century later. The courtroom scenes serve the same function as the war in Gone with the Wind or Apollonia’s murder. It is the violent eruption, the watershed moment that divides innocence from grim awareness, childhood games from the burdens of adulthood.

  In novel after novel, the Golden Country is a blend of place and time: either some splendid natural location, some wild or secret place that forms the backdrop for an innocent, frequently sensuous idyll, or else a time before it all got so damn complicated, before the turmoil and the heartbreak and the deadened senses. It’s a nostalgic, wistful zone, a faraway Shangri-la that pulses at the core of bestsellers—appealing perhaps to some sense of regret and longing in many of us, a vague awareness that something crucial slipped away when we weren’t looking, our childhood, our purity, our dreams, our sexual innocence, our national idealism.

  THE SNAKE OF GREED

  At the opening of John Grisham’s The Firm, we are given a snapshot of Mitch and Abby McDeere’s life in law school. Abby comes home from work, opens the apartment door, and is greeted by Mitch in a state of arousal that’s part sexual and part celebratory. He’s been offered a fantastic job. He yanks her into the apartment and pulls her onto the couch, and they kiss and grope and fondle and moan like teenage lovers.

  The young couple goes on to celebrate the new job offer with a feast of chicken chow mein and egg foo yung and a cheap bottle of Chablis and some more romance on the couch. Ah, yes, the sweet, simple innocence of law school.

  As the novel clips along, Mitch McDeere is tempted by the snake of greed and winds up selling his soul to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, the law firm doing the bidding happens to be controlled by a relative of Michael Corleone’s. The bliss Mitch and Abby initially embrace is one defined by a shiny new BMW, a low-interest mortgage, and other material perks of the self-indulgent 1980s. As his delight begins to unravel along with his marriage and his own moral principles, in a rare moment of self-awareness, Mitch thinks longingly of that more authentic Golden Country that he has left behind, telling Abby, “I think we were happier living in the two-room student apartment in Cambridge.”

  Grisham devotes only a paragraph or two to their innocent law school life and only that single sentence to invoke the nostalgic regret for the lost Golden Country. However, without those key passages, Mitch McDeere’s ambition would seem like little more than unbridled avarice, and the novel would stand as simply one long ode to self-indulgence that went badly off course.

  Instead, by invoking the Golden Country even so briefly, Grisham hints at a man whose youthful idealism and purity were corrupted by the tempting fruits of financial achievement, a man who realizes his mistake and is able to return to the lost paradise with a deeper appreciation for its natural beauty.

  The scrappy kid who made it to Harvard Law and became a hotshot recruit at a big-time law firm is the guy we glimpse again at the end of the novel after he is expelled from the false Eden of BMWs and McMansions and finds a way to start afresh in a new Golden Country, a better one than any he’d imagined. An unpretentious white-painted wood house on Little Cayman, where Mitch and Abby celebrate a new and improved simple life with plenty of rum and some quality sex on the beach.

  CONTAMINATED GARDEN

  In Peyton Place, the Golden Country is once again rendered as a natural landscape that is both beautiful and redemptive, or so it seems at first.

  Allison walks through the woods and arrives at an open field of goldenrod. The clearing is lush with yellow blooms, and as Allison wades into their goldenness she’s swept away in a “feeling of pure ecstasy” and opens her arms wide to the world that envelops her.

  This is Allison MacKenzie’s secret place. She’s thirteen and has discovered her very own Golden Country—an unspoiled bit of woods at Road’s End, one of the last surviving forests in New England that was never harvested. It’s as close to pure, unadulterated Eden as one can find in the area around Peyton Place. Allison goes there to commune with nature and to bask in its calming effects. However, only twenty-five pages after this moment when we first see her bathing in the golden ecstatic glow of her secret garden, Allison leads her tough-minded friend, Selena, to her spot, and at that moment everything changes.

  Selena refuses to walk out into the woods with Allison. And Allison calls her mean and hateful for rejecting her “secret place.” Taking a perverse pleasure in deflating her innocence, Selena reveals to Allison that this is where boys bring girls at night to make out. It’s been happening forever at this exact spot.

  Naïve Allison has unwittingly chosen lovers’ lane as her Golden Country. And not just any lovers’ lane, but lovers’ lane in Peyton Place, a town of sexual extravagance and all manner of smutty behavior. The poor girl has chosen for her personal holiest of holies the most profane spot in a profane town.

  In its irony and dark realism, this scene is a paradigm for the entire novel. Sooner or later, nearly every character will go through a shift of awareness similar to Allison’s. In the course of the story, whatever illusions they once held are eventually stripped away.

  In fact, Allison returns to her secret place later in the novel and shares a first kiss with a boy named Norman Page. Norman discusses what he’s learned about sex from reading a book on the subject. His bookishness, however, doesn’t stir Allison’s blood, and his gentle kisses fail to arouse her. Their foreplay in the heart of Allison’s Golden Country comes to nothing.

  The payoff for this unfulfilled sexual moment is decisive, however, and reshapes the trajectory of Allison’s life. She decides she wants a man whose passion isn’t book-learned but springs from some natural sensuality that is as wild and unrestrained as the wilderness that backdrops her first kiss. Much of what she becomes as an adult can be traced to a few crucial scenes that take place here.

  In the final pages of the novel, after being cruelly deceived by a lover and learning of her own illegitimate birth, after coming to grips with Peyton Place’s sordid history of suicides and abortions and incest
uous rapes, Allison returns to her Golden Place for solace. It doesn’t have all the magic it once had, but it has enough. She sits and reflects for a long time, fondling a flower, rediscovering a portion of the profound comfort she felt as a child.

  GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

  For the islanders in Jaws, paradise is an isolated sanctuary that they rent out to interlopers for part of each year. Their economy depends on the annual migration of tourists. But before the throngs arrive, we get a glimpse of the island in its natural state.

  Soft winds ripple the sea, a crispness fills the air at night, after long sunny days that warm the sandy beach. It’s all so calm and beautiful.

  Shortly thereafter, a skinny-dipper’s mutilated body washes ashore, and that’s the end of paradise. The good sheriff Martin Brody wants to go public with the truth, that a killer shark is on the prowl. But the mayor fears economic catastrophe if the vacationers who are the lifeblood of the community are scared away. In effect, the mayor wants to perpetrate a hoax—to make believe that Eden is still Eden, that the finned snake has not appeared.

  For those like Brody, the natural world of Amity, the beach, the ocean, the sunny summer days, and the shark itself have religious heft. On the other hand, the mayor and his allies view nature as a commodity whose only purpose is to be merchandised. As is so often the case in America, one man’s Golden Country is another man’s Golden Opportunity.

  Just as commerce contaminates Mitch and Abby’s Shangri-la and lustful teenagers invade Allison MacKenzie’s secret place, tourists from the city will intrude on this sanctuary and put the islanders’ Eden under siege.

  It becomes Sheriff Brody’s mission to help kill the shark and return the town to some semblance of normalcy. Given the short attention span of the summer people, maybe one day soon Amity can sell itself again as the beach lover’s Golden Country. But for most locals, after the ravages of the shark, that idyllic view is gone. What’s been lost is the innocent belief that what is beautiful and natural is also benign. This year when the tourists finally leave, it’s doubtful there will be a restoration of the Golden Country. The shark has put an end to the town’s comfortable seaside fantasy. All that will remain is the ghostly yearning for some bygone innocence.

  THIN ICE

  Again with The Dead Zone, an image of something close to paradise appears within the first few pages just before John Smith, our hero, takes his crucial spill while “skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham.” The kids were playing hockey with beat-up sticks and potato baskets as goals. The younger children played around on the edges of the pond, and in another corner a bonfire of rubber tires burned. A few parents hovered close by, keeping watch on their kids, giving the scene a Norman Rockwell sense of glowy security.

  In only a page or two, John Smith will fall on this idyllic ice and the bump on his head will endow him with a mildly psychic ability thereafter, a kind of stage one in his banishment from Eden. His stay in the Golden Country is not exactly over by the end of the prologue, but that bump on his head lays the groundwork for the creepy precognitive skills that will be induced by a second, more serious thump.

  In Stephen King’s world, we are all skating on slippery ice. Fate or accident can launch us out of the ordinary world we all inhabit in a millisecond and send us spinning out into the stratosphere of altered consciousness and terror. It is true in The Dead Zone, and it has been true in his big bestsellers since. The St. Bernard in Cujo, for instance, chases a rabbit into a hole and accidentally becomes stuck. He is attacked by rabid bats, and it is this cascade of random events that precipitates much of the rest of the novel.

  It is true that in King’s novels, other factors besides bad luck can occasionally expel a youngster from the Golden Country of childhood. For instance, religious zealots are often the cause of the expulsion. Indeed, in The Dead Zone, as in Carrie, there are vivid examples of a domineering Christian extremism that banishes characters from their innocent condition.

  But over and over again it is pure chance, the slipperiness of the ground beneath our feet, that is the real danger. There is no way to protect ourselves from the threat of misfortune. That’s one of the ways King torques up the fear factor in his novels. In KingWorld, no amount of tiptoeing caution will save us from the existential horrors that lie just beyond the borders of the Golden Country. The only hope we have is to do as John Smith does in The Dead Zone and find some way to use our own cursed condition for some greater good.

  VALLEY OF THE PEACH TREES

  In Valley of the Dolls, a novel of sex and drugs and more drugs and more sex, wilderness and nature play a limited but crucial role in the narrative. Although the young women whose lives we follow have sworn allegiance to city life with all its concrete and honking horns, nightclubs and cramped apartments, there is one small moment that poignantly evokes the Golden Country.

  Anne Welles, the novel’s leading lady, is alone with Lyon Burke, a cosmopolitan young man who “dwarfed anyone she’d ever known.” Lyon recounts a war story to Anne, a story whose implications he clearly does not fully grasp. Lyon and a young soldier were spending the night in the ruins of a barn. The young corporal kept sifting some dirt from one hand to the other. “This is great earth,” he kept repeating. Turns out the corporal owned a peach farm back in Pennsylvania, and during those long dark hours in the wartime barn, before heading back into a crucial battle, the corporal described to Lyon Burke the agricultural challenges he faced with the soil of his land back home that was not as fertile as he wanted it to be. He wanted the farm to prosper and for it to sustain his children when they came of age.

  The next day, Lyon tells Anne, the soldiers went their separate ways, but Lyon soon came to discover that the young corporal/farmer had been shot down in the hours after they parted. He held the young man’s dog tag in his hand and mused:

  “Last night it had been a man—a man who wasted his last night on earth worrying about fertilizer and soil. And now his blood would fertilize some foreign soil.”

  He looked at her and suddenly smiled. “And here I am, wasting your time talking about it.”

  Since nearly everyone in this novel is busily seducing nearly everyone else most of the time, it seems natural to assume that Lyon Burke is trying to use his war story to soften Anne’s resistance. A great pickup line: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Nothing like a little carpe diem to get the evening turning in the right direction.

  Lyon Burke would like Ann to interpret the story for its existential meaning: Our lives are so short, our deaths so random and unpredictable, we must not waste time on trivial worries like protecting our virtue.

  But for the corporal, the opposite interpretation holds true. What concerned him in his final moments was something more enduring, more profound, more fundamentally American, than simple existential turmoil.

  In those desperate hours on the edge of the battlefield, the corporal was returning to his own Golden Country, the literal terra firma he loved. He was a man of the soil, a man for whom peach trees were as important as bags of gold. Indeed, the dirt he sifts through his hand gives him a level of reality and integrity that hardly any other single character in this novel possesses.

  The natural world he recollects and returns to briefly in his mind is like Winston’s from Nineteen Eighty-four, an escape from war and death and oppression to his own Edenic memory. Lyon Burke had it all wrong. Rather than wasting his last hours, the corporal was invoking his Golden Country with all the solemnity of a final prayer.

  In a novel glutted with the cheap stimulants of cash, fame, drugs, and an endless whirlwind of sexual partners, this single passage stands apart. This corporal occupies only a paragraph or two, yet his brief appearance in the novel resonates like the chime of a well-struck bell through the rest of its pages.

  TWO PARADISES

  In The Hunt for Red October, the Golden Country is an imaginary far-off destination. Locked away inside a submarine thousands of
feet beneath the surface of the sea, Marko Ramius, the Russian commander of the Red October, summons a striking image of Eden when he announces to his crew that they are headed for the tropical paradise of Cuba. If they manage to go undetected by the imperialist American dogs, they will soon be lying on the white beaches beneath palm trees and enjoying the comradeship of the local ladies.

  Secretly, Ramius intends to defect to his own version of the Golden Country, the United States of America, but to mislead and motivate his crew, he intentionally invokes the Communist Party’s version of heaven on earth, that exotic island in the Gulf Stream.

  Eventually, Jack Ryan guesses correctly that Ramius’s motivation for defecting is the compelling allure of the United States: “America, Ryan smiled, could be pretty seductive to someone used to the gray life in the Soviet Union.”

  There is little subtlety in Clancy’s novels, but this is an instance of a fundamental irony around which much of the novel’s action and its patriotic stance is built. Simply put, the “gray life” of Soviet society can make even a shabby paradise like Cuba seem appealing, while the true Golden Country, as anyone with any smarts understands, is the Eden of America.

  For Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code, paradise is her grandfather’s country home, a natural world far removed from Parisian urban life, where most of the novel is set. The country home is a place that’s central to Sophie’s formative experiences.

  In an early scene at the country home, Jacques Saunière indulges his granddaughter’s instinctive love for riddles by sending Sophie on a circuit of the house in search of her Christmas gift. Following his complex clues, she is eventually led to a bright, shiny bicycle. It’s a moment of unadulterated joy that stamps itself permanently in her memory.

  But later on, Sophie’s Eden is spoiled when she returns to the same country house unexpectedly from college and stumbles into a scene that appears to be an orgy in which her grandfather is a major participant. From that moment on, Sophie is alienated from her grandpa and refuses to return to the Golden Country of her youth.