A Random House Trade Paperback Original

Copyright © 2012 by James W. Hall

Reading group guide copyright © 2012 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hall, James W. (James Wilson).

Hit lit : cracking the code of the twentieth century’s biggest bestsellers / James W. Hall.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-679-60496-9

1. Best sellers—United States—History—20th century.

2. Popular literature—United States—History and criticism. 3. Books and reading—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

Z1033.B3H35 2012

381′.450020973—dc22          2011012619

www.atrandom.com

Frontispiece and part title photo: © iStockphoto

Cover design: Pete Garceau and Thomas Beck Stvan

Cover photograph: Pete Garceau

v3.1

FOREWORD

My love affair with books began as most serious romances do, when I was least expecting to fall in love. I was ten years old, maybe eleven, and for years I had dutifully read the required books in school. But because they were required and because I was tested on my comprehension of them, I had decided that reading books ranked alongside long division and penmanship as simply one more bothersome educational duty.

Context is important here, for I was a young male in a southern town of the 1950s. In other words, that I would read a book just for fun was about as likely as my deciding spontaneously to knit a sweater for the football coach. It wasn’t done. At least not by any of the male role models who shaped my thinking at the time.

So when my mother deposited me at the public library that fall afternoon to get me out of her hair while she went about her downtown errands, she might as well have dropped me off in the middle of Death Valley. The gloomy building was one of those WPA structures built in the heavily ornate style of the Old South. That creaky battleship was piloted by a wispy, white-haired woman in a dark dress and thick glasses, a living cliché who floated noiselessly up and down the stacks, replacing volumes in their proper slots and leaving the dry dust of tedium in her wake. As a young boy who aspired only to muscular achievements on hash-marked fields or gymnasium floors, I was mortified. Frightened out of my skin that I would be spotted by one of my friends in such a place.

To make myself as invisible as possible, I moseyed down aisle after aisle, studying the titles of those musty tomes, bored to death by the prospect of spending an hour or two in that dismal room. When the passing librarian seemed to sense my discomfort and began to home in on me, a fit of panic spurred me to nab a random book from a shelf, pop it open to the first page, and feign deep interest.

As my eyes ran down the lines of print, I was suddenly breathless. Though my vocabulary was no larger than that of any average ten-year-old boy of my place and time, I did know the word nude. It was one of those special, cherished words, not quite a curse, but nonetheless a word loaded with magical potency. And lo and behold, that very word leapt out of the first page and seized my full attention. The fact that the word nude turned out to be an adjective modifying the word woman made my knees weak and put a wobble in my pulse.

I looked up, certain that the librarian was about to rip this smutty book from my hand, grab me by the collar, and toss me onto the street. By evening it would be all over town: “Little Jimmy Hall was caught reading that nude woman book in the library.” But magically, the librarian melted back into the stacks and I was left alone with my first murder mystery novel.

For the nude woman was dead, and it was her corpse that had been found in a field by a man chasing butterflies. How did she get there? Who was she? Who would have done such a thing? I was mesmerized. Weak of breath and nearly fainting from a preadolescent tumult of emotions, I located a private corner near a window. I looked around and planned my getaway should my mother suddenly reappear and find me reading such filth. Then I sped through as many pages as I could manage before she returned and called me away.

So this was why people read! Books were about adult things. Strong emotions, extreme behaviors, the inside stuff of a world I had never imagined existed. In this, my first recreational book, I suddenly realized that novels could fill one with heart-pounding fear as well as lip-smacking lust. That they could, in fact, suddenly expand the boundaries of the hillbilly town where I had always lived and where I imagined I always would stay.

Tramping across the bogs of the English countryside in pursuit of the heinous killer of that nude woman, I was suddenly freed of my homebound life. I was set loose in the world and allowed to know every crucial thought of that droll British detective and was just as stumped as he, just as frustrated, and finally just as delighted when the logic of his deductions led him to the surprising culprit.

It took me several more surreptitious visits to the library to finish that novel. Surely my mother and father were deeply puzzled by this new enthusiasm, but they had the good grace not to ask where it was coming from. That might have quashed it all.

The day I finished that first novel, I looked up to find the amiable librarian staring down at me.

I gulped.

“You like mysteries?” she asked.

I gazed at the book in my hand as though it had just materialized there.

“Oh, this?”

“Yes, that. That book you’ve been reading these last few weeks.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, so do I.” She beamed. “I just love a good murder story.” And she gave me a conspiratorial look that still floats into my mind whenever I am feeling isolated from the human race. For as I have come to understand, reading is at once a private and communal act. While books are savored alone, they grant you membership into the most fascinating club I know: fellow readers. Fellow voyagers into the vast uncharted waters of imaginative literature.

That afternoon, the librarian gave me a private tour of that big dusty room and she showed me the best mysteries in the house. Hard-boiled, cozies, Sherlock Holmes. She made a pile, got me a library card, helped me fill it out.

“Tell me what you think,” she said.

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

“Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t school,” she said. “There’s no test when you bring them back. I won’t take your library card away from you if you don’t read one all the way through.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m smart enough to read all these.” I patted the stack of books.

“Oh, my,” she said. “No one starts out smart. That’s why we read.”

Over the next few years, I gradually expanded my reading list with Dickens and Hardy, and later I fell in love with Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, and John Fowles, Faulkner and Steinbeck, and the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Robert Frost. It came as a shock to learn that sports and reading were not mutually exclusive. In fact, when I discovered Hemingway and began reading about his intense competitive exploits, I started to picture the unspeakable—that I might someday learn the craft of writing well enough to create the very things I so dearly loved to consume.

Though that creaky library no longer exists in my small Kentucky hometown, and though I have fled her narrow streets and scrubby fields forever, the largest part of what I am today and what I know about the world and about the affairs of the human heart springs from that one autumn afternoon when I plucked a book from the shelf and encountered that nude woman lying in the grass and I began this long journey, year after year, filling myself beyond the brim with the great accumulated wealth of books.

School year led to school year until I’d accumulated all the degrees there were to be had in my chosen field, and in the process, the reading of books became not just my private passion, but my profession. As so often happens in any career, I began to specialize.

In graduate school, a certain kind of novel that was considered avant-garde caught my fancy and later became my area of concentration when I began to teach at the university level. Call them metafiction or postmodernist, these novels are experimental, fresh, and exciting, and best of all they require someone like me to help the uninitiated student fully comprehend and appreciate their esoteric beauty.

For the first ten years of my teaching life, I held up these challenging novels as the gold standard of literary achievement, and I touted them as superior in every regard to novels that still employed such old-fashioned techniques as plot and character development.

Then one afternoon I was exploring the reference stacks of the university library, trying to devise the course I would teach the following semester, when I happened on a collection of year-by-year lists of bestsellers from the past. I paged through the book with growing fascination as I came across novel after novel that I had read long ago, books that set off starbursts of nostalgia. And there were many more books on the lists that I’d always meant to read but had put off because of my academic studies.

Maybe it was time to take a break from my specialty. Oh, why not.

So I put together a course in popular fiction, and not just any popular fiction. For that initial class, I chose ten books that were the bestselling novels of their decade. These books were big. Bigger than big.

Though teaching such a course started out as little more than a whim, it proved to be the watershed moment in my intellectual and artistic life, and the truth is, I’ve had a lot more fun ever since.

We started with Gone with the Wind. I’d seen the film but never read the book, so I was unprepared for the full-bodied Scarlett O’Hara and how deeply she would move me. She was maddeningly silly, yet totally captivating. I was bowled over. Scarlett’s tale engaged me emotionally in ways I hadn’t experienced since my early days of reading. There was nothing to deconstruct, nothing to decode, nothing to distract the heart. Just fascinating people caught up in a rousing tale.

In the second week, we began to discuss From Here to Eternity. Same thing. Once again I was deeply stirred by the book. The novel’s scope and primitive power and its fabulous characters swept me up and took me to an emotional land I’d almost forgotten existed after all those years of cerebral study. I was a kid again, encountering Dickens and Hardy and Austen for the first time, mesmerized by these robust characters who magically migrated from the page and took up residence inside me, who became as real and gut-wrenching as any humans I’d ever met.

Without intending it, I had rediscovered the excitement I’d felt in that creaky old library in a small town in Kentucky, when I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough, when I disappeared into worlds more real than the one around me. I had returned to the wellspring of one of my great passions.

On that day over twenty years ago, I also began an odyssey to try to understand what makes a book “successful.” What makes us connect with it, what makes us fall in love the way I had.

It suddenly seemed obvious to me that when millions of readers, whether they are formally educated or not, have expressed their separate opinions by buying and delighting in a particular novel, there is some larger wisdom at work. Thus, it seemed self-evident to ask one simple question: What is it about this or that enormously popular book that inspires such widespread fervor and devotion?

I began to wonder what my students and I would learn if we reverse-engineered these novels, breaking them down into their component parts. Would we find any common features lurking in the most popular books of all time? Was it possible to figure out what made these books so irresistible?

WHY THESE TWELVE?

The term “best seller” was coined and came into common use because it filled a need. A term was needed to describe what were not necessarily the best books but the books that people liked the best.

—FREDERIC MELCHER, 1946

Before we begin, it’s important to understand that the twelve novels I’ve chosen to discuss aren’t your run-of-the-mill bestsellers. To spend a week or two on the New York Times bestseller list, a hardback novel could sell a hundred thousand copies or half that many. Depending on the other books it’s up against at any given moment, maybe a little more or a little less will be required of the average bestseller. Those are terrific numbers in the book business, but they fall well short of the sales figures for the bestsellers-on-steroids we’ll be examining.

In fact, one of the quirky features of the bestseller list is that appearing on it depends more on velocity of sales than on total sales. If Book A managed to sell ten or fifteen thousand copies in the first two weeks after it was published, it would almost surely appear on national bestseller lists, even if its sales dropped off to zero in the weeks after that. While Book B could sell many times more copies in the course of a year than Book A, if its sales were slow and steady, without the initial surge that Book A had, Book B might never appear on any bestseller list at all.

In any case, the novels I’ll be discussing in this book were spectacular megahits, selling in the multiple millions, and a few of them continue to show up on bestseller lists fifty years after their publication. To bend Mark Twain’s famous analogy, the difference between these blockbusters and an average bestseller is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The common features I’ve identified recur with such frequency, it’s almost as if these books have been spun out of identical genetic matter. I would go so far as to say that these twelve novels are permutations of one book, written again and again for each new generation of readers. True, these twelve novels have radically different settings, different characters, very different plots. But no matter which decade they were written in or what publishing vagaries brought them to the forefront, all have used strikingly similar techniques and themes to provide deep enjoyment to millions.

But it’s not the ingredients alone that create the magic of highly popular stories. If it were that simple, this book would be only a few paragraphs long and I could end the semester on the first day of class. It is how those ingredients are combined and the unique ways they intermingle and resonate that set a megabestselling novel apart and make it appealing to such a vast audience.

In the following pages, we will analyze these particular elements in detail and examine the ways they are employed, and we will puzzle out the reasons for their enduring appeal to so many millions of American readers.

Along the way, I’ll show how these recurring features in bestsellers spring from a single purpose: a desire to capture the uniqueness of the American story, its inspiring traditions and its bold idealism, its moral struggles, its violence, its contradictory values, and its extraordinary characters.

So without further ado, and before I say more about my methodology, here’s our reading list, with a glimpse at the publishing history of each.

1. GONE WITH THE WIND, Margaret Mitchell, 1936

Scarlett O’Hara is in love with the vapid Ashley Wilkes, but he shuns her and instead marries his cousin—a tradition in the Wilkes family. However, Scarlett will not give him up that easily and schemes constantly to win his heart. As the Civil War presses closer around her, Scarlett uses any means she can to save her family’s Georgia plantation, including entering into a series of increasingly lucrative but increasingly unhappy marriages, until she meets her match in the roguish Rhett Butler.

Number one bestseller for 1936. Six months after its release in December 1936, the novel had sold 1,000,000 copies. By fall of 1941, it had sold 2,868,200 copies. In 1946, authorized foreign sales of the book were estimated to be up to 1,250,000, and American sales had reached 3,713,272. In 1956, worldwide it reached the 8,000,000 mark; by 1962, it had grown to 10,000,000; by 1965, it was 12,000,000. In 1983, the number reached 16,000,000. During the 1980s, the novel continued to sell 100,000 hardbacks a year worldwide and 250,000 paperbacks a year in the United States. Estimates put the sales figures near 30,000,000 in the 1990s.

2. PEYTON PLACE, Grace Metalious, 1956

Conceived during an illicit love affair, Allison MacKenzie grows into an introverted and sensitive young girl who struggles to free herself from her overprotective single mother, Constance, as well as the narrow-mindedness of the quaint New England town of her birth. Just when it seems she has escaped and established a successful writing career in the city, she decides she must return to her hometown to cover the sensational trial of her old friend Selena Cross. While there, Allison finally comes to peace with the cruelty, kindness, and complexity of Peyton Place.

This was Grace Metalious’s first and most successful novel. According to Alice Payne Hackett’s 80 Years of Best Sellers, 1895–1975, Peyton Place sold a total of 10,670,302 in hardcover and paperback combined.

3. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Harper Lee, 1960

Scout Finch is bursting with innocent mischief as she starts first grade in her sleepy Alabama town. Soon after, her father, Atticus, a lawyer, takes on the legal defense of Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of rape by a white woman. The trial rocks the town to its core and forces Scout and her older brother, Jem, to wrestle with grim racial and social wrongs.

Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird remained on the bestseller list for eighty-eight weeks. (Rose as high as number three on the 1961 year-end list.)

The paperback edition has had 135 printings, with well over 14,000,000 copies sold.

4. VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, Jacqueline Susann, 1966

Full of confidence, Anne Welles arrives in New York City just after World War II. She takes an exciting job in the entertainment business and soon has two new roommates, Neely O’Hara and Jennifer North, and a dashing suitor, Lyon Burke. But when the lives of her beautiful and talented friends begin to unravel, they take Anne Welles down with them into a tragic, drug-fueled spiral.

Number one in 1966. Approximately 30,000,000 copies sold worldwide, which puts it roughly in the same category as To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind.

5. THE GODFATHER, Mario Puzo, 1969

After the head of the Corleone crime family, Don Vito Corleone, is shot by a rival, the empire he has devoted his life to building is in danger of dissolving, until Michael, his favorite son, a war hero and upstanding citizen, takes charge. Michael is a natural leader and quickly learns to navigate the inner workings, crude politics, and secret rituals of the Mafia, and by employing a series of swift and brutal moves, he attempts to restore power and respect to the family.

In the first two years after its publication, 1969–1970, The Godfather sold more than 1,000,000 copies in hardcover and 8,000,000 copies in paperback. By 1975, over 12,000,000 copies had sold in both hardback and softcover.

6. THE EXORCIST, William Peter Blatty, 1971

Chris MacNeil, divorced single mother and successful actress, is living in Washington, D.C., with her twelve-year-old daughter, Regan, while shooting her latest film. Regan, once a curious and happy girl, grows moody and strange. After numerous doctors and psychiatrists fail to diagnose her, Chris reaches out to a young priest, Father Karras, who realizes Regan is possessed by a demon. The battle between Karras, a religious man with shaky faith, and the devil that inhabits Regan’s body is a fierce and violent struggle that results in numerous deaths but ultimately in victory for the MacNeil family.

Four years after its publication, 11,702,097 hardback copies and 11,000,000 paperbacks had been sold.

7. JAWS, Peter Benchley, 1974

The resort town of Amity is preparing for the summer onslaught of beachgoers from the city when a young woman taking a late-night swim is killed by a shark. It is Police Chief Martin Brody’s task to decide whether to keep the beaches open for the big holiday weekend. Under pressure from town leaders, he lets them stay open, and as a result, a six-year-old local boy becomes the shark’s next victim. Driven to set things right, Brody teams up with Quint, a salty shark hunter familiar with local waters, and with Matt Hooper, an academically trained shark expert, and the three men head out to sea in Quint’s boat to capture the murderous creature.

The novel stayed on some hardbound bestseller lists for forty-four weeks, making it 1974’s longest-running fiction bestseller. More than 1,000,000 in sales in 1974.

By 1975, 9,275,000 copies of the Bantam paperback were sold.

8. THE DEAD ZONE, Stephen King, 1979

Johnny Smith is working as a high school teacher, an average guy in love with another teacher, Sarah Bracknell, when a serious head injury puts him in a coma. Years later when he wakes, Johnny discovers he has acquired the supernatural gift of foreseeing the future. He sets about finding ways to put his newfound ability to good use, solving crimes and helping individuals, until his path crosses that of Greg Stillson, a rising politician. After Johnny sees a vision of Stillson leading the nation to disaster, he decides he must do whatever is required to prevent Stillson from reaching his goal, even if it means risking his own life.

This was King’s first novel to break into the year-end top ten. His earlier hardback novels, Carrie and Salem’s Lot, had sold modestly. But when the film version of Carrie was released in 1976, King’s career moved into a higher gear. It has continued to shift ever higher with a prolific output over the last twenty years. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was a rare year when one of King’s novels did not appear on the year-end top ten list, frequently landing at number one.

9. THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, Tom Clancy, 1984

At the height of the cold war, submarine captain Marko Ramius, who is commanding the Soviet’s newest top-secret nuclear sub, decides to defect to America. Ramius’s intentions, however, are not clear to the Americans, who enlist the aid of Jack Ryan, a naval historian and part-time CIA analyst, to help the U.S. military plan an appropriate response. When Ryan discovers that the Soviets have apparently developed a new supersilent propulsion system that could shift the military balance of power between the nations, mild-mannered Ryan is thrust into the middle of an escalating confrontation that could very well result in World War III.

The hardcover edition of this first novel sold 365,000 copies, according to a 1987 article in the Washington Post “Book World.” Five to six million copies have sold in hardback and paperback. One million copies were sold in Japan alone.

10. THE FIRM, John Grisham, 1991

Mitch McDeere, a top Harvard Law School grad, is snapped up by Bendini, Lambert & Locke, a prestigious firm in Memphis. Mitch and Abby, his bride, are thrilled by the perks: the new house, the flashy car, the big salary. But they quickly realize the firm is working on behalf of a Chicago crime family, and members of the firm are perfectly willing to commit murder to conceal this fact. After Mitch is secretly recruited by the FBI to help with its investigation of the law firm, his snooping endangers his life and the lives of others. So Mitch devises a complex and risky scheme that is meant to satisfy the FBI and free him and Abby from the sinister grip of the firm.

The Firm spent forty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Grisham’s publisher shipped over a million copies of his next novel, The Client, and two and a half million copies of the following book, The Chamber.

11. THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY,

Robert James Waller, 1992

In the mid-1960s, Robert Kincaid has been assigned by National Geographic to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County, Iowa. Shortly after arriving in Madison County, he meets Francesca Johnson, a farmer’s wife, who is home alone while her husband, Richard, and her children are away for a week’s visit to the Illinois State Fair. A brief and passionate affair between the seasoned traveler and the lonely woman ensues. After days and nights of wild romance, the pair realize they must decide their future before Richard and the children return. Both Robert and Francesca are heartsick at the prospect that they might have to part.

After selling poorly for a few months following its publication, the novel was rejuvenated when a section was published in Cosmopolitan, which attracted a large audience of female readers. Then word of mouth among independent booksellers began to spur more sales, until the book rose to become the number one bestseller in 1993, dropping to number nine the following year. Roughly 50,000,000 copies sold worldwide.

12. THE DA VINCI CODE, Dan Brown, 2003

When Jacques Saunière, head curator at the Louvre in Paris, is murdered, Robert Langdon, a highly regarded Harvard symbologist, is summoned to the scene and is immediately whisked away by Sophie Neveu, a French cop and cryptographer, who warns him that the police are trying to pin the murder on him. In trying to solve the murder of Saunière and absolve himself, Langdon embarks on a quest to expose a conspiracy that is centuries old and involves the Priory of Sion, the Holy Grail, intricate codes, and Jesus Christ.

The Da Vinci Code sold 81,000,000 copies worldwide, making it the top bestselling novel of all time.

(More detailed plot summaries of these novels can be found in the appendix.)

In choosing these twelve, I first consulted Alice Payne Hackett, the leading authority on which books sold the most throughout the twentieth century. Hers is the book I bumped into in the library stacks three decades ago that set me on this course to begin with. Although her 80 Years of Best Sellers is a bit dry, it is indispensable for anyone interested in popular fiction. With the zeal of an IRS auditor, Ms. Hackett spent years analyzing sales figures compiled by her employer Publishers Weekly, a magazine geared for industry insiders, and put together a master list of the most commercially successful novels of previous decades.

While Ms. Hackett’s work is the gold standard for book sales info, her commentary on popular novels is largely a recitation of publishing factoids, interspersed with a few dreary plot summaries. A far more lively account of bestsellers is Michael Korda’s excellent survey Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. Mr. Korda relied on lists from The Bookman, a periodical that first began to publish a monthly bestseller list in 1895. The modern lists Korda used appeared in Publishers Weekly. (The New York Times didn’t begin to print its own list until 1942.)

Most of the pages of Mr. Korda’s slender volume are taken up by the fiction and nonfiction lists themselves, but what text exists is richly spiced with tidbits. Did you know, for instance, that Mark Twain never made the bestseller list in part because he found it more profitable to sell his books himself through the earliest form of book clubs, as well as through house-to-house sales? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Mark Twain with your new copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Although Mr. Korda doesn’t try to determine what constants bestsellers might possess, he does a solid job of sketching out the general contours of bestseller land. He’s particularly good at presenting the history of publishing trends and demonstrating the book business’s symbiotic connection with major world events, such as war, the Depression, and the flower power era of the 1960s. Though the connection between book sales and popular fashion is a slippery subject, Mr. Korda is masterful at making the case that a novel’s success is often influenced by larger cultural forces in vogue at any given moment.

When it came time for me to formulate the basic structure of the reading list for this book, Ms. Hackett’s “combined list” (which adds together paperback and hardback sales figures) was the obvious starting place.

Here are Hackett’s bestselling novels between 1895 and 1975 (with the novels I’ve selected in bold).

1. The Godfather, 1969, Mario Puzo, 12,140,000 sold.

2. The Exorcist, 1971, William Peter Blatty, 11,700,000 sold.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960, Harper Lee, 11,120,000 sold.

4. Peyton Place, 1956, Grace Metalious, 10,670,000 sold.

5. Love Story, 1970, Erich Segal, 9,905,000 sold.

6. Valley of the Dolls, 1966, Jacqueline Susann, 9,500,000 sold.

7. Jaws, 1974, Peter Benchley, 9,475,000 sold.

8. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970, Richard Bach, 9,055,000 sold.

9. Gone with the Wind, 1936, Margaret Mitchell, 8,630,000 sold.

10. God’s Little Acre, 1933, Erskine Caldwell, 8,260,000 sold.

It’s interesting to note that the decades of the 1960s and 1970s contain more than their share of the largest bestsellers of all times, while the 1940s is missing in action, as are the first two decades of the century. For those readers interested in such matters, Korda’s Making the List sketches out some of the historical, economic, and cultural factors that shaped these decade-by-decade differences in sales figures, but such considerations are not my focus here.

For the purposes of this book, I made some nips and tucks to Hackett’s master list. I’ve jettisoned two mushy books, Love Story and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, replacing them with the more recent (though, let’s admit it, equally mushy) The Bridges of Madison County. I’ve also dropped that ode to incest and small-town squalor God’s Little Acre, because those same subjects are already well represented by Peyton Place and To Kill a Mockingbird.

To flesh out the total to an even dozen, I included four more novels. I’m confident the authors I’ve added would be on any modern reader’s top ten list: John Grisham, Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Tom Clancy.

OUT OF PRINT

All the books on our reading list are still in print, but the same cannot be said for the great majority of bestsellers from the past century. Most of the smash hits of yesteryear can no longer be unearthed except by shopping at rare-book dealers. Such novelists as Warwick Deeping, Russell Janney, Ethel Vance, May Sinclair, and Harry Bellamann (whose Kings Row was made into a film starring Ronald Reagan) all had their fifteen minutes of literary fame, riding atop the bestseller lists of previous decades, but all are virtually unknown today. Which makes you wonder which of the huge bestsellers of our current age will still be around fifty years from now and beyond, and how and why one lives on and another doesn’t.

For instance, how about Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller? Still in print, though no longer widely read, Ms. Miller’s 1934 novel, which is set in pre–Civil War Georgia and won the Pulitzer Prize, will always be a quirky footnote in American bestseller history. After witnessing the great commercial success of Caroline Miller’s novel, Macmillan editor Harold S. Latham went shopping for other books with similar southern settings and in the process discovered Margaret Mitchell. Would Gone with the Wind have been published and heavily promoted without Lamb in His Bosom nudging open the door? It’s one of those intriguing and unanswerable questions. But it’s entirely possible that Caroline Miller is as responsible for our knowing and loving Rhett and Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes as Margaret Mitchell was.

FIRST NOVELS AND BREAKOUT BOOKS

Successful first novels are more likely to reveal popular tastes than bestsellers written by an established author. Because of the brand-name effect, a tenth or twentieth novel by Danielle Steel or John Grisham or Stephen King is virtually guaranteed a spot on the bestseller list and as such is less an indicator of public tastes than an indicator of public habits—and therefore is not particularly useful in demonstrating the recurring features that helped make it popular.

When an author’s first novel does manage to overcome the incredible odds against it and turns into a commercial success, the student of popular culture needs to pay special attention. In such a case, readers and publishers had little reason to come to it beyond the appeal of the story itself. The combination of factors that sets apart that bestselling first novel from the hundreds of other first novels that remain in obscurity is exactly what my research was attempting to uncover.

After first novels, the next most instructive books are those that used to be known as a “breakout” novels—that is, the first book of an established author that cracks the bestseller list.

Back when publishers had the patience and the financial wherewithal to nurture a writer through the early, unprofitable stages of his or her career, it was not uncommon for a novelist to publish half a dozen books or more that didn’t make a profit without being abandoned by the editor or publisher, usually because the editor was convinced the writer’s work was solid and worthy and would one day find a larger audience. As a more tightfisted corporate model gradually replaced this charitable system, and publishers were buffeted by a succession of economic and industry upheavals, the patience required to wait for a “breakout book” all but disappeared. These days, if a writer does not succeed on the first or second try, his or her career is likely to flatline.

Of the twelve books on the list we’ll be examining, a surprising seven were first novels: To Kill a Mockingbird, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, Gone with the Wind, Jaws, The Bridges of Madison County, and The Hunt for Red October. The rest appeared early enough in the writers’ careers to qualify as “breakout” novels. Grisham’s The Firm was his second attempt, while The Godfather was Puzo’s third book. William Peter Blatty wrote four comic novels before he circled in on The Exorcist. The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s third try. Stephen King had already cranked out eight books before The Dead Zone finished as the year-end number six bestseller.

The Dead Zone is unique among the others on my list. At roughly 175,000 hardbacks sold, its numbers fall far short of The Godfather or Gone with the Wind or the others we’re considering. I included The Dead Zone because it was the first year-end bestselling hardback from one of the top commercial writers in history, a novelist who went on to publish dozens of number one bestsellers. How could any study of bestsellers omit Stephen King?

FEMALE SCRIBBLERS

Another factor I considered in fine-tuning my reading list was gender. Diversity is a tricky matter. As Leslie Fiedler wrote in “Literature and Lucre,” “The struggle of High Art and low has, moreover, been perceived as a battle of the sexes. Referring to the writers who had preempted the paying audience before he ever entered the scene, Nathaniel Hawthorne called them a ‘horde of female scribblers.’ ”

When more than three-quarters of the book-buying public are women, one would assume that female authors would populate the bestseller lists in greater proportion than men. But that’s not the case. Based on a quick and totally unscientific sampling, using the results for the year-end bestselling totals for the opening year of each decade, I found quite the opposite to be true:

In 1900 two of ten were women.

In 1910 five of ten were women.

In 1920 three of ten were women.

In 1930 four of ten were women.

In 1940 one of ten were women.

In 1950 three of ten were women.

In 1960 two of ten were women.

In 1970 two of ten were women.

In 1980 two of ten were women.

In 1990 five of ten were women.

So in the twentieth century, the average is somewhere around two or three women on the year-end list. Far less than half and not at all what Nathaniel Hawthorne so chauvinistically imagined. John Bear, in his collection of intriguing facts about bestsellers (The #1 New York Times Best Seller), graphs the gradual increase in female authors who have achieved the number one slot on the Times list. From the forties through the eighties, the percentage of women reaching the pinnacle of the bestseller list hovered around 20 percent, while in the nineties the percentage climbed to 27.9 percent.

For the purposes of this book, I’ve bumped that figure up to 33 percent. One-third of the twelve novels we’ll consider were written by women.

OPRAH, ADVERTISING,

AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Inevitably, any discussion of bestseller lists must take into consideration the impact of marketing and Oprah Winfrey. How valid is it to draw cultural conclusions from the bestseller list if a great many book buyers are motivated to buy a book not by the intrinsic elements in the book itself, but by slick ad campaigns or a television celebrity who caters to a unique demographic base?

Well, first, the hard reality is that clever marketing campaigns tend to work only a few times before they are copied by other marketers, thereby neutralizing the advantage. For instance, it was once rare for a writer to hit the road to promote his novel. Mark Twain is a colorful exception. With his trademark white suit and bushy mustache, his catchy nom de plume, and his stand-up comic routine, he established himself on the rough-and-tumble lecture circuit, selling his books by hand as he moved from one small-town venue to the next. In the modern era, Jacqueline Susann is often credited with breaking new ground in book promotion. Dressed in her Pucci outfits and carrying her poodle, Josephine, under her arm, the indefatigable Ms. Susann went so far as to visit truck stops, buttering up the drivers who used to select which books to stock on the spinning racks in drugstores and groceries. Twain and Susann were pioneers of what has become commonplace with modern authors, tireless and often flamboyant self-promotion.

Over the last few decades, however, the practice of book touring has become so widespread that on any given night in any given bookstore across the land, an author can be found pacing up and down the aisles, waiting and hoping for his or her audience to appear. The novelty of actually meeting a living, breathing author face-to-face has long ago worn off.

Then, more often than not, the latest advertising bright idea fails entirely to produce the intended results. Even lavishing hundreds of thousand of dollars on a promotional campaign is no guarantee of a book’s success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails. Though they would wish it were otherwise, publishers are less in control of the destiny of individual books than the public (and most authors) often imagine.

My point is that knowing the historical details and the exact method a publisher used to promote a book to bestsellerdom would ultimately tell us very little, since the whole enterprise is fraught with unpredictability. Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of publishers or agents say some version of the following: “How the hell did that book make the List?”

“At least half the books on any given week’s bestseller list are there to the immense surprise and puzzlement of their publishers,” says Michael Korda, bestselling author and longtime editor. “That’s why publishers find it so hard to repeat their successes—half the time they can’t figure out how they happened in the first place.”

As for Oprah, well, bless her amazing heart. Starting in 1996, her book club brought enormous numbers of new readers into the marketplace and conferred on dozens of otherwise obscure writers a measure of fame and fortune that, while ephemeral in many cases, was surely deserved.

However, for the decade that her book club operated at its peak, her chosen books tended to skew the bestseller list toward a type of novel that might not be so heavily represented otherwise, and thereby her selections squeezed off the list (and out of view) novels that many people might have chosen using guidance from more varied sources such as book reviews, booksellers, and word-of-mouth recommendations.

In any case, I didn’t feel the need to include an Oprah pick on our reading list since at least two of the novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Peyton Place, already stand squarely in her demographic promised land.

Finally, the five authors I’ve added to Hackett’s all-time bestselling list are all from the last quarter of the twentieth century, with a strong tilt toward contemporary novels. I’ve done this bit of updating for the simple reason that I wanted to make this study of bestsellers more germane to a modern reader.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

THE TWELVE FEATURES

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

Hot Buttons

The Big Picture

The Golden Country

Nothing but the Facts, Ma’am

Secret Societies

Bumpkins Versus Slickers

God Is Great, or Is He?

American Dream/American Nightmare

A Dozen Mavericks

Fractured Families

The Juicy Parts

RECAP

Once Again, Quickly

A Bonus Chapter: No Tears for the Writer

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Toasting a Few of My Students

Appendix: Plot Summaries

Reader’s Guide

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

FEATURE #1

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

The most difficult thing in the world is to make things simple enough, and enticing enough, to cause readers to turn the page.

—HELEN GURLEY BROWN,

FORMER EDITOR OF COSMOPOLITAN

Some tricks of the trade that make our bestsellers unputdownable.

When Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner intercepts an impatient guest who’s rushing to a wedding, and grabs hold with his skinny hand and glittering eye, and proceeds to mesmerize the man with his haunting sea story, Coleridge has given us a nifty metaphor for the foremost mission of a bestseller writer. These books grip you and refuse to let you loose until they’ve finished their tale.

For the popular audience, first and foremost a novel must be entertaining. It’s a fact so painfully obvious, I shudder to say it. For a novel to rise to the sales level of these twelve blockbusters, it must be a page-turner. A book you can’t put down, that you want to read in a gulp. One that keeps you up all night. Gripping. Edge of your seat. Mesmerizing. Fast-paced. Spellbinding. A roller-coaster thrill ride. Unputdownable.

Novelist and historian Les Standiford, a university colleague of mine, is fond of telling roomfuls of aspiring novelists, “The only place people read books they are not interested in is college.”

The focus of this chapter is twofold. First I’ll share what my students and I came to call the “mechanics of speed.” Various ways in which writers initially engage readers, then keep them securely hooked while moving fast through a few hundred pages.

Then we’ll look beyond narrative devices at the other key ingredients that helped these twelve novels seize the attention of so many readers.

MOVIE-FRIENDLY

Hollywood filmmakers can teach us a thing or two about speed, for moviemakers have turned storytelling into a science, using certain formulaic devices that consistently accelerate the forward movement of the narrative.

It’s true that all twelve of the novels on our reading list were made into major motion pictures, and without a doubt some of their sales success as books was spurred by their filmic version. However, the common belief that a movie of a novel is the main factor in driving a book’s commercial success is not supported by the facts. For instance, Jaws sold around a million copies before the film even came out.

In the cases of Valley of the Dolls and The Da Vinci Code, which are two of the biggest bestsellers of all time, so many copies had already been sold by the time the movie hit the theaters that it was unlikely any movie ticket buyers had not already bought the novel. Indeed, they seemed to be drawn to the film because they knew and loved the book.

That said, the effect of a successful film on the novel’s long-term sales can be substantial. Gone with the Wind is the top-grossing domestic movie of all time, adjusted for ticket price inflation. Without a doubt, the film’s ongoing popularity keeps the sales of the novel perking along. However, it’s important to note that Margaret Mitchell’s novel sold two million copies within a year of its publication, long before David O. Selznick got his hands on it. In this case, as in many others, the movie obviously helped the book’s long-term sales, but the film was only one of many factors contributing to the book’s overall success.

The permutations are endless: Bestsellers that flop at the box office (The Lovely Bones). Novels that have marginal sales but become spectacular hits as films (Forrest Gump). Novels that were moderate bestsellers but become movie legends. (Larry McMurtry has done it often.)

But such considerations are ultimately beside the point; at least, they’re beside my point—which is that popular novelists have undeniably absorbed many lessons from the craft of filmmakers, and either intentionally or unintentionally, they have made their stories more “movie-friendly.” These are the books that Hollywood folks want to make into movies. And moviemakers, in turn, have sharpened their storytelling craft by employing techniques of successful novelists. This crosspollination of the two storytelling art forms is natural and mutually beneficial.

Steven Spielberg puts it this way: “I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie.”

Being able to compress a novel’s complex plot into a single sentence is both a useful exercise for a novelist struggling to understand the dramatic forces driving his or her own work and a helpful marketing tool in the publishing industry and the film world. There are numerous commercial benefits to being able to frame a story in intriguing shorthand. For one thing, if a novel can’t be summarized succinctly and engagingly, then word-of-mouth buzz isn’t as easy to generate, and a marketing campaign is less likely to succeed; sales reps simply have a harder time selling the book to their bookstore accounts if they can’t give a concise and appealing description. That’s three strikes against any story so murky or complex that it can’t be simplified to a tasty kernel.

For example:

When a rogue Russian sub commander who’s piloting a vessel so technologically advanced that it could upset the balance of world power engages in a cat-and-mouse game with a brilliant CIA analyst who has the entire U.S. Navy at his disposal, World War III is only one small mistake away.

A resourceful young girl’s innocent childhood is shattered and her family members threatened when she is thrust into the center of the racial turmoil that erupts in her small southern town.

Just for fun, check out this one-liner for The Wizard of Oz (often credited to Richard Polito, a journalist in California), which makes Dorothy’s story sound like a hallucinatory episode from the life of Charlie Manson:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to do it again.

The literary version of “high concept” is what’s known as “the dramatic question,” which is another way of capturing in a single catchy phrase the dramatic energy coiled within a novel.

Generally speaking, each genre has its own standard question. In mysteries: Will the detective catch the killer? Romance: Will the woman hook up with the man of her dreams? Horror: How will our hero manage to survive or defeat these terrifying events? Or in coming-of-age-novels: How will the character’s adult life be shaped by the events of his or her youth?

Our twelve bestsellers are anything but coy about showing their hands from the beginning. Will the shark come back for a second bite? Will Scarlett ever marry Ashley? What will success do to Mitch and Abby McDeere? Will Anne Welles and her two girl pals find love and happiness in the big city? Will that faithless priest be able to save the little girl from the clutches of Satan?

Good questions, sure. Most readers’ interest would be piqued. But are these questions sufficient to attract and compel large numbers of readers? No. More is required.

One way our twelve bestsellers stand apart is that each of them enhanced these dramatic questions by using unique and creative mash-ups of traditional genres. For instance, at its heart The Hunt for Red October is a detective story, and its dramatic question is straightforward. Will the detective, Jack Ryan, locate the rogue Russian sub commander and thwart his mission?

But if that were all this story was about, it’s doubtful it would have risen above the other popular novels of its time. Its grip on so many readers springs in part from Clancy’s mingling the dramatic structure of the detective story with the familiar tropes of the novel of international intrigue, then combining that with elements of the sea adventure, and finally tossing in one inventive new ingredient, a feature that has become a staple of the techno-thriller: the use of cutting-edge hardware and technology, which plays a role as central as the characters themselves (not unlike science fiction). So in The Hunt for Red October, the potency of the standard dramatic question that fuels the detective story is increased exponentially when these additional elements begin to slosh together.

An average reader may not observe any of this consciously, but even the most jaded among us can’t help but be intrigued when we confront a never-seen-before species that somehow echoes other stories we’ve read and loved. We love the familiar and are excited by the new. A combination of both is irresistible.

While it may not seem as fresh and original to us now, in its day The Hunt for Red October was almost experimental in its novelty. A large part of its success as both fiction and film was due to this crafty mixing and matching of genres and its use of a movie-friendly principle called “high concept” that helps seize our attention from the very first pages.

THE SECOND ACT AND BEYOND

Once the reader has been snagged by a novel’s high-concept premise, on one level we are drawn forward by the momentum of the unfolding story as one complication after another challenges the central character and the original dramatic question mutates into another question and another.

How will Scarlett ever manage to marry Ashley Wilkes now that he’s engaged to Melanie? And how will she achieve her dream when she impulsively marries Frank? Then there’s the big annoying complication of the Civil War. How will Scarlett ever seduce Ashley when he’s off being gallant at the front lines? And when Rhett Butler makes a beeline for Scarlett’s affections, will she be able to resist his obvious charms and remain available for Ashley? There are lots and lots of plot complications branching off the trunk of this main dramatic question, but everything in this sweeping novel stays firmly rooted in Scarlett’s single-minded focus to win the one man she can’t have. Ashley, Ashley, Ashley. What are the consequences of Scarlett’s bullheaded and maddeningly foolish love for Captain Wilkes? It takes a thousand pages to answer that question.

In The Firm, Mitch McDeere’s too-good-to-be-true first job also raises a dramatic question that takes a few hundred pages to resolve. Will this nice young couple grab the brass ring, or will the brass ring grab them? Once the reader begins to see the pickle Mitch and Abby are in, that question morphs into another even more lapel-grabbing question: How will Mitch and Abby ever extricate themselves from this perilous trap they’ve stumbled into?

The first question The Godfather asks seems harmless enough. How will Michael Corleone resist being drawn into the family business? Well, for starters, he’ll keep his distance and marry a girl who is the exact opposite of a Mafia princess. But once his father is the target of an assassination attempt and the family is forced into a war that threatens their very existence, the question is no longer about how he will resist. Now the question is, How will this good boy, a war hero, not ready for prime-time Mafia work, meet the minimum job requirements? Then once he has taken command, the question changes again. How the hell is this all-American kid who seems to be in over his head going to live up to the Godfather’s dark example?

When it becomes clear in the early pages of The Dead Zone that Johnny Smith has the gift of precognition, our first question is a natural one. How will this ordinary kid employ this extraordinary perception? Will he, like many in his place, use his new skills for fun or profit?

Sure, that could be a titillating story line, but we find out pretty quickly that’s not where we’re headed, because Johnny isn’t greedy or self-indulgent. This psychic has a virtuous heart and wants to use his powers for some benefit to the world. So what saintly purpose will Johnny decide upon? That’s the question that drives us through the heart of the book and right into the depraved mind of Frank Dodd, a murderous fiend whom Johnny brings to a just and bloody end.

Okay, good. But now what? Will Johnny simply keep assisting the police and solving crimes, bringing to justice one killer after another? How do you top a vicious serial murderer like Frank Dodd?

Greg Stillson is the answer. Turns out that Stillson has monstrous plans for the entire world. A killer to the thousandth power. We watch as Johnny’s simple wish to use his talent for the greater good evolves into a dark obsession. Step by step, he reaches the horrific conclusion that he must kill Greg Stillson before this tyrant-in-the-making can rise to power and bring darkness to the entire world.

When good John Smith sets off on a lone-wolf mission to assassinate Stillson, the reader is both jittery and fascinated. We can’t help ourselves from asking a new and troubling question: Is John crazy or is he sane? Don’t all lone gunmen have similar visions or voices commanding them to do the unthinkable?

It’s these last dramatic questions that keep us riveted to the end.

MAGNETIC RESONANCE

What starts as a simple premise (Scarlett wants to marry Ashley) is made ever more engaging by the complications and difficulties that arise. The challenges that Scarlett must overcome, which force her to dig deep into her bag of tricks to keep her original dream alive, generate an emotional response in readers in direct proportion to the intensity of her determination.

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 their 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.”

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 here. 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.

Published in that Orwellian year of 1984, the novel rode the last crests of cold war paranoia. Perestroika and glasnost were just up ahead, but our periscopes couldn’t yet make them out. So the country was armed and dangerous and nervous as hell, and a book like this submarine novel that reflected well on our native resourcefulness, our blue-collar ingenuity, our military hardware, and our grace under a hundred fathoms was the right story at the right time with the right ingredients that appealed to the right wing of the American reading public.

HOT BUTTON #10

Greed Is Good

Sellouts like Mitch McDeere were all the rage in the decade of greed known as the eighties, when he and his fellow yuppies made down payments on their luxury cars and minimansions from their first week’s paychecks and started looking for a better class of cocaine dealer. With his fresh law degree and his glamorous young wife, he was a perfect model for the latest incarnation of the me generation.

Grisham takes both sides of the “greed is bad vs. greed is good” debate that seethed back then just as it has off and on for most of the nation’s history. The novel starkly portrays the Reaganomics of the era. It was a time when supply-side trickle-down voodoo economic arguments could ignite furious passions. MBAs and law degrees were being minted as fast as new tax laws cut marginal rates. Corporate deregulation and union busting were in the air. Go to it, boys. Make a fortune. Wallow in a little luxury, don’t be shy.

One of the key theoretical arguments supporting Reaganomics was something suitably named the Laffer curve, which supported the idea that cutting taxes led to a rise in total revenues. Enter Mitch McDeere, a highly educated lawyer whose specialty is tax cheating. He heads south to work for a WASPy firm whose clients turn out to be not some legitimate struggling small-business CEOs overburdened by taxes and regulations, but mobsters who want to launder their money and not let any of it trickle down to law-abiding citizens. The huge tectonic plates of dissension grinding beneath Mitch’s story give the novel a shuddering larger significance. When Mitch and Abby sail away on their schooner as winners in this sweepstakes of greed, both sides of this American hot-button issue have further fuel for their arguments.

HOT BUTTON #11

Nuclear Family

In 1992, when Robert Kincaid came striding into bookstores across the land, “family values” was the hot-button issue on the lips of many, including Vice President Dan Quayle, who that same year notoriously derided the prime-time TV show Murphy Brown for its “poverty of values.” Mr. Quayle’s complaint, which was supported by a great many voters, was that the show positively portrayed a single professional woman who had decided to bear a child alone, and thus the show was helping to undermine the sanctity of the nuclear family.

The nuclear family and its sacredness was smack dab in the foreground of The Bridges of Madison County, which opens with a don’t-think-about-it-too-hard explanation of why the two Johnson siblings allowed their mother’s private journal to be published for all to see.

Yet in a world where personal commitment in all of its forms seems to be shattering and love has become a matter of convenience, they both felt this remarkable tale was worth telling.

Bridges heated up the passions of a few million readers and divided them along party lines, stimulating fond memories and regrets over loves lost and paths not taken in one group while irritating the self-righteous sensibilities of others who’d held firm against such adulterous temptations.

HOT BUTTON #12

Holy Mother

There’s a type of novel that courts controversy and scandal, like The Da Vinci Code, that might be categorized as speculative history. Such books try to imagine what might have gone on backstage at the scenes of celebrated events, then they tantalize us with half-truths and gradually weaken our resistance with allegations that are impossible to disprove and spread themselves virally among us with their provocative and outlandish claims.

When the target of such feverish accusations is a once omnipotent but now weakened entity, like the modern-day Catholic Church, whose followers make up a quarter of the population, a strong reaction is guaranteed.

The hullabaloo and polarizing debate that erupted after Dan Brown’s novel was published set staunch defenders of the church in passionate opposition to legions of cynics and nonbelievers who were happy to finally see their own grievances, doubts, and prejudices portrayed so entertainingly. A killer monk. A two-thousand-year-old conspiracy. Sexual rituals. Yes, yes, I knew it must be happening!

In the face of this awesome display of provocative storytelling, we can do nothing but bow in awe and kiss the ring of the holy mother of all hot buttons.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED AND

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

So popular novels are fast and they appeal unapologetically to the baser emotions. Now we also know a few key devices and tricks of the trade that authors have used to hook us and keep us hooked. These stories grip us by using an intriguing high-concept premise, and their speed is enhanced by accessible prose, by pressures of time, by the use of unrelenting suspense, and by favoring action over interior monologues. Matters of the heart dominate. Our heroes and heroines are passionate in their devotion to some cause and act boldly to achieve their ends. Their passion grows hotter as the original premise grows more complex and their challenges become more difficult to overcome. And all of these stories explore some hot-button social issue of their day that is rooted in a long-term national dispute.

Next we will turn to considerations of substance. As we’re flying through the pages of bestsellers, gulping down this comfort food, some might want to know: Is it possible that something that tastes this good and goes down so easily can actually be nourishing?

The chapters that follow take on this question, but I can provide the one-word answer now. Yes.

FEATURE #3

The Big Picture

The United States … has already reached the foremost rank among nations, and is destined soon to outdistance all others in the race. In population, in wealth, in annual savings, and in public credit; in freedom from debt, in agriculture, and in manufactures, America already leads the civilized world.

—ANDREW CARNEGIE,

TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY, 1886

Colossal characters doing magnificent things on a sweeping stage.

From its earliest days, the novel portrayed individuals struggling against the large and indifferent machinery of class and racial prejudice and social injustice. Over the last two centuries of the novel’s existence, most of the successful literary characters have been more than simple individuals; they have been men and women who were embodiments of their age.

Most of the great American masterpieces like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Age of Innocence, My Ántonia, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, The Invisible Man, From Here to Eternity, and Native Son tend to have a sociological orientation—they are more likely to be stories about the ways in which men and women work out their destinies within large groups and communities rather than alone.

Again and again, American bestsellers depict the broad affairs and actions of men, their customs, their beliefs, placing their heroes and heroines on expansive historical or social stages, rather than focusing on the finer calibrations of their thoughts and the subtle renderings of their emotions and consciousness.

As a purely practical matter, just as there is a seesaw effect between action and characterization in most novels (as one goes up, the other inevitably goes down), there is a similar relationship between the creation of inner lives versus the creation of outer lives. As an author devotes more narrative energy to placing a character in historical context with attention to such matters as customs, behaviors, dress, and the artifacts of the age, there is simply less time left to devote to the specific density of the interior self.

Wide-angled scope has been a feature of many of the most popular and some of the most grudgingly respected novels of all time. Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, James Jones, John Steinbeck, James Michener, and any number of American novelists adopted a panoramic view and set their characters against backdrops of enormous scale and consequence.

VITAL, EARTHY, AND COARSE

A small story told against a sweeping backdrop—that’s the pattern repeating again and again in the most successful bestsellers.

Early on in Gone with the Wind Scarlett O’Hara gazes at her father, Gerald, and tries to explain why she finds him so comforting: “There was something vital and earthy and coarse about him that appealed to her. Being the least analytic of people, she did not realize that this was because she possessed in some degrees these same qualities.…”

Scarlett’s lack of introspection is a common feature among the protagonists of these novels. What’s true for Scarlett is also true for Allison MacKenzie and Jack Ryan and Mitch McDeere and Professor Robert Langdon. These characters are not self-absorbed or contemplative. Instead, they are shown primarily from external observations. We see their social interactions, their behavior, their dress, what they say and what they do in public and in private, but rarely do we go wading into the stream of their consciousness.

Readers are carried away by big stories, stories of import set on a large stage, ones that also feature a wide assortment of social classes. For scope applies not just to a wide-angle treatment of subject matter, but to demographics as well.

From the very beginning, novels have been the most democratic literary form, written in a raw, simple prose that gives free and easy access to all comers. It required little education beyond simple literacy to read the first English novels, and it requires little more today to consume a bestselling work of fiction. In fact, the democratic spirit that defined the first English novels is still the defining characteristic of the American bestseller.

The novel was born in the eighteenth century as the industrial age was making it easier for men and women at every class level to lift themselves up in rank. From the outset, those early English novelists considered it their primary duty to inform their readers about how this transformation might be achieved, using the most accessible language and style available to them and creating characters who originated from the vital, earthy, and coarser classes.

Today, the most commercially successful American novels continue to appeal to the same demographic and to focus on the same issues those first novels did two hundred years ago: social mobility; racial, gender, and class fairness; the struggles and triumphs of the poor set alongside similar conflicts of the powerful. In other words, they are stories about characters pitted against large forces, not characters in conflict with themselves.

Scarlett spends most of the novel struggling to return to the safe, predictable haven of the prewar Tara, where once she could bat her eyelashes and men would fall at her feet. Though her nostalgic wish to return to a prewar world is as hopeless as her fantasy of marrying Ashley Wilkes, that harsh fact never seems to dim her ambition.

The fact that Scarlett doesn’t grasp the magnitude of the historical moment is part of her silly charm. She’s simply annoyed at the inconvenience of the war, a little grumpy at all the nonsense she’s required to do to survive, and she winds up whining more than whooping in protest. In that sense, she’s almost a comic character, unaware of the gravity of her situation and therefore innocently undaunted by the overwhelming obstacles facing her. It simply never occurs to Scarlett that she’s acting heroically.

For most of the novel, Scarlett’s tribulations center around mundane matters of survival in the social realm, and most readers would surely understand how treacherous this realm can be. Scarlett has to master the complex minuet of manners and proper behavior of polite society at the very moment those things are in a state of radical transformation.

As she is coping with wartime realities and the new condition of being a widow and living in Atlanta’s hothouse of decorum, Scarlett’s personal story unfolds against the backdrop of the most tumultuous period in our history. Scarlett thrives, turning herself into a smashing business success, chiefly by marrying anyone who can help her achieve her ends. In this sense, the novel is as much a story about female empowerment and the redefining opportunities of the industrial age as it is a flirty romance. Big themes, sweeping issues, a very large stage for one of American fiction’s biggest stars.

Later, in scenes with panoramic sweep, Scarlett O’Hara takes charge of her family and leads them home to Tara amid smoldering scenes of battle and death and destruction. She must tear up her petticoat to use as a halter for a cow. Later she must pick cotton to survive. She kills a Yankee soldier who invades her house. She loses a child and two husbands (a third, if you count Rhett), and she rises to every occasion, fueled by romantic longings as vast as the larger-than-life landscape she passes through.

Scarlett’s focus is outward. She keeps her sights on the exterior realities of social politics, the finer points of corsets and ball gowns—the nitty-gritty sociology of her era. Without the giant wheels of history clattering behind her, her story might have collapsed into a froth of silliness. But with the enormity of change occurring before our eyes, the violent death of the Old South and the reinvention of American life, the cataclysmic changes in racial arrangements and class and gender values, Scarlett’s struggles take on greater scale and more heft as well.

As is the case with most bestsellers, two stories are at work, one small, one large. And two Scarletts are required to merge these stories into one. The foreground narrative is about the emotional cravings of a petty, narcissistic ingenue—Scarlett’s ceaseless pining for Ashley and her schemes to win his love—while the other story is a broad-canvased epic that features a tough-as-nails young woman who confronts Yankee soldiers, triumphs in a ruthless business world, and successfully adapts to the most wrenching social changes our country has ever known.

RACIAL POLITICS

An entirely different type of scope is found in To Kill a Mockingbird. On first blush, this portrait of secluded small-town life rendered through the eyes of a preadolescent girl would seem an improbable candidate for a novel of scale.

Many of us have a tendency to associate the large political and social convulsions of any particular era with urban centers, believing those upheavals to be muted to inconsequence by the time they filter out into the hinterlands of rural America. Al Zuckerman, in his guide to writing a “blockbuster,” puts it bluntly: “Less than 1 percent of the population can afford to buy hardcover fiction with regularity, and that affluent group tends to be more interested in rich people than in poor ones, in city dwellers rather than in rural folk, in movers and shakers rather than in the downtrodden.”

Well, that’s not exactly accurate. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most commercially successful novels of all time, and its setting is as far removed from urban America as one can get. But because the novel sends its taproot deep into the loamy soil of vital American concerns, its appeal stretches far beyond its rural setting.

In the isolated backwoods of Maycomb, Alabama, the large moral and political issues of the Depression era sifted into the courtroom and the front parlor, the public schools and the church sanctuary. Like Scarlett, Scout Finch roams the social spectrum. She journeys to places no ordinary character could take us, from First Purchase African M.E. Church, to the living room of the pious upper-crust church ladies who are supporting missionaries in distant lands, and on to the angry streets where a lynch mob gathers to murder Atticus Finch’s black client. Scout sees it all and takes us on a tour of the nooks and crannies of Maycomb. Luckily for us, she is an astute observer of the sociological structure of her hometown.

The Crawfords mind their own business, a third of the Merriweathers are morbid, the Delafields are all born liars, the entire Buford clan have that same strange walk. Scout can reel off every detail of the caste system in Maycomb effortlessly.

Scout truly scouts the entire social gamut from top to bottom and back again in this brief but expansive story. Though the city limits of Maycomb may be cramped and the population small, the sweep of Scout’s gaze is unbounded, stretching outward toward the nation that resonates beyond the borders of her small town.

BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST

The Da Vinci Code challenges the core values of institutions no less vast than the Catholic Church and Western art, to name only two, yet lest we forget the grandness of scale the novel is operating on, we are given repeated reminders in the form of superlatives of every kind. You want big? I’ll give you big. Here are nine examples, but there’s virtually one on every page.

1. “the world’s most famous paintings …”

2. “the longest building in Europe …”

3. “the most famous mathematical progressions in history …”

4. “the most famous piece of art in the world …”

5. “one of the world’s most documented inside jokes …”

6. “the most sought-after treasure in human history …”

7. “one of the most enduring mysteries of all time …”

8. “the most famous fresco of all time …”

9. “one of history’s greatest secrets …”

Superlatives abound. Greatest this, biggest that. Most famous this, earthshaking that. Another elbow in the ribs and another. Get it? Get it? This is important! This is big! Really, really huge!

Surely most readers glide past these passages without a blink, so swept up in the constant puzzle solving and didactic passion for all things related to Catholicism, symbolism, goddesses, Western art, and Parisian and London travel guide info. In fact, in the case of The Da Vinci Code, such trumpet-blaring announcements of the importance of the story are unnecessary, because the scale of the story, the grandeur of its subject, and the momentous nature of its revelations would have easily carried the day.

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 fine 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 highly 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.

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 incestuous 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.

As with Michael Corleone, Ramius, Allison MacKenzie, Scarlett O’Hara, and most of our other protagonists, Sophie Neveu’s Golden Country is a natural setting that churns with erotic energy, and when the innocence is lost, it is never quite regained. Late in the novel, when Sophie learns the true nature of the strange rite her grandfather was participating in, an exercise that’s religious rather than sexual, she can’t let go of her revulsion.

Even Robert Langdon, who tries to set her straight, realizes it’s not so easy to explain away the scene she witnessed: “Admittedly, the concept of sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first.” Well, yeah. Once an apple that juicy is bitten into, there’s just no cleaning the taste from one’s mouth.

It would be false to claim that images of the Golden Country or lost Edens are unique to bestsellers. But what I can say for sure is that without exception, every single novel in this sampling prominently features a lost Eden, and that image plays a pivotal role, changing the dynamics of characterization, as in Mitch McDeere’s and Michael Corleone’s cases. Or as we see in Peyton Place and Gone with the Wind and Jaws, the portrayal of an idyllic natural setting is a cornerstone of the thematic power of the entire novel.

FEATURE #5

Nothing but the Facts, Ma’am

Franklin himself … was practical, industrious, inquiring, convivial, and middle-brow philosophical. [He] celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society.

—WALTER ISAACSON,

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE

An abundance of facts and information, including everything from etiquette to the nuts-and-bolts layout of a submarine, fills these twelve books. The didactic function is as old as the novel form itself and continues to be a chief attraction in bestselling novels.

Ben Franklin, that uncommonly ingenious common man—kite flier, printer, bookseller, inventor of the bifocal lens and the flexible urinary catheter, namer of the Gulf Stream, and creator of the first American subscription library—will stand forever as a representative of at least two fundamental virtues of the American character: practicality and self-improvement.

At the age of twenty, Franklin made a to-do list, much like the one Jay Gatsby devised, an inventory of personal goals that captured the spirit of his countrymen at that time and for the centuries thereafter. Number six on his list was this promise to himself:

“INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”

Franklin was a busy reader and a student of the early English novel. Though he claimed the book that influenced him most was Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, historians claim Franklin was also well instructed by a book that Mather would have considered hard-core porn. Lustful Ben managed to be one of the first Americans to own a copy of John Cleland’s scandalous novel Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book that contained explicit erotic descriptions and that might well be regarded as an eighteenth-century sex manual. The man just wanted to learn.

Novel readers always have.

Indeed, part of the wide appeal of the earliest novels was based on their function as instruction manuals. Of course, it’s also true that the first novel readers in eighteenth-century England were attracted to Pamela and Moll Flanders in some part to satisfy their voyeuristic yearnings. They were titillated by being privy to the secret lives of these two common women, one a young country girl who is hired as a servant in the manor house and the other a London prostitute, both of whom are placed in dire distress.

Certainly part of the appeal of these first novels is that early readers were able to identify with literary characters of their own social class portrayed in realistic detail. A kind of raunchy tabloid sensibility pervaded many of those early narratives that were stuffed to overflowing with carnal escapades. Low-tech reality TV.

But at least as important to most early novel readers was their desire to be informed. To learn about the larger world, particularly the secrets to social advancement. How was a farm girl who’d been hired as a maidservant in the manor house supposed to behave? How was she to fend off the master’s lewd advances and still maintain her virtue without losing her job?

Samuel Richardson’s English novel Pamela was in fact an early road map to the successful management of sexual harassment. Pamela’s defense of her virtue was eventually rewarded when she married the master whom she’d formerly had to shove away. But the “virtue rewarded” moral was no doubt of minor importance to most readers compared with the thrill of witnessing the shocking realities that occurred behind the heavy locked doors of the upper class.

(The desire that a great many Americans have to master the rules of polite society propelled Emily Post’s Etiquette onto the bestseller list in 1922, where it remained for a year and a half. It is now in its seventeenth edition.)

Learning the codes of behavior, the appropriate dress and salutations, the standard markers that determined one’s class, and the ritualistic intricacies of courtship was to be Jane Austen’s focus nearly a century after Pamela. Because her “novels of manners” were often seen as “husband-hunting stories,” they were disparaged as an inferior literary subgenre. Such scorn finds new targets in our supposedly more enlightened era, when labels like “romance novel,” “women’s fiction,” or “chick lit” are considered by many to be vicious put-downs.

But the fact is, the terrain that Jane Austen was working is not much different from that of Mario Puzo or Tom Clancy or John Grisham. The social arrangements, class distinctions, and codes of behavior aboard a nuclear-powered submarine or within the ranks of the Cosa Nostra or within a top-tier law firm are the central topics of these male-dominated novels. Just as the group dynamics within the town of Peyton Place or Maycomb, Alabama, are of critical importance in Grace Metalious’s novel and Harper Lee’s.

NUTS AND BOLTS

The other form of information that bestsellers frequently contain is the sort of factualism that today we associate with nonfiction—the kinds of nuts-and-bolts data like Clancy’s detailed renderings of submarines or Dan Brown’s encyclopedic cataloging of architectural, religious, and cultural factoids. We readers have come to expect two or three large scoops of factual information even in our detective stories, our thrillers, our adventure novels, and our science fiction. Few (if any) bestsellers fail to supply this service.

Telling a rousing story is in the job description, and making it seem real, seducing the reader into suspending disbelief: All of these were the novelist’s tradecraft from day one.

There’s no absolute way to prove the causal connection between high dosages of information and high sales, but in the years my classes combed through bestsellers, this feature was by far the most widespread and consistent.

THE DISH

Inside information, the scoop, the dish, gossip, the lowdown, the straight dope: This is the juicy side of information. Readers love to be taken somewhere they’ve never been before by an authority on that unexplored alien subculture.

One of the appeals of Grisham’s The Firm was that it gave the reader the unvarnished story of the inner workings of high-powered law firms seeking glamorous Harvard Law School grads, complete with snapshots of the interview process and the bidding wars. We even learn the dollar amounts for billing hours, spicy details of an entire profession that until then had been the exclusive domain of writers such as Erle Stanley Gardner, whose interest was courtroom drama, not the down-and-dirty dollar figures that hotshot lawyers command or detailed descriptions of the flashy houses and cars that are paid for by crushing hours of work. Clearly, part of the fascination that drew many readers to The Firm came from this tell-all aspect. Slide the curtain aside, show us the play-by-play details of what’s going on back there.

In Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s raison d’être is to expose the behind-the-scenes double-dealing of showbiz. Do you want to know some practical strategies for how to succeed as a young ambitious babe in Manhattan or hear stories about the couches you’ll have to stretch out on to break into the movie business? You want to know about the pitfalls, the payoffs, the seductions, the heartbreaks, the Lotharios, the Demerol, the Seconal? Hey, girlie, you want to know how to fend off the lord of the manor house and still keep your job? Well, read this book.

It’s not a big step from Pamela to Valley of the Dolls. Virtue is rewarded (by marriage to the boss) and licentiousness is punished. Jennifer, the resident bimbette in Valley of the Dolls, puts her worldview into this shameless axiom: “She stroked the beaver coat—one night with Robby. That’s what a great body was for, to get things you wanted.”

A few chapters later, poor beaver-coated Jennifer is punished for her lack of virtue when she OD’s on “dolls.” True to narcissistic form, she leaves behind a narcissistic suicide note to Anne, the good girl of the novel:

Anne—No embalmer could make me up as well as I do myself. Thank God for the dolls. Sorry I couldn’t stick around for your wedding. I love you. Jen

The three young women of Valley of the Dolls give us a backstage pass to the petty and soulless world of American show business. The trio of innocents either die, become hopelessly addicted to downers, or turn terminally cynical toward the possibilities of love. It’s a tragic tale, cautionary in tone. But as with Pamela or Moll Flanders, the moralizing aspects of the novel are no doubt of less interest to most readers than the roller-coaster ride through stardom and addiction, drying out in sanitariums, and back to the bright lights of the stage. Local color, facts, education.

STUFFED WITH FACTS

When you open the covers of The Da Vinci Code, an avalanche of Post-it notes spills out, as well as file cards and a clutter of short essays. Jottings about the Louvre, riffs on goddesses and feminism and the male and female symbols, the Hebrew alphabet, Mary Magdalene, Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, the Depository Bank of Zurich, lambskin velum, and cryptics of every sort.

That a dozen books seeking to rebut some of Mr. Brown’s claims have appeared in the years since The Da Vinci Code was first published suggests that it is the information as much as the characters or the plot that drove the success of this novel. Whether it is fact or hokum that “the Church burned at the stake five million women” or that Jesus was married and had a child is irrelevant to the immense popularity of the novel. These assertions are only a couple of the hundreds that critics seize on to try to overturn Mr. Brown’s credibility. But fact is one thing, truth quite another. Readers everywhere have found the novel’s compelling and entertaining premise to be sufficiently convincing to waive their rights to disbelief.

And Clancy? What is true for Dan Brown’s astonishingly jam-packed novel is even more true for The Hunt for Red October—more than anyone ever wanted to know about submarines and the alphabet soup of governmental agencies and this protocol and that procedure and this bolt and that nut. I’d wager that there is more pure data on a single page of The Hunt for Red October than in many entire novels by Faulkner or Hemingway.

PURPOSEFUL PLEASURE

Fact-based fiction has broad appeal because it is simple, hearty fare. No highly refined palate required. Anyone can buy a ticket. Information is the red meat that sticks to the ribs. It satisfies a craving in nearly anyone who turns to a book in search of purposeful pleasure. By giving the story amplitude, a sense of nutritional value, information satisfies a basic need in most readers. All of which suggests that in large measure, people read to improve themselves or further their education. And like the early fans of Defoe and Richardson, they read in order to peer inside secret places not open to them otherwise—the daunting and mysterious manor house where innocent young Pamela goes to work.

Whether his or her taste is refined or not, the mass reader has always yearned to see beyond the shut door, be it the top floor of the Vatican or twenty leagues beneath the sea.

Margaret Mitchell’s exhaustive rendering of the details of an antebellum household and the social intricacies of party planning for an evening ball rivals in its comprehensive detail Tom Clancy’s blueprint walk-through of a nuclear sub and his loving descriptions of an array of military hardware.

When an interviewer from Contemporary Authors questioned Clancy about the amount of research labor his books display, he dismissed the notion offhandedly: “The most time I have spent researching any of my books was three weeks and that was for Patriot Games.”

That must have been one hell of a speed-reading cram session.

A GOOD BOOK VERSUS THE GOOD BOOK

Surely the American tendency to honor the collection of facts and information is due in part to the ingrained pragmatism of our culture—a desire to improve ourselves in Gatsbyesque fashion by accumulating ever more practical knowledge in case we ever want to practice a little Yankee ingenuity.

And don’t discount the importance of the Protestant work ethic in shaping our ideas about what a book should be. From the time of the Pilgrims until today, for many Americans the only good book is the Good Book. For a large segment of the reading public, any book without a heaping of useful information would be considered even more suspect.

It is clear that readers of our most popular novels hunger for more than vivid characters, a rousing story, realism of detail, or psychological subtleties. They want to be instructed and informed, to emerge from the novel with a wider understanding of some grand or esoteric subject matter. It is clear that bestselling novelists understand the hunger in their audience and are willing and able to supply heavy doses of information in highly entertaining packages.

FEATURE #6

Secret Societies

As opposite as George Bush and John Kerry may seem to be, they do share a common secret—one they’ve shared for decades, and one they will not share with the electorate. The secret: details of their membership in Skull and Bones, the elite Yale University society whose members include some of the most powerful men of the twentieth century.

—60 MINUTES, CBS NEWS

All twelve of these bestsellers expose the inner workings of at least one secret society.

Readers of popular fiction can be forgiven for thinking that Dan Brown discovered the subject of secret societies. But while he’s certainly mined the topic exhaustively, he’s not the first American bestseller writer to use a secret society as a cornerstone of his narrative, nor is he alone in tapping into the paranoid sensibility that seems a staple of American culture.

In that immensely popular TV show of the fifties The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) and his best buddy, the inestimable sewer worker Ed Norton (Art Carney), were active members of the International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons, whose lodge members employed code words and hailed fellow members by flipping the tails on their coonskin caps and greeting one another as “brothers under the pelt.”

Getting laughs in the fifties was as easy as flicking a furry extremity in the face of those snooty Rotarians or Freemasons or DeMolay or whoever was the object of their satire. Audiences got the message. Secret societies were uppity and goofy, and whatever power was conferred by membership in such groups was self-delusional.

However, during the same years that The Honeymooners was mocking secret societies, Joe McCarthy, senator from Wisconsin, rose to national prominence by exploiting Americans’ anxieties about them, by claiming to have the names of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers who had infiltrated the innermost levels of the federal government. For years, McCarthy held public hearings in which he grilled citizens from every walk of life about their loyalty to their country. And while McCarthy was giving anticommunism a bad reputation, Mickey Spillane was selling millions of books like I, the Jury, which tapped into that same streak of paranoia that seems to run deep in our national sensibility. Killing fictional Commies made Spillane very rich.

Conspiracy theorists have been alive and well in America since at least 1798, when a group of New England reverends alerted their congregations to a plot by Illuminists (a gaggle of European intellectuals), who were said to be hell-bent on extinguishing the Christian religion and bringing down government control.

Pitting Them against Us seems to be one of the surefire strategies to incite an audience. From Father Charles Coughlin to the John Birch Society to the KKK to the radio and television shock jocks of today, we have seen the muscle-flexing power of groups that feed on hatred and prejudice and flourish by identifying other groups as a threat to our way of life.

Perhaps because we are a nation of immigrants, where there’s always a reliable and steady stream of Others to stoke our tendencies toward suspicion and mistrust, it is inevitable that secret societies would play a prominent role in our popular culture.

PRIVILEGED GLIMPSES

In a celebrated passage from the opening of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway claims he’s emotionally exhausted after being immersed in the melodrama of his friends’ lives, and he’s decided he wants “no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” After months of exposure to the confessions and excruciating tragedies of Jay Gatsby and Tom and Daisy Buchanan, he’s fatally fatigued and desires nothing more than to resign his membership in their elite circle.

For many readers, this demurral only whets the appetite for the story to come. Most of us yearn for a few of those “privileged glimpses” into the guarded fortresses, the inner sanctum of the holiest of holies, the penthouse, the boardroom, the Oval Office. Bestselling novels mine this craving by regularly sliding aside the curtains and exposing the secrets of a wide assortment of secret societies.

The Mafia, Opus Dei, elite nuclear submariners, law partners fronting for the Mob, Broadway superstars, shark fishermen, exorcists, small-town cliques, and the southern aristocracy: Each of our twelve novels has at least one secret society at its nucleus.

For definition’s sake, let’s call a secret society any group that for one reason or another has isolated itself from the rest of the world by creating a collection of rules, rites, sacraments, or covert behaviors that reinforces its separation from the larger population. The group is exclusive, usually powerful in some domain, with its own initiation rituals and its own sense of justice and duty, sometimes its own language, and even its own criminal code.

In the innermost circle of any social group, we expect to find an elite few who have been inducted into the private ceremonies, have mastered the conventions, dress, and behavior that mark them as elite members of their particular secret society, or else have paid some exorbitant membership dues that mere mortals could never manage. Gated communities within gated communities, with security guards and grimfaced sentinels at every stage.

Behind layers of sentries are characters like Don Corleone, or the pope’s henchmen, or a powerful law firm’s senior partners, or perhaps the elite commander of a nuclear submarine, or maybe even a master angler whose knowledge of the sea and the frightful creatures swimming in its depths gives him an unequaled authority, something close to the status of a savior.

While social class might overlap with these descriptors in certain ways, the kind of exclusivity we find portrayed in bestsellers is rarely a function of class status alone but is rather an earned seniority. Neither wealth, social standing, nor a privileged background is an important ingredient in Don Corleone’s power. Indeed, his rise from poverty to a position of great influence is typical in bestsellers. The poor or the lower middle classes far outnumber their economic betters as the heroes in the megahits under review.

SECRETS OF THE SEAS

Although he doesn’t wear a coonskin hat, Quint, the veteran shark hunter in Jaws, is Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of the seas, complete with arcane techniques, specialized jargon, and inviolable shipboard rules.

His authority and mastery of his element are unquestionable. Quint’s the man you call when the biggest, baddest great white shark shows up on your shores over the Fourth of July holiday and threatens not only to eat your citizens, but to destroy the well-being of your entire tourist economy.

Because Quint has lost his first mate recently, a rare chance exists for an outsider to come aboard the Orca and audition for a spot as Quint’s acolyte. That task falls to Sheriff Martin Brody as agent for the community, and it is Brody who over the course of the novel is slowly inducted into the privileged secret society of shark hunters.

“Lost your mate?” Brody says. “What, overboard?”

“No, he quit. He got nerves. Happens to most people after a while in this work. They get to thinking too much.”

So Brody finds himself aboard the Orca, trying very hard not to think. He works shoulder to shoulder with Quint and is forced to learn the ropes quickly or risk expulsion—which in practical terms means being pitched overboard into sharky waters.

Though the captain is a reluctant mentor, Brody never stops asking questions, determined to learn as much as he can, as fast as he can. At one point when Brody pushes Quint for a more detailed explanation, Quint brushes off his question with the finality of a master to his dunderheaded apprentice:

“Those are the rules.”

After the puny blue shark is brought alongside, Quint gives Brody an instructive demonstration, disemboweling the fish, letting its entrails spill into the water, then cutting the shark loose. In a spasm of instinct, the shark swims beside the boat, slurping up its own guts, and is promptly attacked by a school of smaller sharks.

One lesson after another. One question after another. The first day of the hunt melts into a second, with Quint softening under Brody’s respectful curiosity about the tradecraft of fishing. The two men don’t exactly bond, but Quint’s brusque insults lessen, at least those directed at Brody. However, there is little doubt that Hooper, the wealthy, intellectual marine biologist, is not going to win his membership card in Quint’s secret society anytime soon. He lacks the right stuff, the proper obeisance, and the down-home authenticity. His scholarly, book-acquired knowledge entitles him to absolutely nothing in Quint’s view. Experience is all that matters, and grinding it out day after day on the blood-soaked decks of the Orca is the only schooling that counts.

When the great white shark first explodes into view and opens its mighty jaws an arm’s length away, Brody is dumbstruck. While Hooper blathers on about its beauty and gigantic proportions, Quint goes quietly about his business, and Brody, the fumbling amateur, remains paralyzed with fear. After the shark disappears into the depths, Quint mocks Brody’s shocked reaction:

“Gave you a bit of a start.”

“More’n a bit,” said Brody. He shook his head, as if to reassemble his thoughts and sort out his visions. “I’m still not sure I believe it.”

The master prods his apprentice, and the novice admits his ignorance. In the secret society of the Orca, this is proper behavior and will be rewarded.

Some secret societies, like the ones we find in The Da Vinci Code, The Godfather, The Hunt for Red October, or The Exorcist, are so obviously central to their novels’ purpose that they don’t require a lot of elaboration. Opus Dei, the Mafia, nuclear submariners, and Catholic exorcists each indulge in a hefty dose of hocus-pocus and abracadabras to give an aura of mystery to their activities. Exotic chants, rites, and prayers, a specialized lexicon, rules of authority and hierarchy, incense-drenched ancient ceremonies of worship, and formal acts of obedience all play roles.

Such is the case in the scene at the outset of The Godfather when Don Corleone, following traditional custom, opens his inner sanctum to a string of petitioners on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding. When one is stepping before the Don, there is a right way to ask for a favor and a wrong way. There is ring kissing and bowing and circumlocutions that require the supplicant to master his part of the script before he recites his request to the Godfather. Flunk the test and you’re history.

On board the Orca it works the same way, although Quint practices the plain vanilla version of induction ceremonies. There’s no mystique to shark fishing, no pomp and circumstance. In fact, he harshly deromanticizes his own profession. Fishing for the largest and most dangerous fish anyone has ever seen is nothing but unpretentious work, on a par with the lowest forms of menial labor.

When Brody asks if the captain considers the fish his personal enemy, Quint scoffs:

“No. No more ’n a plumber who’s trying to unstick a drain.”

This blue-collar ethos repeats with regularity in bestsellers, as we’re seeing. We’re all just plumbers, these authors seem to say, just ordinary folks. Storytelling is nothing more or less worthy than clearing sludge from the pipes.

On what will be their final day of sharking, before boarding the Orca, Brody asks if Quint has found a replacement for Hooper, who was killed by the shark the day before. Quint’s solemn response has the tone of a sacred confirmation:

“You know this fish as well as any man, and more hands won’t make no difference now. Besides, it’s nobody else’s business.…”

Permission to come aboard is granted, and as Brody steps onto the Orca’s deck for the final fateful voyage, the local chapter of world-class shark hunters has increased its membership by one. In fact, Brody learns his lessons so well that it is he, not Quint, who survives the ordeal of the great white.

Quint makes a fatal error and steps inside a coil of rope lying on the deck, the other end of which is attached to the shark. Overboard he goes. The sheriff, who has dutifully paid his dues, lunges to save his mentor, but Quint is “pulled slowly down into the dark water” like a modern Ahab. Brody, in Ishmael’s role, can only watch in horror, then start his slow journey back to shore. You can almost hear the echo of Ishmael’s famous last line: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

BEDROOM SECRETS

In The Bridges of Madison County, Kincaid and Francesca form an adulterous secret society that stays hidden until both of them have passed away. The frame story that has Francesca Johnson’s children, Michael and Carolyn, discovering their mother’s notebooks after her death seems a trifle less clumsy when you consider it as the planned dissolution of a secret society—a time capsule meant to give Francesca’s children a glimpse into the private world their mother once experienced.

The two lovers took a vow of silence that was meant to protect the living, yet Francesca felt the need to pass the knowledge of her romantic swoon to her children, presumably hoping they would be inspired by her dalliance—inspired to recast their memory of Francesca as a noble soul who sacrificed her one true love to return to the duties of motherhood.

Taking the measure of what lessons the grown-up children absorbed is hard to do, since the novel ends with them just beginning to grasp the revelation. But clearly it’s not infidelity but faithfulness that’s at the heart of Bridges. A secret society of two made a painful pact and for decades devotedly maintained their pledge, an act of mutual self-sacrifice in which both parties abandoned the love of their lives so an ordinary American family could be preserved.

Sappy, perhaps, but for me and a few million others who consumed this sugary confection, there’s something quaintly poignant and even a little complicated about the secret society Francesca and Robert formed.

For one thing, it took a huge dose of old-fashioned willpower and self-discipline to make that decision, then to keep their love affair concealed and spend their remaining years in a state of emotional frugality, without ever abandoning their rapturous memories.

Then there’s Francesca’s decision to let her children in on the secret, an act that seems to be her way of releasing them from the lie that was her life and her marriage. This final act of revealing leaves us with a riddle that gives the novel a smoky aftertaste. Did Francesca and Robert do the right thing by giving up their love? Or did they deny themselves a greater joy, bullied into accepting the mundane and empty obligations of a conventional life? Was their sacrifice an emotional tragedy or a triumph?

In an age brimming with irony, the earnestness these two characters demonstrate can seem sentimental, but to fully appreciate these bestsellers a reader must accept that subtlety, intricacy, and ambiguity are not often the ingredients of popular novels. For the most part, these novels are thoroughly sincere and heartfelt. There’s no attempt to cast furtive signals to the reader, no evidence the language is trying to say anything more than exactly what it says. It is that simplicity of tone, that artlessness, that wins the hearts of so many readers, and it does so for the very reason that it is not exclusive. There is no attempt in the style or the storytelling method to favor readers in the know over normal folks. Anyone and everyone is freely admitted and on equal footing. No segregation allowed. No secret handshakes permitted.

PENETRATING THE CLAN

For so small a town as Maycomb, Alabama (the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird), there are a surprising number of secret societies flourishing in its midst. When Dill and Jem and Scout get mobbed up, creating their own summertime drama club, the rules are clear—anyone lacking an imagination and a taste for danger and a willingness to test authority need not apply. Nor should any adults even consider membership. These kids are picky. They target the stiff and phony neighbors as objects of their derision and reenact lampoons of everyone up and down the street.

Little by little, with Atticus’s help, the kids learn a modicum of respect for some of the grown-ups who are the objects of their parodies, and each time another lesson is absorbed, the secret society must slightly alter its rules of engagement. The one person who stays within their sights, however, is Boo Radley, the mysterious recluse ostracized by the community and transformed into a bogeyman by the children.

Although he’s the focus of their heckling, Boo isn’t daunted but works in the shadows to win favor the same way Brody earned his place aboard the Orca, by keeping his distance while he observed the society’s rules and behaviors, adjusting his own actions accordingly. Or the way that Mitch McDeere worked his ass off to qualify for a spot at the holiest of holies conference table.

“You reckon he’s crazy?” Scout asks the trustworthy Miss Maudie about Boo.

Miss Maudie shook her head. “If he’s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what secrets—”

It is the nature of secrecy, Miss Maudie seems to say, the nature of insulated systems, to stunt those who are imprisoned within them. The Radley household has isolated itself and become some kind of terrible echo chamber, and whatever was wrong with Boo before has probably metastasized into something far worse after all these years of being shut in.

Boo studies the children’s comings and goings with the same focus Sheriff Brody employs on Quint. He places sly offerings in the hollow of a tree. He repairs Jem’s torn and mislaid trousers and surreptitiously returns them to the youngster. Staying out of sight, he courts the children while observing from a safe distance the workings of their closed circle.

For Boo knows very well what everyone in Maycomb knows, that mixing one clan with another, one race with another, even one brand of Christianity with another, is forbidden. Secret societies abound in this small town. Everyone is segregated from everyone else, by race, by gender, by religious practice, by family lineage, and by narrow definitions of class. Scout is astonished when Atticus describes the trashiest family in town as having a snobbish aspect. “He said that the Ewells were a member of an exclusive society made up of Ewells.”

Add to the list those missionary ladies who meet in the Finches’ front parlor. Those good ladies are as exclusive and rigid in their costumes and ceremonial customs as the Mrunas, the African tribes these silly old women fantasize about saving. But it’s not just the good Christian white ladies who are exclusionary. Many in the black congregation of the First Purchase African M.E. Church murmur uneasily when Scout sits in their midst. “I wants to know why you bringin’ white chillun to nigger church,” one of them wants to know. Their society has its regulations as well.

Groups like Opus Dei or its elite squads of killers, or the New York Mob, all employ a highly organized structure. Like the partners of Bendini, Lambert & Locke, they are a caricature of a tight-knit family, a family that operates under strict guidelines. For one thing, in Don Corleone’s secret society, as in Bendini, Lambert’s, you do not resign your membership without risking death. Those who have tried to bail have not been heard from since.

The secret societies operating within To Kill a Mockingbird are as treacherous as those in The Godfather and The Firm. Though it would seem on first look that the ground rules for the play group that Scout, Jem, and Dill are members of are relaxed and easygoing. After all, Dill is readily admitted into their club when he proves himself to be at least as imaginative and devoted to playacting and daredevil stunts as they are. These are kids just being kids, right?

Not really. For their merciless targeting and demonizing of Boo Radley uncomfortably echoes the lynch mob that puts Tom Robinson in its lethal sights. Sure, they’re kids, but this threesome is also a closed system that feeds on suspicion, prejudice, and fearmongering. They have copied—innocently, of course—the group dynamics of the KKK.

As the story concludes, Boo is close by when Scout and Jem are attacked on their way home from a school play. In a protective fury, Boo Radley murders their attacker, and this act of violence turns out to be the price of admission into the Finches’ world.

Once Boo is on equal footing with the Finch children, their clique disbands. Just as Bendini, Lambert & Locke cannot absorb one truly honest man like Mitch McDeere and just as Robert Langdon single-handedly penetrates and dissolves the centuries-old, murderous wing of Opus Dei, Boo Radley brings an end to the Finch kids’ gang of three.

In an event that would have seemed unthinkable a few chapters earlier, Boo is welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Finches’ home. At the end of that traumatic evening, with Jem laid out from his injuries, Boo is escorted home by Scout. Carefully protected perimeters are broken, secrets are revealed, and there is even a physical touch between Boo and Scout.

Standing on Boo Radley’s front porch and seeing the world from his vantage point, Scout grasps how their summer threesome was organized around an exclusionary principle. They’ve persecuted this guy, ganged up on him in a childish reenactment of the lynch mob coming to string up Tom Robinson. It is the moral of the story. A simplistic one, that’s true, but a message with profound resonance. Walk in another man’s shoes, Atticus says. Empathize. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”

Whether it’s the KKK, the Ewell clan or the Cunninghams, the First Purchase Church, the missionary ladies, or Jem, Scout, and Dill acting out childish games, secret societies, no matter how harmless they may appear, can be training camps for intolerance and bigotry and thus inimical to a fair and open society.

The novel stands forcefully against the destructive nature of secret groups, while demonstrating how they can be altered by the least among us, by children whose sense of equality is our hope for social progress. Among other things, it is this dreamy, hazy, hopeful stew of idealism and wishful thinking, leavened with just enough hard-edged skepticism, that helped make To Kill a Mockingbird a much-loved and perennial bestseller.

CONSPIRACY OF SECRETS

What The Hunt for Red October is to submarines, The Da Vinci Code is to secret societies. The Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, Freemasons, Knights of Templar … oh, the list is long. The novel is bubbling over with highly secretive brotherhoods that have been around for centuries, working behind the scenes to rig world affairs. Turns out they are even engaged in an ongoing battle with other secret societies and occasional lone crusaders like Robert Langdon whose goal is to rip aside the veil that conceals their nefarious deeds.

The Da Vinci Code takes its place at the head of a long list of popular novels that capitalize on the widespread suspicion that deceitful and universal powers are conspiring against them, a list that includes such diverse works as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to Dr. Strangelove and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

Using a favorite target of conspiracy novels of the past, The Da Vinci Code marches deep into a minefield of politically incorrect and highly charged views about Roman Catholics. Though the folks who run Opus Dei’s website would have you believe that they are a “Catholic institution founded by Saint Josemaría Escrivá … [whose mission] is to spread the message that work and circumstances of everyday life are occasions for growing closer to God, for serving others, and for improving society,” Dan Brown paints a starkly different fictional portrait.

Employing what sound like facts copied and pasted from newspaper accounts, in one short paragraph alone he associates Opus Dei with doping its new members so they will believe they’ve experienced religious ecstasy, then describes another new recruit who gives himself an almost fatal infection by beating himself with his cilice belt, and then provides a third example of the depravity of the organization, which conned the life savings from a young man, a scam that drove him to attempt suicide.

Suddenly Corleone’s Mob seems warm and cuddly in comparison.

Every inch of forward movement in the plot of The Da Vinci Code is propelled by one attempt after another to expose one shadowy secret society after the next. To break the code, to solve the puzzle, to penetrate the layers of high-tech security of the Depository Bank of Zurich, to use the key that fits the lock to open the safe that hides some titillating secret, to locate the keystone that explains the sign of the Rose, to interpret the “flash card catechism” of the Tarot, to follow the labyrinthine trail of clues to the wooden box that holds the …

Oh well, it’s easy to see the narrative structure. A series of Chinese boxes. Open one, there’s another; open that one, it sends you running for your life in a new direction, chasing one permutation after another of the greatest secret of all time, forever pursued by an albino monk who is determined to keep the secrets hidden. This single device drives the story forward at breakneck speed and is the source of nearly every thrill and chill, all of it driven by a single dramatic goal: to expose the secret, the awesome fact that “the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene … the mother of the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ.”

Apparently there must be a bit of the conspiracy theorist in all of us, or at least in the eighty million readers of The Da Vinci Code. To some critics of the novel, this plot device grows quickly tiresome, a kind of one-trick narrative pony in which paranoia has run amok. After a few hundred pages of this, they argue, we could easily find ourselves questioning the Girl Scouts and the Brownies and all those other institutions we so foolishly thought we could trust. They’re all devious and sinister, no doubt playing some part in the grand cabal that has infiltrated every corner of Western art and culture.

Though in the end Langdon’s efforts manage to save his own skin and Sophie’s, we discover that the Holy Grail is more slippery than Robert led us to believe. Marie Chauvel, a minor character who appears near the end of the novel, puts it bluntly. Robert Langdon’s quest has been little more than an elaborate wild-goose chase: “The Holy Grail is simply a grand idea … a glorious unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today’s world of chaos, inspires us.”

Well, okay, so the Holy Grail was not a golden chalice or some other fabulous artifact but merely an abstraction. Still, few would deny this was a pulse-quickening ride. A little like the roller coaster: Once you’re done, your stomach is hinky, your hair is mussed, but otherwise you’re back exactly where you began—in a world where elaborate confederacies continue their knavish skullduggery. A world where our last best hope rests on the broad shoulders of a dauntless interpreter of symbols, the ultimate defender of the proletariat, a man who has made it his mission to penetrate and expose secret societies.

SMOKE-FILLED ROOMS

American readers are drawn to novels that expose the inner workings of secret societies for a simple reason. They want to comprehend the silent forces that shape their destinies, to have a few “privileged glimpses” into the hidden boiler rooms that power our world. Furthermore, as a resolutely democratic people, we have a natural suspicion of institutions, public or private, that might in some way undermine our personal liberties. We’re distrustful of organizations that lack transparency, that perform their rituals behind closed doors.

On a regular basis, bestsellers like these enforce our rights under the Freedom of Information Act—they kick open the door to the smoke-filled room and expose the scheming rascals and neutralize their power. Those novels that allow all comers access into exclusive and esoteric worlds get extra credit in the popular culture. Even more credit is given to those books like the ones on our list, which portray the triumph of a righteous individual over the often dehumanizing prejudices of a secret group.

FEATURE #7

Bumpkins Versus Slickers

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

—JACK KEROUAC,

ON THE ROAD

In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes, where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.

Journeys of this type have mythic echoes as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the earliest-known narrative tales), a story in which the hero left the safety of the walled city to trek off to the edges of the world. This narrative structure, the hero’s journey, as it is sometimes called, was the basis of Joseph Campbell’s landmark work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In our contemporary era, the same structural underpinnings are at work in popular films from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz, as Christopher Vogler so thoroughly describes in his practical guide for aspiring Hollywood screen writers, The Writer’s Journey.

A character is called to adventure. After initially refusing the call, he is galvanized into action by some event and leaves the safety of his ordinary world, crossing the threshold into a foreign land. Relying on mentors, some of them with supernatural abilities, and tested by various enemies, he eventually reaches a perilous place that Vogler calls “the inmost cave.” There he faces some terrible ordeal but is finally able to summon sufficient inner resources to conquer his adversary. Afterward he begins the long trek back, which usually involves confronting a second ordeal before he can return home with the grail he has wrested from his antagonist. Think Dorothy, her three mentoring friends, the Wicked Witch’s dreadful prison cell, and those magical red shoes.

That same mythic paradigm forms the bone structure underlying most popular fiction. Master storytellers have mastered its elements, either consciously or instinctively, and have found ways to create fresh permutations of an old, old story.

The journey motifs we find in the bestselling novels under review here have strikingly similar plot elements, but in particular they share a common tendency to send their traveling heroes back and forth between the countryside and the city. A rube goes to Manhattan, or a city slicker finds himself on the farm. These “fish out of water” story lines recur in every book on our list.

FISH OUT OF WATER

Once the Civil War begins, Scarlett is forever out of her element, relying on her quick wits and nimble values and sex appeal to make constant adjustments to each new environment. Each of the other protagonists is equally dislocated. Sheriff Brody, who hates the water, must go far out into it. Same with Jack Ryan, the naval historian, who must take a chopper ride out to sea to hop aboard a submarine, growing more seasick all the way. John Smith wakes from his coma to find he’s missed his youth and is having one long out-of-body experience, a man who will be forever alienated from even the most conventional reality. Then there is Michael Corleone, comfortably at peace in the sunny clover of Sicily but exiled back to the gritty city streets of New York.

Each of these novels in some way explores the clash between city values and rural ones. Characters journey from teeming urban landscapes to the peaceful countryside, or vice versa, in what might be described as a restless yearning to find their true American home.

COUNTRY GIRLS IN THE CITY

We see this migratory pattern enacted in Peyton Place when Allison sets off from her provincial New England home to take on the challenges of New York just as her mother, Constance, did before her. Constance Standish, not exactly a feminist, had very clear goals for her long-ago journey.

Because she was beautiful and stubborn and full of pride, at nineteen she decided to ditch the confines of Peyton Place, and against her mother’s loud protests she headed off to the Big Apple to find a job and marry a rich man. In no time she went to work for a gentleman named Allison MacKenzie, who was good-looking and ran a very successful fabric store. In less than a month they were sleeping together. Badda bing, badda boom.

But when Constance learns that her lover, Allison, is a two-timer who is married and has two children living upstate, she flees back home to Peyton Place, pregnant with a daughter whom she names after the man who deceived her (for reasons that defy explanation).

Published ten years later, Valley of the Dolls records a strikingly similar journey for Anne Wells, who rejects a stifling existence in Lawrenceville, Massachusetts, and sets off in search of love and success (that is, a husband) in that hotbed of deceit and double-dealing, New York City—the same den of iniquity that treated Constance Standish so cruelly.

In an early episode, Anne Wells declares her independence from small-town life with the same fervor a “Go west, young man” might have used a century earlier when departing the suffocating eastern seaboard to set off for unexplored territories.

She escapes the orderly life her mother and her mother’s mother had embraced. She dumps her fiancé, a solid boy she doesn’t love, and she absolutely refuses to live in the family’s New England home that was passed down for generations. Most of all, she says no to the smothering conventions of good behavior as they are defined by the small-town arbiters of propriety and decorum. She wants to be free, damn it.

CITY BOYS IN THE COUNTRY

Mitch McDeere makes the other half of this journey in The Firm when he rejects job offers from law firms in various American urban centers and abandons the highly competitive universe of Boston, which he has conquered handily, so he can test himself against the perils of the relatively slow-paced southern town of Memphis. Mitch has already completed the first half of this yin and yang cycle by departing from his rural roots to head off to Boston in the first place. If he hadn’t worked hard and won his way to Harvard, who knows what would have become of him? He might have wound up in prison like his brother or working in the Waffle House in Panama City Beach like his mother.

The conflict between urban and rural American values informs The Bridges of Madison County as well when the man-of-the-world, Yeats-quoting Robert Kincaid shows up in the provincial backcountry of rural Iowa. The luster of his urban ennui is part of what makes him seem so glamorous to the isolated and vulnerable farmer’s wife he romances.

Francesca is susceptible to his charms in some measure because she was once somewhat worldly herself, a free spirit with lofty expectations when she set off on that youthful journey from her birthplace in Naples, Italy, to join Richard Johnson on his farm in Iowa.

For Francesca, the sweet promise of America turns into the aching dullness of Iowa. So when worldly Robert Kincaid sweeps into town while her dreary husband is off at the state fair, Francesca is primed and ready to lower her moral guard.

But Robert Kincaid is no simple city slicker. He’s way slicker than that. He’s so damn sophisticated and worldly wise, poor Francesca doesn’t have a prayer.

Here was a guy who exited military service in 1945 and put his job with National Geographic on hold while he went tooling down the coast of California on his motorcycle, running it to Big Sur, where he made love on a beach with a musician from Carmel. Hitting all the hippie stations of the cross.

By the age of fifty-two, our boy has done a couple of tours around the world and visited all the exotic places whose photos he’d once hung on his boyhood walls. The Raffles Bar in Singapore, a riverboat trip up the Amazon, and a camel ride in the desert of Rajasthan.

Robert Kincaid’s rootlessness is a manifestation of a familiar type, the peripatetic American. As we are often reminded, our westward-ho pioneer ancestors were the sons and daughters of the hardy souls who braved the Atlantic to find a new home. It’s as though we’ve been bioengineering our culture for the last three centuries, selecting for a wandering gene.

But for every incurable rover, there seems to be another American who decided, by golly, he’d had enough rambling and unsaddled his team of oxen and staked his claim to a piece of soil and just stayed put. The clash between these two prototypes is a recurring theme in our popular fiction as well as a favorite topic in nonfiction examinations of American culture.

In the 1970s, an era of mass migration to the suburbs and job relocations and general social waywardness, Vance Packard’s A Nation of Strangers became a nonfiction bestseller by warning that the growing American rootlessness was resulting in “a society coming apart at the seams.” The anomie that Packard described, of disintegrating communities and a growing sense of personal anonymity, is part of the backdrop against which Robert and Francesca play out their fairy-tale romance.

After the two lovers have shared a final kiss and said their good-byes, they bump into each other again one last time, where else but on the road. Francesca’s husband is back from his trip, and he’s driving Francesca from the isolated farm into town, and who should randomly appear in his pickup truck but wandering Robert. For a moment as they wait in traffic, separated by only thirty feet, Francesca imagines throwing open the door and running to Robert’s truck and driving away with him. But no, she stays put, “frozen by her responsibilities.”

And so Robert James Waller has given us one of our favorite cakes and let us eat it, too. We’ve vicariously enjoyed a hot and heavy fling between a wandering man and a housebound wife, then we’ve been purified of any guilt by Francesca’s virtuous self-denial.

THE FALSE LABELS WE BELIEVE IN

At times, we Americans glamorize city life and demonize the heartland. But when it suits our purposes, we’re happy to flip those labels to the complete opposite. There seems to be no middle way for us.

During every national election cycle, the heartland takes on a familiar mythic identity in the media. The clichés and stereotypes begin to roll out with a predictable drumbeat: Rural America is suddenly populated with “hardworking,” “blue-collar,” “real” people who value decency and honesty and “kitchen table” issues a whole lot more than city dwellers do, especially those urbanites living near the coasts, who are derided as self-involved elitists out of touch with mainstream values. City life is hopelessly fast-paced and materialistic and shallow, a frenetic, never-ending worship of Mammon, while country living is unhurried and more in touch with the godly virtues of neighborliness and generosity and family devotion, a wide-open space where firearms are proudly hung above the mantel and Old Glory waves in every yard.

Red state vs. blue state. Working-class vs. corporate elite. Virtuous vs. decadent. The Bible-trusting ordinary folks who still believe in the pioneer spirit and refuse to be tamed or corrupted by all those godless messages being broadcast from within the corrupt citadels of metropolitan culture.

In The American Myth of Success, Richard Weiss gives Horatio Alger a good deal of credit for popularizing these stereotypical views:

Alger’s settings are most often in the New York of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and his accurate descriptions of its streets, hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants made his books valuable as guides to those unfamiliar with the city. But his attitude toward the city he described so well was one of hostility. While the city was a place of opportunity, it also was a place of unspeakable corruption and moral turpitude. Virtue resided in the country. If the country boy could survive the city swindlers ready to prey on his innocence, his chances of success were greater than those of his city-bred peers. This was because he was usually stronger morally and had “been brought up to work, and work more earnestly than city boys.” Country boys might come to the city to gain wealth, but city boys could well go to the country for moral regeneration.

While we all know these labels are bogus, they are so ingrained in our sense of national identity that we reflexively embrace them even as we discount their accuracy. This ambivalence toward rural and city values recurs in American bestsellers with such frequency, it’s clear that vast numbers of readers are also fascinated by these competing views of national identity.

ALL OVER THE MAP

Despite all its apparent dangers and vices, again and again urban life is portrayed as the mythic proving ground for popular fiction characters, a place that challenges the likes of Anne Welles and Allison MacKenzie and Mitch McDeere and Scarlett O’Hara. Some survive, some flourish, some (like Atticus Finch) are enlightened by the experience and take that enlightenment home to the country.

When you add it up, our bestseller writers are all over the map when it comes to their use of urban or rural settings. Here’s the rundown:

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 westward 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?

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.

—MARK TWAIN

Our twelve bestsellers all feature religion in prominent ways, consistently critiquing orthodox religious practice and the dangers of zealotry.

According to conventional wisdom, the bestseller of all bestsellers is the Holy Bible—though in fact the book appears only a few times on the annual bestseller lists. Once, in 1952, the revised standard version sold over two million copies and came in at number one. Tallulah, by Tallulah Bankhead (an actress known for her sexual exploits), was nipping at the Bible’s heels at number five. In 1953, the Holy Bible again finished in the number one position on the nonfiction list, followed closely by The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale’s classic how-to book, and coming in at number three was Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, by Alfred C. Kinsey and others.

And again in 1954, the Bible was the largest seller, while Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book came in third, and fourth was Betty Crocker’s Good and Easy Cook Book.

Religion, sex, and homemaking skills. It would be hard to find a more revealing American trifecta than that. More on sex and homemaking in a few pages, but for the moment our focus will be on God, religion, and belief.

GOD SELLS

Religious-themed novels have traditionally sold so well in the United States that most bestseller lists shunt them off into a separate category so the mainstream nonreligious books will have some slim chance of survival.

Even with that rigging of the game, on any given week the fiction bestseller list includes one or two books with a prominent religious orientation. Obviously, the enormous success of books like The Da Vinci Code, or the Left Behind series, or books from long ago like Ben Hur, The Power and the Glory, or Lloyd Cassel Douglas’s The Robe (a number one bestseller in 1953), J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, is based in large measure on their spiritual themes.

Then there are a host of other “inspirational” novels with quasi-religious overtones, such as William Paul Young’s hugely successful bestseller, The Shack, or Richard Bach’s novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which rode atop the bestseller list for two years straight, in 1972 and 1973. Bach claimed the novel was dictated to him by a voice that came from somewhere “behind and to the right.” Okay.

The novel used flight as a metaphor and was variously interpreted to be a celebration of getting high or an ode to man’s miraculous engineering skills. Some saw it merely as a fictional reframing of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, the American Bible of optimism and self-advancement.

Just as Mel Gibson’s 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, made a huge splash by luring to the movie theaters millions of conservative Christians who were not frequent filmgoers, novels that place a heavy emphasis on religious themes certainly attract readers who might otherwise avoid novels altogether. Attracting this part of the reading population is crucial to the making of a megabestseller. For even if every habitual book buyer were to purchase the same individual title, the sales figures would still fall far short of the multimillion level. To swell the ranks of consumers and break into these rarefied zones, a novel needs to catch the attention of large numbers of infrequent book buyers, and the religiously inclined are a common target audience.

SECULARISM

It should come as no surprise that of the dozen books on my list, almost all of them share one ingredient, a strong religious content.

What is surprising, however, is how heretical they are in interpreting what might be considered mainstream religious perspectives. For most of the bestseller authors under review here, skepticism is the shared religious stance. To one degree or another, each of the novels portrays characters afflicted with spiritual doubt. It would seem that the bestselling authors of all time are a collection of freethinkers and agnostics who share a tendency to ridicule religious hypocrisy and aggressively challenge standard orthodoxy.

That’s not to say that the most popular books of all time are hostile to faith and organized religion. Rather, they seem to focus on the worldly consequences of religious practice rather than the spiritual aspects. In a word, the morality of bestsellers is rooted in a vision of culture that we know as secular.

Part of this secularism derives from the history of the novel form itself. As Ian Watt described in The Rise of the Novel: “The relative impotence of religion in Defoe’s novels, then, suggests not insincerity but the profound secularization of his outlook, a secularization which was a marked feature of his age—the word itself in its modern sense dates from the first decades of the eighteenth century.”

In addition to the tendency inherent in the earliest English novels to take a stand against orthodoxy, there is the particular American inclination to raise doubts about religious doctrine. Our forefathers, for all their religiosity, were the first great doubters. Take, for example, Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams concerning the Bible’s literary value:

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

OUTING HYPOCRISY

In American Gospel, Jon Meacham’s fine work on the role religion played in our nation’s development, he describes the unique American tension between the secular and the religious:

A tolerant, pluralistic democracy in which religious and secular forces continually contend against one another may not be ideal, but it has proven to be the most practical and enduring arrangement of human affairs—and we must guard that arrangement well.

Examples of this secular skepticism can be found in all the bestsellers on our list, but let’s start with an episode in To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Scout is sent to Aunt Alexandra’s missionary circle to further her moral education. The missionary ladies are financially supporting Reverend J. Grimes Everett in his attempts to bring Christianity to the Mrunas, a jungle tribe.

Mrs. Merriweather, who was known as “the most devout lady in Maycomb,” gets all weepy when she describes to Scout the terrible plight of the Mrunas and the saintly heroism of J. Grimes Everett, who is the only “white person’ll go near ’em.”

A page later, when Mrs. Merriweather has recovered herself and moved on to other topics, she complains to Mrs. Farrow about some “sulky darky” in her employ, then describes chastising the petulant household worker for not being more like Jesus Christ, who never went around moaning and griping about his plight. This reprimand puts the servant in her place, and Mrs. Merriweather takes satisfaction in having “witnessed for the Lord” in this small moment of racial humiliation.

The juxtaposition of the pious moment with the bigoted remark is no accident. Clearly, Harper Lee has a view of religious authenticity that’s based on core humanistic values rather than hypocritical lip service. Scout is highly sensitive to these contradictions and in her quiet way scorns them.

Even when Scout visits the First Purchase African M.E. Church in the black quarter, she finds the preacher’s message to be sadly flawed. After denouncing sin, he goes on to rail against the “impurity of women,” which Scout observes is a preoccupation of all the preachers she’s encountered.

Despite the misogynist message, Scout is impressed by other aspects of this passionate congregation. Without the means to buy hymnals, they still manage to sing the old songs from memory. They know every word by heart.

Digging deep into their pockets and handbags, this destitute group manages to scratch together ten dollars in dimes and pennies to contribute to the defense fund of the falsely accused Tom Robinson. The sacrifice involved in this tithing is in stark contrast with the sanctimonious blather of Mrs. Merriweather and her missionary ladies. While Harper Lee’s method is indirect, it is nonetheless absolutely clear. Bigotry and false piety often march hand in hand under the banner of Christianity. But mouthing platitudes doesn’t cut it. Even a young girl can spot that old con.

FAITH AND DOUBT

Grace Metalious was every bit as intent on calling out hypocrites as Harper Lee. While Peyton Place is one long castigation of pretenses and false pieties of every sort, religion comes in for more than its share of scolding.

When one of the town’s fine citizens, Marion Partridge, marries into Peyton Place money, she promptly bails out of one church to join another, but not for reasons one might consider religious. Marion abandoned the Baptists for the Congregational Church because the Congregationalists were considered an upscale denomination. The church’s only flaw, as far as Marion was concerned, was that it sometimes admitted “undesirables” into the fold and therefore diminished its snob appeal.

The heroine of the novel, Allison MacKenzie, sounds a highly skeptical note when considering the religious explanations of her pastor, who claims that the Lord hears every word of every prayer. She wants to know, if that’s true, then why does He so rarely answer? Well, the preacher responds, sometimes God just has to turn down our pleas for our own good. Okay, then, Allison wonders, why bother praying at all?

And a few lines later, she takes the same religious stance that in one way or another all these bestsellers do—falling somewhere in a narrow range between doubter and agnostic.

When Allison was younger, she’d prayed day after day for her father to return to the family, but he never showed. Which makes her confront a terrible realization. How could a God capable of miracles not do something so easy? How could He allow a little girl to suffer so? It was this seeming injustice that destroyed Allison’s faith.

SUPERNATURAL CALCULUS

After hearing a plot summary of The Exorcist (a priest exorcises a sadistic satanic force from the soul of a tormented child), most book buyers might reasonably assume they are in for a rip-roaring tale in which religious belief wins out over devilry. But it’s not that simple.

In The Exorcist, Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit priest, is experiencing an agonizing loss of religious faith not unlike Allison MacKenzie’s. He cannot confide in any of his colleagues, for he fears that they’ll consider his reasons for doubt to be signs of insanity. And in various interior monologues, the priest does sound as though he’s teetering on the existential edge. He’s driven to the brink by considering such quotidian horrors as thalidomide babies and young altar boys attacked without provocation and set ablaze. How could a just God allow such vile suffering?

And to make matters worse, God’s silence is driving him even more nuts. Why won’t He reveal Himself? Why won’t God speak to this man of faith, who has pledged his life to God and now is crying out in the most orthodox ways? His faith is in tatters. He’s lost all hope in God’s power.

The fact that Chris MacNeil is an avowed atheist doesn’t keep her from summoning Father Karras to minister to her daughter, Regan, whom she believes is possessed by Satan. Karras, by now a skeptic to the core, tries for most of the novel to find a reasonable, secular explanation for Regan’s behavior. He engages in an ongoing verbal joust with the being inhabiting Regan’s body, a tête-à-tête that is part psychoanalysis and part Jesuit debate. However skillful Father Karras is at explaining away Regan’s extreme behaviors, finally his psychological rationalizations crumble until he is left with only one conclusion: The devil has taken control of the girl.

Well into the novel, the bishop of the diocese consents to an exorcism. The great bulk of the story, however, is devoted to dramatizing Damien’s attempts to use nonreligious explanations to come to grips with what is plainly a satanic possession. When all the scientific, logical approaches fail to help the poor child, Father Karras is forced to fall back on his wavering belief. While the head-spinning horrors and the guttural obscenities coming from the mouth of the girl might be the spice that accelerates the pulse of an average reader, the thematic backbone of the novel is the story of a priest who rediscovers God when he is forced to confront the devil.

It is Merrin, the elderly exorcist, who speaks the lines that are the takeaway religious stance the novel promotes:

Yet I think that the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us … the observers … every person in this house. And I think—I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity … to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent.… For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us.…

Merrin dies before the exorcism is complete, and Father Karras must step in to battle on. In a scene that is withheld from us, Karras is ultimately victorious, the devil is purged, and the girl is saved, though Karras sacrifices his own life to the cause. As he lies dying on the sidewalk outside the MacNeil house, Karras receives final absolution. Since he is unable to speak to the priest administering the last rites, it is debatable whether Karras accepts this formal blessing willingly or not.

In any case, it is Chris MacNeil who has the last words on faith and religion in this novel that has been fixated on both. She says to Karras that despite everything she’s witnessed, she’s still a nonbeliever. But on the other hand, she has come to believe that the devil is very real. Very, very real.

Is it Karras’s final acceptance of God’s mercy and power or Chris’s rejection of the same that stands as the novel’s coda? Whichever view appears overriding in a reader’s mind probably depends on the predispositions that reader brought to the novel. The remarkable fact is, however, that the secular position is given the last word, and in the supernatural bookkeeping of The Exorcist, it costs two priests to take down a single manifestation of the devil. That is what is known these days as an unsustainable economy.

UNCOMMON SENSE

When Kay Adams Corleone at last learns the true nature of her husband’s criminal enterprise, her first reaction is to seek out a priest for instruction to become a Catholic. In the final lines of this bloody novel full of brutal revenge killings and murderous power plays, Kay goes to church.

She kneels in supplication, bows her head, folds her hands over the rail, and “with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe,” she says prayers for the eternal soul of Michael Corleone.

That her deeply willed desire to believe is actual belief is dubious. Certainly Mario Puzo’s muted skepticism pervades this moment. After Michael Corleone has piled up four hundred pages of mortal sins, it seems unlikely that his soul can be saved by his wife, a new and wavering convert. Michael is, after all, the Godfather—a secular God if there ever was one.

In Jaws, the shark is considered by many in the town to be “an act of God,” and its eventual destruction requires the deaths of several sacrificial lambs. Hooper, the shark expert called in to aid the seaside community, is awestruck by the fish, while Quint, the old salt who has been hired to kill it, begs to differ. Hooper believes the shark is a thing of beauty that shows the awesome power of nature and therefore confirms the existence of God.

Horseshit, is Quint’s reply.

Later, Quint and Sheriff Brody discuss the religious implications of the shark’s appearance, Brody mentioning the woman back in town who believes the shark is some kind of divine retribution.

But Quint, who puts no stock in religion, replies that the shark’s appearance is simply “bad luck.”

In the last lines of the novel, Brody survives the great white’s final assault and watches as Quint is yanked overboard and drawn down into the sea in a posture that evokes the crucifixion, “arms out to the sides, head thrown back.…” A secular version of Jesus Christ, dying for the secular sins of others.

If the shark is truly God’s way of reminding the townsfolk of His awesome power, then it damn well worked. But for Quint, who stands as the larger-than-life voice of the common man, the alternative vision is one of randomness and accident—an existential universe in which God’s will plays no part whatsoever. It is Quint, like Scout and Chris MacNeil, who voices the commonsense skepticism that undergirds the moral position of each of these books.

A COMMONER’S COMMON SENSE

Common sense, not religious conviction, is also a major tenet of Scarlett O’Hara’s worldview. At the graveside ceremony when her father, Gerald, is laid to rest, the religiously formal Ashley Wilkes intones a few solemn clichés, then is followed by Will, a simple farmer who speaks off-the-cuff about the death of Mr. O’Hara.

Scarlett … did feel comforted. Will was talking common sense instead of a lot of tootle about reunions in another and better world and submitting her will to God’s.

Throughout the novel, Scarlett’s religious beliefs are childish and shallow, characterized less by faith and devotion than by a ruthless pragmatism. For Scarlett, religion is nothing more than a bargaining chip. She has always made promises to God in exchange for some return on her investment. Since God had been such an unreliable business partner, “to her way of thinking, she felt that she owed Him nothing at all.…”

Indeed, for a character so deeply loved by so many readers, Scarlett O’Hara is surprisingly blasphemous. Like Allison MacKenzie and Father Karras, she’s lost faith. Scarlett refuses to believe in a God who won’t respond to the million other prayers sent to Him daily on behalf of the Confederacy.

She’s forsaken church and no longer prays. Her spiritual outlook is secularist, pure and simple. A humanistic view that is rooted in a commoner’s common sense rather than in the rituals and liturgical ceremonies of the ecumenical elite.

Scarlett’s skeptical views are echoed by those of John Smith in The Dead Zone. Johnny’s paranormal abilities have given him a vision of a disastrous future if Greg Stillson is elected president of the United States. Oh, and by the way, remember, Greg Stillson got his start as a con man selling, of all things, Bibles.

Debating whether to go ahead with his plans to assassinate Stillson, John anguishes over God’s failure to do the job first. He wonders why God would allow such an evil man as Greg Stillson to flourish. Why has God left it to Johnny to do His dirty work?

Even Jack Ryan, an otherwise play-it-by-the-book hero, squirms uncomfortably when asked by a Russian sub captain if he believes in God. Ryan fumbles a bit, then says sure, yeah, he believes in God, “because if you don’t, what’s the point of life? That would mean Sartre and Camus and all those characters were right—all is chaos, life has no meaning. I refuse to believe that.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of religious faith. Ryan believes in God only because to do otherwise would be to support Camus “and all those characters.” Meaning, I suppose, the French.

THE POWER OF BLASPHEMY

Could there be a more secular novel about religion than The Da Vinci Code?

Sophie was skeptical. “You think the Church killed my grandfather?”

Teabing replied, “It would not be the first time in history the Church has killed to protect itself. The documents that accompany the Holy Grail are explosive, and the Church has wanted to destroy them for years.”

Secularism is one thing, but seeming to charge the Catholic Church with serial murder is a whole different animal. Is it any wonder that Vatican officials were outraged over the novel’s assertions or that dozens of books sprang up to challenge fictional anti-Catholic claims that were taken seriously by many readers?

The narrative dynamics of The Da Vinci Code are clear. The protagonist, Robert Langdon, is a man of science, while his antagonists are men of the cloth. The conflict at the crux of the novel is a clash between science and faith, between academics and clerics, between reason and mysticism. Or between secularism and religion.

Consider the way Robert Langdon, the high priest of rationality, explains away religious belief to his love interest/student Sophie. He feels sure that he could provide hard evidence that contradicted the holy stories of every religious belief system, from Islam to Buddhism. He suggests that he could even demonstrate that Christ’s virgin birth was just a metaphor, not a literal fact as so many devout believers assume. But Langdon has decided to let the poor fools stay deluded, for he believes that religious allegory (the lies that religion tells, like Christ actually walking on actual water) is a useful coping mechanism for millions of religious folks. Why spoil their fun?

As spokesman for puzzle solvers everywhere, Robert Langdon is the ultimate secularist. Everything can be explained. All mysteries, all supernatural phenomena, all religious faith, can be dissected and reduced to their component parts. For Robert, there is no rapture beyond logic and reason.

It’s striking that millions of readers, many of them presumably devout believers in one religion or another, could be so swept up by a novel whose central character devotes so much of his time not only debunking Christian symbolism but challenging the very idea of religious belief.

No doubt part of the extraordinary appeal of this work of fiction derives from its handling of religious matters in so direct a fashion. Whether those readers share Langdon’s view that “every faith in the world is based on fabrication” or not, they were clearly energized and possibly even flattered by seeing organized religion take center stage and its iconography and art elucidated in fresh and surprising ways.

FEATURE #9

American Dream/American Nightmare

I’ve not only pursued the American dream, I’ve achieved it. I suppose we could say the last few years, I’ve also achieved the American nightmare.

—KENNETH LAY, CEO, ENRON

Americans delight in reenactments of our national myths. The rise from humble roots to become rich and powerful. A character struggling against injustice and, finally, triumphing over oppression. And we are also grimly fascinated by the flip side of these stories.

Although Horatio Alger’s novels, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, didn’t invent the “rags to riches” story line (folkloric versions like “Cinderella” were around for centuries), Alger’s stories certainly helped to crystallize the vocabulary of a central part of what we’ve come to call “the American Dream.”

Writing what today might be termed “young adult novels” such as Ragged Dick and Adrift in the City; or, Oliver Conrad’s Plucky Fight, Alger introduced into the national consciousness an image of down-and-out ragamuffins who, through sweat and labor, determination, and a hard-nosed sense of justice, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and achieved some measure of wealth and social success. The heroes of these tales were most often orphaned boys with abundant street smarts who weren’t afraid of a fistfight as a last resort against the advances of a bully.

There is the air of the fairy tale about Alger’s novels. But the foremost achievement of Alger’s work was to develop a clear and vivid narrative that dramatized one of our most treasured national myths: that even the poorest and most disenfranchised among us can achieve prosperity, material wealth, and personal freedom.

THE NIGHTMARE STORIES

While we yearn to believe in these optimistic principles, at the same time Americans seem to take a grim satisfaction in watching the opposite pattern unfold. We love with equal fervor to watch our national myths foiled, to see their limits, their frailty, sometimes even their emptiness.

These are the nightmare stories: a pious, God-fearing community that is racked by hypocrisy and double-dealing and crimes against morality (Peyton Place); the smart, talented, attractive young women who journey off to the big city seeking fame and fortune (and husbands), only to find the tragic hollowness and unimaginable perils of that dream (Valley of the Dolls); the ordinary all-American young man who lives by a Boy Scout’s modest and hardworking creed but falls victim to unthinkable horrors (The Dead Zone).

What about John Smith’s doppelgänger, the sharp, obsessively studious boy from the shabby trailer park who makes his way to Harvard Law School, then lands his dream job in America’s heartland (The Firm)? Ah, yes. Mitch McDeere will meet the dark side of the American Dream as well and make a fatal Faustian bargain, taking a low-interest loan and shiny new BMW in exchange for his own soul, his marriage, and possibly his life.

In Mitch’s case, his belief in the American Dream remains unshakable even after his discovering that very dream has betrayed him and put everything he loves at risk. He takes a breath, summons his courage, and gives it one more college try, proceeding to outwit the Mob, the FBI, and his lethal legal brethren, then sailing off into the sunset of everlasting retirement.

AMERICA HAS BEEN GOOD TO ME

And there’s Bonasera, an outraged father who at the outset of The Godfather pleads for Don Corleone’s help in getting revenge on the boys who beat and tried to rape his daughter. The boys were released by the courts, and now Bonasera comes to the Godfather for the justice he had trusted the legal system of his adopted country to deliver. “America has been good to me. I wanted to be a good citizen. I wanted my child to be American.”

Don Corleone dismisses poor Bonasera for making the mistake of putting his faith in America, not in the Godfather. Later, during a meeting of all the Mafia heads from around the country, Don Corleone makes a statesmanlike speech about what he feels is a belief that binds these criminals together, a belief in the American Dream.

By refusing to be puppets manipulated by the power elite, Don Corleone and his fellow Mafia leaders have laid the foundation for future generations of Corleones. Their children have found better lives. They are scientists and musicians and professors, and no doubt the next generation will “become the new pezzonovanti” (the new big shots, or ruling class). And who knows about the Don’s grandchildren. Maybe there is a future governor among them, even a president. For “nothing’s impossible here in America.”

When the Don’s son Michael reveals the true nature of the “family business” to Kay Adams, his white bread Protestant fiancée, he echoes nearly word for word his father’s views on the American Dream.

He wants his kids to be raised under Kay Adams’s influence, for them to grow up all-American kids. And he too holds out hope that one of them, or maybe someone in the next generation of his family, will become president of the United States. Why not? Michael learned in a history course at Dartmouth that some of our most revered presidents were raised by fathers “who were lucky they didn’t get hanged.”

THE IMMIGRANT NARRATIVE

If any single creed serves as the foundation for our national sense of self, it’s the promise of social mobility. That hard work and fair play will be rewarded. Anyone can become a star, and conversely, it’s all too possible for stardom to turn into a hellish fall from grace (Valley of the Dolls).

Even an eight-year-old girl in a tiny racist town can change the course of human events, as Scout does when she thwarts a lynching. Even a small-town cop who is deathly afraid of the water can go out to sea and help destroy a great white shark that is terrorizing his precinct. And even Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled girl-child with few worldly skills beyond coquetry, uses those skills to full advantage, managing with ruthless determination to flourish as an entrepreneur, then save Tara from the Yankee invaders and the carpetbaggers.

Rhett Butler warns Scarlett that a woman has only two choices: She can either make money and be unladylike and be ostracized by polite society, or she can be poor and well mannered and have lots of friends. Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett says about all that ladylike reputation stuff. She goes on to make her Atlanta lumber mill into a cash machine that supports the rebuilding of her first and only true love, Tara. She’s a capitalist wizard, using her heaving bosom and come-hither eyes to win husband after husband, each one lifting her to a higher income bracket.

That’s not to say Scarlett doesn’t get her hands dirty in a salute to the American virtue of hard work. After the war, back at Tara, she picks cotton, raises vegetables, and masters every skill the “darkies” used to handle. She replicates her own father’s immigrant narrative, starting with nothing, forced to stoop and scratch and eventually rebuild her lost empire through the sweat of her brow and a crafty use of her feminine charms.

At one point, so desperate to raise three hundred dollars to pay the Yankee taxes that threaten to steal Tara away from her, she decides she must attempt to seduce Rhett Butler, who is being held in an Atlanta prison. Without a gown or fitting frock to wear on this crucial mission of enticement, she pulls down the velvet drapes in Tara’s dining room and fashions a fetching dress that she just knows will assist her scheme. Rhett is fooled for a moment or two, until he takes her hands in his and sees how roughened they are from the manual labor she’s been doing back at Tara. He scoffs at her silly attempts to actually toil her way to prosperity. She’s better than that, Rhett believes, more shrewd. He counsels her simply to use her feminine wiles as he uses his masculine ones to gain what advantage she can.

Rhett’s rejection doesn’t thwart her. Moments after leaving the jail, Scarlett is still wearing the drapery dress when she bumps into Frank Kennedy, a successful store owner. Ah-ha. A quick pivot, and she’s got a new potential husband within her sights. The one minor inconvenience with lassoing Kennedy is that he’s the fiancé of her own sister Sue Ellen. But Scarlett brushes that aside and goes neatly from one man to the next, stealing her sister’s beau, latching on to yet another man who can write a check on her behalf.

Scarlett is a whirlwind of cunning and free enterprise craftiness. Maybe her old way of life has been destroyed and the Confederacy defeated, but Scarlett is destined to turn America’s greatest nightmare into her own version of the American Dream.

THE BOOTSTRAP MYTH

The power of individuals to change their own destiny, to rise or fall on the basis of their skills, their smarts, their craftiness, is at the core of each of these novels. No matter how insuperable the problem may be (finding a tiny needle like the Red October in the huge haystack of the Atlantic Ocean), a modest, unassuming, straight-talking, down-to-earth ordinary man with a little ingenuity and determination can save the day—or in Jack Ryan’s case, the world.

As I’ve noted, the novel from its very beginning has been unabashedly democratic. Any reader, no matter his or her race, creed, social class, or previous educational training, is invited to enter freely. And the writers of bestsellers seem abundantly aware of their duty to keep all comers entertained with stories of success, the triumph of social mobility, or its evil twin, the cautionary tale of disaster.

For it’s clear that in these bestsellers there is a right way and a wrong way to attain the American Dream. Take Hollywood mogul Jack Woltz, a man Don Corleone wants a small favor from. Woltz is a self-made man just like Vito Corleone, but there’s something un-American about his makeover.

When he turned fifty, Woltz began to take speech lessons, hired an English valet to teach him how to dress, and employed an English butler to instruct him on social rules. He became a collector of paintings and sculpture and a patron of the arts. All this would be enough to put Woltz on the Don’s blacklist, but what really seals his fate is turning down the Don’s business deal, an act of disrespect that leads to Woltz waking up in bed next to the decapitated head of his prized horse Khartoum.

By comparing Woltz’s hoity-toity vision of the American Dream with Don Corleone’s rise from poverty, we get a vivid contrast between the false version of the dream and the authentic one.

To escape Mafia violence in his homeland, young Vito Corleone was sent off to America at the age of twelve to live with friends. As a youngster in his adopted land, he labors in a grocery store and after a few years marries a sixteen-year-old Sicilian girl and settles down in a Tenth Avenue tenement.

But Vito Corleone is destined for greater things. He will lift himself up from destitution and hardship through the use of intelligence and icy courage. After murdering a neighborhood tyrant named Fanucci, who was reputed to be a member of an offshoot of the Mafia, Vito settles into the olive oil business. Largely because of the respect (and fear) he’s earned through removing Fanucci’s ruthless rule in the neighborhood, his business flourishes, and Vito begins to employ a certain leverage to make it flourish faster. His business plan sounds like a dark parody of a Wharton School MBA course.

Vito Corleone spent years building up his business until Genco Pura was the bestselling imported oil in the whole country. He undercut his business rivals in price, he strong-armed store owners to buy less of his competitors’ brands, and once his rivals were in a weakened position, he tried to buy them out. Since his olive oil was not in any way superior to the others on the market, it was the Don’s own reputation as a “man of respect” that gave him a stranglehold on the imported olive oil industry. The fact that he had a reputation as a cold-blooded murderer certainly didn’t hurt his rise.

Part of The Godfather’s immense popularity is no doubt due to its sly straddling of these two positions. On the one hand, the novel portrays a group of cutthroat criminals who use whatever bloody means necessary to succeed; on the other hand, the book could as easily be described as a tribute to the prototypical immigrant family, whose traditional American moral virtues (the Don refuses to deal drugs, for instance) and loyalty to friends and family allow them to overcome great obstacles and escape a life of poverty.

AMERICAN CYNICISM

The dark side of the American Dream is an equal and opposite force in nearly all of these megabestsellers. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, the black man who is falsely accused of rape, is found guilty of the crime, though it is clear to everyone in the courtroom down to the youngest child (our girl Scout) that he is innocent. Justice is not even close to being just. While Atticus might take some solace in the fact that the jury took an especially long time to hash out their guilty verdict, that small step toward judicial fairness is small indeed and might seem more like a sad rationalization of bigotry than a hopeful view of social progress.

Similarly, cynicism toward the American Dream of success drips off every page of Peyton Place. Like the story of Roberta and Harmon Carter, a married couple with one son who live on a street that was considered the “second best” in Peyton Place. They could easily afford to live on the best street or even build a twenty-room castle if they weren’t concerned about appearing ostentatious. Drawing attention to themselves is a little dangerous because these two conned their way to their improved social class status.

When they were young, Harmon Carter and Roberta Welch were an item. But it was clear to Harmon that his job as an accountant at the local mill was not exactly the fast track to the American Dream. So he planted a sinister seed in Roberta’s mind by giving her constant reminders of the likely trajectory of their economic life together.

It’ll be paycheck to paycheck, he tells her, the grim life of an office worker. She deserves more than that, he assures her. Roberta should have furs and diamonds and the most fashionable clothes. But none of those wonderful material possessions will ever come her way with him stuck in a dead-end job.

Though Roberta claims she loves Harmon and always will, whether they are rich or poor, clever Harmon will have none of that, and he turns her argument around, saying if she loves him that much, then that deep love will not desert her while she’s married to Old Doc Quimby, the rich man whose house she cleans.

Roberta caves, and the scheming devils put their plan in motion. Of course, poor Old Doc falls for Roberta’s seduction, and all of Peyton Place has a good long snicker. The Doc gradually realizes what a fool he’s been, and a couple of weeks before the first anniversary of his marriage to Roberta Welch, Doc Quimby presses his revolver to his temple and kills himself.

Roberta inherits the Doc’s loot and promptly marries Harmon. Bingo, they’ve just won the American Dream grand prize. Before long they produce a son, Ted, and they buy a far nicer house than they could have afforded on Harmon’s accountant salary. But wait—the last laugh may be on them.

Ted, their pride and joy, falls hard for Selena Cross. Unfortunately, Selena is the town slut who lives in one of those tar-paper shacks over on the wrong side of the tracks. She’s damaged goods, the stepdaughter of a drunk. Selena is never, ever going to have a sniff of the American Dream. And it is Selena who becomes an unpleasant reminder to Roberta and Harmon Carter of their own shabby social backgrounds and their scamming of Doc Quimby.

Ted graduates from the university, planning to return to Peyton Place and marry Selena and build a house on a hill, with lots of windows. He’s going to be a lawyer and save Selena from her hard-luck destiny. The two of them will rewrite the perverted script Ted’s parents read from. They’ll act out a true Horatio Alger narrative.

In the end, young Ted Carter decides that love is not all it’s cracked up to be, as so often is the case in this harsh rendering of American family values. The night before he’s to take Selena’s hand, he begins to hear his parents’ hard-eyed practicality whispering in his head. After a sentence or two of debating the subject with himself, Ted decides it would be best if he dumped his fiancée. And in a blink, she’s gone from his heart.

There must be something in the water in Peyton Place, some potent truth serum that forces characters to admit that the glittery promise of America is a damnable lie. Maybe the town was cursed from the beginning. After all, the place was named for Samuel Peyton, a black slave who escaped his master and ran off to France, married a white French lady, and returned to America during the Civil War to flaunt the wealth and refinement he’d scored abroad.

The folks around those backwoods where Samuel and his white wife settled didn’t take kindly to that biracial union or the general uppitiness of Peyton. Even though Samuel had fulfilled the American Dream by making a fortune in Europe, enough money to buy a medieval castle and import it stone for stone to be rebuilt along the river in this valley that became known as Peyton Place.

Ostracized by the locals, he and his wife eventually retreated inside their castle walls and became the Mr. and Mrs. Boo Radley of New England. What was that black man thinking? That this was America, land of the free? Did he really fall for that old claptrap that if a man simply worked hard and made good, he could overcome the darkness of his skin? Well, we showed him!

Samuel Peyton’s warped fairy tale is the inspiration for the novel Allison MacKenzie is trying to write. By the last few chapters, Allison has freed herself from the small-town pettiness and gone to the big city to live out her dreams of fame and fortune. She’s broken into the book business, finding a job with a literary agent, and she’s happily banging out her novel. She’s not the least bit shy about staking her claim to the low road of bestsellerdom.

In fact, the novel she’s working on sounds an awful lot like Peyton Place. Her agent, Brad Holmes, loves the book, though he may be a little biased since he’s sleeping with the author. When Allison pitches her novel to David Noyes, a young up-and-comer who writes big books of “social significance,” David lets his snobbery out of the closet and mocks Allison for wanting to write for such shallow motivations as fame and money. But she stands firm. Not everyone can be a brilliant boy genius, the next big thing in literature. She’s content to stay on the low road of commercial fiction, writing the best book she can, even if there are those like David who consider the results trashy. The scene between them comes as close as any in these twelve novels to making a case for the inherent integrity of bestsellers.

THE YIN AND YANG OF THE

AMERICAN DREAM

Allison MacKenzie should have held out for a writer-boyfriend like Stephen King. Now there’s a man who knows a thing or two about fame and money and more than a little about the American Dream and its twisted fun-house mirror image.

The Dead Zone gives us a story of two converging characters who represent the yin and yang of the American Dream. One is the all-American, hardworking, though otherwise unexceptional John Smith, whose accidental fall on an ice-covered pond sets off a serious attack of paranormal powers. Johnny never wanted anything more than to marry Sarah, his sweetheart, teach school, raise a family, and enjoy the modest fruits of his very conventional labor. Now look at what he’s got to deal with. The power to change the world.

On a collision course with John Smith is Greg Stillson, who begins his career as a door-to-door Bible salesman working the rural circuit. The first time we meet him he’s knocking on a farmhouse door when a guard dog advances on him with its ears back. Stillson makes short work of the dog, shooting it, then finishing it off with a series of savage kicks.

After he’s dispatched the poor beast and is sitting comfortably in his car, he coldly dismisses the incident and the dog blood on his shoes, musing instead on his dreams for the future.

It won’t be long before Greg Stillson has left Bible selling far behind and is using his con man’s skills to work his way up the political ladder.

Along the way, Stillson’s ascent to power in the political circles of New Hampshire catches John Smith’s notice. By late in the novel, John has become something of an amateur political scientist and is fond of attending rallies so he can shake the hands of candidates, because making this skin-to-skin contact allows him to use his precognitive skills to see which of them will make good leaders.

Before John can confirm anything definite about Stillson by meeting the man flesh to flesh, he’s decided he doesn’t like Stillson’s policies one bit. In fact, some of them seem downright scary to Johnny. Under Stillson’s leadership, the library budget has been cut (a major sin in any book lover’s world). During the same period of Stillson’s reign, the police have gotten a 40 percent increase in their budget, which includes new cruisers and riot gear and military weapons. Stillson shuts the teen rec center, imposes a curfew for kids under sixteen, and cuts welfare by a third.

Gradually, a dreadful question takes root in John Smith’s mind: “If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?”

Whether Stillson, this dog-killing, neocon crackpot, is actually as dangerous and evil as Hitler is beside the point. John Smith thinks he is, and his prescience has been proved right enough times to virtually guarantee the truth of his suspicions. If Johnny can’t find a way to foil Stillson’s steady rise, chances are good Greg Stillson will become the next president of the United States, and Johnny sees Apocalypse written all over that.

The linked destinies of these two men is a fitting metaphor for the way the American Dream and the American Nightmare intertwine in most of the bestsellers under review. John Smith sacrifices his own life to spare the world the cataclysm of Stillson’s presidency. The good boy neutralizes the bad.

It’s worth noting that had the story been rendered from a political angle slightly different from Stephen King’s, Stillson’s version could easily sound like a tragic telling of the American Dream: Stillson, a fatherless youth who rose from poverty through hard work and devotion to public service, was on the verge of staking claim to the highest office in the land when he was brought down by an underachieving kook who believed he was a psychic.

That these two versions of the American Dream story are so easily interchangeable is testament to the ambivalence that bestseller writers and readers of bestsellers seem to feel toward the subject.

On the one hand, this American belief in the “rags to riches” possibilities of our nation is an honorable and compelling pillar of our national identity. On the other hand, there are those who regularly exploit these worthy dreams of the people of America with false rhetoric and thereby manage to swindle their way to a higher station than they truly deserve. From Mark Twain to Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis and Stephen King, bestseller writers have served a dual purpose in this regard: to tap into the wellspring of belief that so many Americans share, reinvigorate the righteous optimism and promise of their nation, while at the same time issuing a bitter “Humbug!” against the shysters and frauds who prey on this very sincerity.

THE GOLDEN PROMISE OF AMERICA

The last word on the American Dream must go to Tom Clancy, whose hero, Jack Ryan, in The Hunt for Red October rescues the world from certain thermonuclear war by using the golden promise of America to close the deal with a Soviet defector.

Were it not for Clancy’s novel, we’d not have a single representative on the list of bestsellers that actually makes a wholehearted case for Horatio Alger’s version of the American story. With Reaganesque audacity, Clancy paints the Soviet Union as a drab and evil empire, one whose bankrupt socialism, so full of fraud and incompetence, almost leads to World War III.

Marko Ramius, a heralded submarine commander, loses his wife, Natalia, in a series of bungled medical procedures that are described in Clancy’s usual painstaking detail. Thanks to a widespread shortage of the French pharmaceutical-grade antibiotic ordinarily distributed to Soviet clinics, a batch of vials filled with distilled water had been surreptitiously substituted and administered, which put Natalia into a coma and eventually caused her death.

Faithless, bereaved, and enraged, Ramius puts together an audacious plan to abscond to the United States, where presumably such medical errors do not occur and where one’s faith can be restored.

What propels Ramius across the cold and gloomy depths of the Atlantic is partly revulsion toward a failed political system and partly the overpowering allure of the American Dream.

By the time Jack Ryan has managed to bond with Ramius, the American continent, glowing with bright promise, is only a few hours distant. With nervous excitement, Lieutenant Kamarov, one of Ramius’s fellow defectors, wants to know if the Soviet crewmen will be subjected to “political education” when they come ashore. Ryan laughs and explains to the lieutenant that someone will eventually take a couple of hours to explain how America works. Afterward he’ll be free to criticize the nation like every other citizen. Then Ryan admits he’s never lived in a country that wasn’t free, so maybe he doesn’t appreciate his homeland as much as he should.

Surely the implication of Ryan’s admission is that many of Clancy’s readers might also be guilty of taking for granted the freedoms they enjoy. In that sense, The Hunt for Red October is offered as an entertaining political education, a reminder to the mass reader that such freedoms are safeguarded by the likes of stalwarts like Jack Ryan. No wonder it was one of President Reagan’s favorite stories.

As the submarine full of Soviet traitors cruises ever closer to the promised land of America, they are treated to a video of Spielberg’s ET. When the movie is finished, the assembled Communists have been brought to tears, proclaiming that the film is magnificent. One of them wants to know if all American children are so brave and free.

Ryan, honest to a fault, explains that the movie was shot in California, where parents are a bit permissive and kids a little more liberated than they are in other parts of the country. But still, he points out, on the whole American kids are a lot more independent than Soviet kids.

The Clancy version of political education continues as the defectors reach dry land. Since diplomatic conventions require these arriving Soviet sailors to be returned to their motherland unless they make a last-minute decision to defect, their military escorts give the sailors a little capitalistic brainwashing: the American Dream guided tour.

The men are welcomed aboard a VIP transport plane, given cigarettes and liquor, taken up to twenty thousand feet, and wooed by a running commentary on all the glorious abundance below. Their guide points out the vast middle-class neighborhoods where ordinary folks with ordinary jobs live.

Welcome to the shining city on the hill. Welcome to our vast and jam-packed cornucopias of materialism. Give ’em a look at Wal-Mart and Costco and they’ll defect every time.

When Ryan happens to mention American supermarkets, one of the Soviet officers demands he explain what such a thing is. It’s a building as big as a soccer field, Ryan tells them, full of fresh fruit and vegetables and every kind of food imaginable.

Fresh fruit in winter? The Soviets can’t believe it. Oh, yes, Ryan tells them. Hell, America even pays their farmers not to grow things. That’s how lush, abundant, and overflowing with goodies our country is. And the sales pitch goes on:

If you have money, you can buy nearly anything you want. The average family in America makes something like twenty thousand dollars a year, I guess.

Twenty thousand a year in 1985, when this novel was published, must have seemed an amazing sum to a Soviet defector. It might still. But surely the American Dream is something more than this, something more noble and slightly less tacky than the dollar figure of an average worker’s yearly income.

By the final pages of the novel, Captain Ramius is on the last leg of his seafaring journey, riding aboard a tug toward the American shore, still questioning whether he made the right choice in abandoning his Soviet homeland. And Jack Ryan, flag-waver to the end, starts in again with his mantra, the hymn that all of us sing to ourselves from time to time when we are trying to remind ourselves what makes our American citizenship so unique and so dear.

As they approach the harbor entrance, their tug slows to a crawl. Ramius wants to know why they’ve cut back their engines, and Commander Bart Mancuso replies that the pilot has to be careful of civilian traffic, like some guy in a sailboat with the same rights as the big vessels steaming into port. A sailboat so small that it wouldn’t even show up on radar.

“It’s a free country, Captain,” Ryan said softly. “It will take you some time to understand what free really means.”

Sometimes the dream of social mobility that so inspired and energized Horatio Alger, and is such a cornerstone of American bestsellers, has little to do with the movement to a higher income level. At times it can simply refer to the freedom to move from one place to another unhindered by the almighty ships of state.

FEATURE #10

A Dozen Mavericks

The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.

—R. W. B. LEWIS,

THE AMERICAN ADAM

The heroes and heroines of our twelve bestsellers are all rebels, loners, misfits, or mavericks. They don’t fit in worth a damn, and that’s one of the reasons we love them so much.

At the close of the novel that bears his name, Huck Finn realizes, dadgum it, he can’t let himself get tangled up in the apron strings of the spinster aunt who wants to be his guardian. During his rafting journey down the Mississippi, he’s learned too much about the conformity, hypocrisy, and double-dealing of respectable folks like Aunt Sally to ever feel comfortable living among them again, and in the final lines of that American classic, Huck makes his declaration of independence:

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

As literary critic Northrop Frye once noted, the recurring hero of many American novels is “placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.”

In other words, he’s a maverick.

James Garner played this familiar role in a 1960s television series set in the Old West. He was a gambler and reluctant gunslinger and a tumbling tumbleweed without destination or much sense of loyalty. In Top Gun, Tom Cruise, playing a fighter jet pilot, uses the same handle as his nickname. Or take our recent national election in which both the presidential candidate and his running mate, each of them citizens of the New West, adopted maverick as their brand.

In our popular culture and folklore, this term has a venerated status. Indeed, the word itself owns a colorful American pedigree. It derives from the surname of one Samuel Maverick (1803–1870), a Texas lawyer and ranch owner whose name entered our lexicon because he refused to brand his cattle. He took this radical position not in defiance of the customs of the time, but because he found the labors of ranching to be too damn much trouble.

So there you go. The word we’ve come to identify with rebels, bohemians, trailblazers, dissenters, loners, nonconformists, extremists, malcontents, independents, insurgents, eccentrics, oddballs, free spirits, outsiders, hermits, recluses, strangers, outcasts, pariahs, and exiles originates from a lawyer who was so indifferent toward his ranching duties that he couldn’t be bothered to burn his insignia into the hides of his herd. An act of laziness as much as rebellion.

Surely even after all these years, a molecule or two of Samuel’s indolence lingers in the word maverick, reminding us that there can sometimes be a razor-thin difference between a maverick and a slacker.

Our old friend Henry David Thoreau will do for one quintessentially American example. Thoreau turned his back on civilization and experimented with a Spartan existence for a couple of years beside Walden Pond in what he claimed was an act of mutiny against the puritanical dogmas of his time. Yet all that journal writing and introspection in the drowsy Concord forest certainly has a tinge of indolence.

Thoreau’s pragmatic, law-abiding neighbors were no doubt unmoved when their freeloading neighbor, the dreamy transcendentalist, was hauled away to jail for tax evasion. Rebellion is one thing, doing your fair share for the public good is another.

A similar tension between mavericks and conventionalists operates at the core of the biggest bestsellers of all time. Scarlett O’Hara, Allison MacKenzie, Scout Finch, Anne Welles, Michael Corleone, Chris MacNeil, Sheriff Martin Brody, John Smith, Jack Ryan, Mitch McDeere, Robert Kincaid, and Robert Langdon each in his or her own way does righteous battle against the forces of conformity and repression.

Every one of them is a maverick of one denomination or another. Most are teetering on the brink of flat-out rejection of conventional society and are ready to embrace an individualist isolation from the customs of the mass culture.

THE EBB AND FLOW OF ORTHODOXY

Social scientists who chart such things have long been fascinated with the American tendency to tout individualism in one decade, then urge conformity in the next—reliable mood swings that seem to occur every ten years or so. In the postwar 1920s, for instance, there was something known as the “hometown mind,” a form of groupthink that acted as a restraining pressure on the new, young individualists with “subtle compulsions” not to speak out frankly or act out sexually. The flappers vs. the moralists.

During the decade of the twenties, the flappers mostly won the day, and mavericks of every kind flourished and could be found spouting their views in literary journals and over shots of absinthe in Parisian Left Bank cafés.

During the Great Depression, calls for more personal and sexual freedom subsided, and the conformity pendulum lurched back the other way for a good long stay. In her sociological study In Conflict No Longer, Irene Thomson found that in the 1930s (a period during which Gone with the Wind was written and To Kill a Mockingbird was set), the heroes and heroines in mass magazine fiction no longer favored “self-realization over and above group definitions.” Instead, the most widely read stories of that decade depicted individuals making adjustments to fit into the larger social context.

While the ebb and flow of gray flannel conformity and tie-dyed counterculture rebellion clearly exists in the national culture at large, these twelve bestsellers are consistent in the stands they take regarding these issues. Scarlett and Scout and Mitch McDeere and Allison MacKenzie and Johnny Smith don’t blithely accept the prevailing views or social pressures exerted by their families or the citizens of their towns, even if it means public disapproval or risking their lives to act in ways they believe are right.

Over the last century, the heroes and heroines who consistently strike the deepest chord for American novel readers have remained those who reject the pressures and deadening effects of conformity and strike out for new territory.

SCARLETT AND RHETT,

A COUPLE OF MAVERICKS

From early on, Scarlett thinks of herself as a clashing mixture of her parents’ unique bloodlines, her mother’s “soft-voiced, overbred Coast aristocrat mingled with the shrewd, earthy blood of an Irish peasant.… It was the same conflicting emotion that made her desire to appear a delicate and high-bred lady with boys and to be, as well, a hoyden who was not above a few kisses.” “Hoyden,” meaning part heathen, part tomboy, and all maverick.

With self-conscious contempt for conventional good manners, Rhett Butler sets himself apart the first moment we meet him at the Wilkeses’ barbecue, where he sneers at the assembly of gentlemen who are salivating at the prospect of war. He takes the floor, exuding his special blend of contempt and faux courtesy.

Rhett knows his lecture will be badly received by these airy-fairy cavaliers, but he forges on anyway, telling them what they least want to hear. How many cannon factories are there south of the Mason-Dixon Line? How many iron foundries? What about woolen mills or tanneries or cotton factories? And what about our lack of a navy? Yankee ships could easily blockade southern harbors, and then how would we sell our cotton? All the rebels have is a bunch of arrogance and slaves. We’ll be licked in a month.

As becomes increasingly clear to both of them, Rhett and Scarlett are maverick soul mates. Defying the thought police of Atlanta high society at every turn, Scarlett quickly earns a reputation for defiance. So it comes as no surprise that when Rhett Butler asks the recently widowed Scarlett to dance at a charity ball, even though the rules of propriety strictly forbid such a thing, Scarlett is irrepressible. She leaps up, her heart beating wildly, completely undeterred by the disapproving looks on the chaperones’ faces.

Later, while helping Scarlett flee Atlanta along the road to Tara, Rhett decides abruptly to join the doomed Confederacy, leaving Scarlett to finish the dangerous journey on her own. He’s confident she’ll survive just fine without him. She wails for him to stay, but he’s adamant. Then he tags Scarlett perfectly:

“I love you, Scarlett, because we are so much alike, renegades, both of us, dear, and selfish rascals. Neither of us cares a rap if the whole world goes to pot, so long as we are safe and comfortable.”

A renegade. A maverick. What’s the difference? Not to quibble too much about the nuances of etymology, still, it’s interesting to note that a renegade is one who abandons one belief for another; or else he’s a turncoat, a person who has acted with disloyalty to a cause.

To be a maverick is more extreme, for a maverick rejects the general status quo and will not be branded by its white-hot iron of normalcy. A maverick is a dropout, a nonconformist, a misfit. In short, a maverick is fully independent of the herd, an individual who acts without regard to others’ opinions or rules.

Though the word maverick wasn’t in use at the historical moment when Rhett was making his proclamation, it seems the more appropriate description of the characteristics Mr. Butler believed he and Scarlett shared. Renegades abandon causes, but neither Rhett nor Scarlett ever had a cause worth fighting for other than self-interest.

AMERICAN TOMBOY

Jean Louise Finch, otherwise known as Scout, has her own thought police to outwit. Near the head of the list is Miss Caroline, her first-grade teacher, who is displeased by Scout in general but in particular doesn’t like that the girl has arrived at school already knowing how to read. Scout’s learned it on her own somehow, and this proves to Miss Caroline that the girl-child has an unruly spirit that must be reined in immediately. Scout’s solution to this assault on her freedom is much like Scarlett’s “tomorrow is another day” avoidance. She begins a pattern of staring out the classroom window till the school day is done, at which time she’s free to resume her education.

A more worthy adversary for Scout is her father’s sister, Aunt Alexandra. Like Huck Finn’s aunt Sally, Scout’s aunt means to “sivilize” her niece, with special attention to the young lady’s fashion sense.

Aunt Alexandra is obsessed with Scout’s clothes and tries in vain to convert her from breeches to dresses. She is just as fanatic about the manner in which Scout spends her playtime, urging her niece to use the tea sets and small stoves and to play with the Add-A-Pearl necklace Alexandra had given her as a newborn. Naturally, Scout will have none of this and would rather consort with her brother and her brother’s friend Dill than stay inside and learn the feminizing tea ceremonies.

To stand against the entire community’s racist views as Atticus does when he defends the innocent black man Tom Robinson is the ultimate act of individualism. Both Scout and Jem are swept into the turmoil, rebuked and isolated and threatened by nearly the whole town of Maycomb. What follows is something resembling a maverick boot camp, with Atticus as drill sergeant.

Atticus is eloquent in explaining to Jem and Scout that the discomfort they feel being ostracized by their friends and the townsfolk of Maycomb will pass. Such maverick behavior, he goes on to explain, is based on compassion and conscience, two Christian virtues that Atticus cannot disregard, although doing so would be so much easier. Giving in to the social norms, the racial intolerance, and the small-minded views of Maycomb is simply not an option for him, even if it means endangering himself and his family.

On the surface, you couldn’t find two more dissimilar mavericks than Scarlett and Scout. One is defiant out of selfishness and romantic delusion, chasing the mirage of Ashley Wilkes or trying to re-create the antebellum fantasy of Tara. The other is a natural-born questioner of authority, an innocent seeker of the dadgum honest truth.

Yet the reality is that Scout is similar to Scarlett on many counts. She’s as self-sufficient and every bit as brave as young Miss O’Hara—all of which becomes clear when Scout faces down a lynch mob, a group of men as grim as a gaggle of zombies and as dangerous as any Yankee soldiers Scarlett ever dealt with. The gang wear denim shirts buttoned to their throats, and most are in overalls, with hats pulled over their ears—sullen and sleepy-looking, as though they’re not used to being up so late. Scout is not cowed and wakes them from their mindless daze by singling out one man and speaking to him disarmingly. The mob tension dissolves, and the men drift off.

As much of a maverick as Scarlett is on matters of social propriety, she hews close to the conventions of her era on racial matters. Numerous passages that most charitably might be considered instructional can sometimes sound an awful lot like rants of racial intolerance. She scornfully describes former field hand slaves as acting like “lords of creation” and “trashy free issue niggers,” while the “better class” of slaves stayed with their white masters.

Though only twenty-five years separate the publication of these two books, their views on race couldn’t be more different. By Scout’s estimation, being black or poor or both is a hard lot, but the worst predicament of all is being ostracized.

It came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years.… She was as sad, I thought, as what Jem called a mixed child: white people wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs. Negroes wouldn’t have anything to do with her because she was white.…

Both these female mavericks win our respect by remaining unbranded, using every means at their limited disposal to butt heads against the pressures of convention. The fact that both are female southerners and therefore subject to an additional set of persnickety social demands and relentless pressures to conform only makes their independence that much more triumphant.

WANTING TO BE NORMAL

“All I want is a normal life,” John Smith moans. Not that Stephen King is about to let that happen.

Not a natural maverick like Scout or Scarlett, Johnny sets his feet firmly on the path of normalcy, working as a public schoolteacher. The kids like him, though they spot him as something of an oddball, nicknaming him Frankenstein for his geeky appearance. He’s also a little off center in his laid-back approach to teaching and a bit inept with Sarah, the more experienced lover whom he courts.

For all his desire to fit in and live a normal life, Johnny is cursed by his condition, just as Rhett and Scarlett are cursed by theirs. He’s bumped his head twice, and those accidents have reconfigured his hard-wiring.

When he wakes from his coma after four years, all hope of normalcy is gone. Sarah has deserted him and married another and has produced a child. Johnny’s mother, Vera, has become a religious kook and is eagerly waiting for the End of Days. Ironically, Vera might have it right, if Greg Stillson comes to power. Unless Johnny can summon the ultimate maverick’s courage and shoot down the psychopath before he’s put in higher office, the End of Days may very well be here.

So there it is. Greg Stillson runs on a platform as an outsider, a man with fresh ideas, in what seems like a winning strategy. He’s billed himself as a political maverick, and much of his appeal is based on the “straight talk,” “straight shooter” attraction. He successfully charms the voters, but not the reader, who knows this man has kicked a dog to death and that he honed his persuasive skills as an unsavory con man selling Bibles door-to-door. And we also come to understand that Greg is cynical about his own maverick image. He’s nothing but a manipulator running the biggest con of all.

The only one who can save us is a genuine maverick, a man willing to take the most extreme act of individualism one can imagine, sacrificing his own life to save millions of others.

DRAGGED BACK

The normal life that Johnny Smith wanted was a lot like the one Michael Corleone had in mind before he was dragged into the family business. Normalcy was all Mitch McDeere sought, to marry Abby, have some kids, make a decent wage. It’s the sum total of what Jack Ryan has in mind. Come to America, do a little weekend CIA business, and scoot back to London with a stateside Christmas gift for his daughter.

But all four of these male protagonists who are conformists by nature bump their heads in one kind of traffic accident or another. Michael’s car explodes with Apollonia inside it, sending him storming back home with a vengeance. Mitch discovers his car is wired with microphones, as is his bedroom, and he crashes head-on into a plot to launder the Mob’s money. Jack Ryan has no aspirations to be James Bond, but he’s dragooned into service because his brainpower is unsurpassed. He’s a scholar and knows a lot of esoteric stuff that might just save the world.

All four of these men become mavericks, but not by choice. Maverickhood is thrust upon them. They are forced almost against their will to act beyond the conventional patterns of behavior they’ve always embraced.

They are forced to be heroic and must summon their special skills, from second sight in Johnny’s case, to the grim combat skills Michael Corleone mastered while fighting for his country’s survival, to the cunning legal expertise Mitch employs to incriminate those who seek to destroy him. Jack Ryan’s knowledge base also comes in handy, and he’s recruited to handle negotiations that are far beyond his comfort zone of military duties.

Each man simply wanted the ordinary satisfactions of the culture. They had intended to fit in. But circumstances forced their hand and gave them a test they dared not fail.

As a Dartmouth grad and war hero, Michael Corleone doesn’t have the street cred of his brothers, Sonny and Fredo, or even the orphan the Don adopted, Tom Hagen, all of whom stayed home in the Mafia trenches and made their bones in the usual ways. Michael’s desire to fit into conventional American life makes him a bit of a maverick as far as Mafia men are concerned.

When the Don gets whacked and is almost killed, Michael struggles to retain his outsider status. However, his Corleone genes ignite when a punch in the jaw from a cop seems to wake him from his civilian daze. He gives up his conscientious objector status and joins the fray.

In time, Michael will learn more about the roots of this organization he’s taken over. He’ll discover its own maverick history. How when his Sicilian ancestors were repressed by cruel rulers (“landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church”), the common folks had learned that “society was their enemy, so when they sought redress for their wrongs they went to the rebel underground.”

Michael, the war hero, the Ivy League boy, who will always be something of an outsider, takes control of a band of antisocial types who have lawlessness at their marrow. A maverick leading mavericks.

ORANGE SUSPENDERS

As Robert Kincaid comes rumbling across the bridges of Madison County in his pleasantly dented pickup truck, he’s wearing the all-American maverick costume of “faded Levi’s, well-used Red Wing field boots, a khaki shirt, and orange suspenders. On his wide leather belt was fastened a Swiss Army knife in its own case.”

In case his individualism isn’t nailed down firmly enough by those orange suspenders, Robert provides further evidence in this recollection from his younger days. “When other kids were singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,’ he was learning the melody and English words to a French cabaret song.”

Though his IQ was off the charts, Robert rejected all that intellectual crap and spent his time reading “all the adventure and travel books in the local library and kept to himself otherwise, spending days along the river that ran through the edge of town, ignoring proms and football games and other things that bored him. He fished and swam and walked and lay in long grass listening to distant voices he fancied only he could hear. ‘There are wizards out there,’ he used to say to himself. ‘If you’re quiet and open enough to hear them, they’re out there.’ ”

Oh, they’re out there all right. Huck heard them long ago. And John Smith hears them, too.

For Robert, being a maverick is conveniently conflated with being a seducer of married women. Though he experiences a moment of hesitation, considering “the propriety drummed in by centuries of culture, the hard rules of civilized man,” those conventional restraints dissolve when he starts to wonder how her hair would feel and how her body would fit beneath his.

Later on, after Robert and Francesca have spent a few ecstatic hours between the sheets, Robert lets her know just what kind of maverick she’s gotten mixed up with. He refers to himself “as one of the last cowboys” and goes on to explain how society’s normal conventions don’t apply to him. All its rules and regulations and social conventions and laws are way too “organized” for Robert. Hierarchies of authority? Fie on them. Long-range budgets? Pooh. A world of “wrinkled suits and stick-on name tags”? No thanks, not for this cowboy.

At moments such as these, when he claims he’s exempt from morality and has an inalienable right to sleep with married women, Robert Kincaid seems like such a smugly narcissistic blowhard, my bet is the Honorable Samuel Maverick would be tempted to rise from his lethargy, fire up his branding iron, and put his mark on this guy just to show him what being a real cowboy is all about.

HARRISON FORD IN HARRIS TWEED

And what of Professor Robert Langdon? Well, considering he’s on nearly every page of The Da Vinci Code, it’s a bit surprising how little we know about his personal life, or even his appearance. In The Da Vinci Code, the most detailed physical description of him is that he resembles “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed.”

This kind of shorthand, relying on the Hollywood parallel, has the virtue of suggesting that Robert Langdon’s fictional character is modeled on a confection that’s one part Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) and one part Indiana Jones (also played by Harrison Ford).

That is, Langdon fits the Harrison Ford action figure stereotype, the scholar-hero who, when the situation requires, peels off his corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches, snuffs out his pipe, and pops into action. He’s the bookish guy dumped into the snake pit of an adventure novel; his only real skill, aside from his dexterity with a bullwhip, is an unsettling tendency to recite long quotations from source material he apparently memorized in grad school. Oh, the curse of an eidetic memory.

Like Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan daily newspaper, our professor lives a dual life. First, he long ago made a maverick career choice, deciding to be permanently out of step with society by isolating himself in the ivory tower. Which means he’s geeky and stiff and in that sense is a first cousin to Jack Ryan, Jack being the author of naval histories. Spending way too much time with his nose in a book has made Robert Langdon a bit of a bumbler, always slightly flustered when someone produces a pistol and aims it his way.

When he’s forced to assume this action figure identity, again he plays the maverick role, for he’s lacking in physical prowess. He has no karate skills, isn’t a kung fu master or an ex–Navy SEAL, doesn’t even know how to field-strip an AK-47. As an action hero he just barely gets by, and that’s part of the charm of this hero subcategory. Part of its American aura. Not every American fictional hero is a gunslinger. Americans like to view themselves as humble and self-effacing, able to make do with what they have, using Yankee ingenuity and an occasional nuclear-powered submarine to compensate for what they lack in physical prowess. In fact, most of the heroes in our twelve novels are anything but tough customers.

Of the twelve protagonists, only three take another human life. Scarlett O’Hara shoots to death a Yankee soldier who’s invaded Tara, an act of self-defense. Jack Ryan is almost too nervous to fire back at the Soviet secret agent who is shooting at him and then apologizes to the dying man as he passes away. It’s only Michael Corleone who kills without remorse, shooting two men at point-blank range in retribution for an attempt on his father’s life. Johnny Smith tries to murder the evil Greg Stillson but muffs it. Still, he manages to push Stillson into an act of cowardice so public that it destroys his future political prospects. Even though extreme violence is commonplace in these twelve novels and the body count runs into the double digits (not counting the millions dead in the Civil War), our heroes and heroines are averse to using extreme force and are anything but adept at gunplay.

BOOKS AND MAVERICKS

Bookish types, both writers and readers, appear with such frequency in bestsellers that it is tempting to give them a chapter all their own. As any bookish person knows, authors and book readers are by nature oddballs, flaky loners who like to go off somewhere quiet and sit in a corner turning pages or swiping their finger across an e-book screen. In short, they’re a bit on the mavericky side.

In these twelve novels, Scarlett is atypical in this regard, for she is openly hostile to books, mocking some of her Atlanta lady friends as “subdued, churchgoing, Shakespeare-reading.” She came by this aversion to books naturally. Her father, Gerald, not only mocks Ashley Wilkes for his bookish, effeminate ways, but belittles the whole Wilkes clan for buying crates of books in German and French from the Yankee scoundrels. Then those crazy Wilkeses laze around reading when they should be out hunting and gambling like real men.

Scarlett O’Hara notwithstanding, almost every other novel on this list is filled with characters for whom books are of crucial importance.

In Peyton Place, for instance, Allison MacKenzie won’t quit reading. Books are her lifeblood, both a way to temporarily escape from her complicated life and a method for reimagining it. She is rebuked by her mother for caring too much about literature. Constance didn’t understand how a twelve-year-old girl could bury herself in books all the time while other girls her age were fixated on pretty frocks and lacy underwear.

Underwear versus books? Well, for most of us mavericks, the choice is clear. We’ll go commando before we’ll give up our books.

For all its overheated sexual display and attacks on social hypocrisy, Peyton Place is actually an old-fashioned Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young girl. A novel that takes us almost step by step through the literary education of Allison MacKenzie.

Speaking with an early boyfriend, Allison proudly stakes claim to the low road of literary aspirations. She wants to write a famous book like Anthony Adverse, a book that will make her a celebrity.

Allison won’t be denied and grows into a full-fledged journalist with the dream of one day becoming a writer of novels. She goes to New York to fulfill that dream and sets about the hard work of breaking in. As a generous gesture to all the would-be writers in her audience, Grace Metalious even diagrams a primitive form of literary networking.

After a series of crushing rejections from numerous literary agents, Allison marches off to the New York Public Library, where she studies current bestsellers. It is there she discovers on the dedication page of one of the commercial hits a declaration of thanks to the author’s agent, Bradley Holmes. Bingo.

Allison tracks down the agent, makes her case, and soon is sleeping with the guy, though eventually he doesn’t think he can sell her book.

Books, books, books. They’re everywhere in these bestsellers, a reminder of the strange and fanciful power of narrative and of the shared love that writers and readers have, the symbiotic relationship they enjoy.

Books and reading play a large role in Scout Finch’s world. She doesn’t remember learning to read, just as she doesn’t remember learning to breathe. Since Atticus is a lawyer and a devoted reader of books and newspapers, it was probably osmosis.

At one point, Atticus punishes Jem by requiring him to read Ivanhoe to the odious neighbor Mrs. Dubose. Scout and Jem do their duty, and though the old lady dozes off now and then, she never seems to lose track of their place in the story.

The punch line of this episode is that Mrs. Dubose was addicted to morphine, a habit she was determined to kick before she died. It was Jem’s reading of Ivanhoe that diverted her sufficiently from the withdrawal pains and made her last wish possible. Ah, the stimulating power of books.

In Valley of the Dolls, when Anne Welles briefly rejects the romantic heartthrob Lyon Burke, there’s only one way he can console himself. He flies off to London to write a book. And of course it becomes a smash hit.

Books are also of crucial importance to John Smith in The Dead Zone. He’s a reading teacher, after all, and when he wakes from his coma and learns he’s been fired from his teaching job, he soon finds work tutoring poor Chuck Chatsworth in reading. Chuck is a successful jock and “the apotheosis of the BMOC,” but his illiteracy reduces him to bending “grimly over his book like a machine gunner at a lonely outpost, shooting the words down one by one as they came at him.”

Since pedagogy is Johnny’s real gift, not that second sight stuff, in no time Chuck is reading Jude the Obscure. It’s an educational triumph and a reminder of what nearly mystical power some teachers can have.

Teachers and writers and professors and scholars and priests and lawyers march through nearly every one of these bestsellers. Men and women whose life’s work revolves around reading and interpreting books. Books, books, everywhere books.

The most famous and fabulous and fussy professor of them all, Robert Langdon, is a scholarly wordsmith, though you wouldn’t know it from his cultural allusions. A lot more book titles appear in the pages of The Bridges of Madison County or Peyton Place or Jaws or The Exorcist than issue from Robert Langdon’s lips. Although Langdon seems to have read and memorized every volume ever shelved in the Library of Congress, he’s more likely to drop Tom Cruise’s name or refer to a Disney film than mention Jude the Obscure or Anthony Adverse.

At one point when Langdon enters a library, King’s College Research Institute, to solve the next step in his puzzle, he doesn’t blow the dust off some ancient tome and turn its desiccated pages but sits at a computer terminal and does some kind of Google search. That’s not to say that Langdon doesn’t love books. He does, he does. He writes them, after all. He just doesn’t refer to them much.

Robert Kincaid, on the other hand, quotes Yeats and Robert Penn Warren and is currently reading Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway’s safari journal that is full of literary commentary on Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Robert’s own true love, Francesca the farmer’s wife, “usually read in the kitchen—books from Winterset library and the book club she belonged to.… The television bored her.”

In The Godfather, Mario Puzo has some fun with writers, those “shmucks with an Underwood,” as they used to be called in Hollywood. The singer Johnny Fontane tells an anecdote about a novelist who became a celebrity in the literary world and arrived in Hollywood expecting to be treated with fanfare. The author was set up with a well-endowed starlet and was eating dinner with her at the Brown Derby when the girl spotted some second-rate movie comic who wiggled a finger at her across the dining room. Without a word, she dumped the hotshot writer, leaving him with a new understanding of the Hollywood pecking order.

So busy shooting up the place, most of the characters in this novel don’t have much spare time to read. But there’s one man, Dr. Taza, Michael Corleone’s landlord during his stay in the old country, who knows the value of a book.

Though in his seventies, [Dr. Taza] went every week to Palermo to pay his respects to the younger prostitutes of that city, the younger the better. Dr. Taza’s other vice was reading. He read everything and talked about what he read to his fellow townsmen, patients who were illiterate peasants, the estate shepherds, and this gave him a local reputation for foolishness. What did books have to do with them?

Hookers and books keep the old guy young. With vices like that, Dr. Taza could become an honorary maverick.

FEATURE #11

Fractured Families

[Literature] is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks.

—KENNETH BURKE,

PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM

In each of our twelve novels, a member of a broken family finds an ingenious way to transcend his or her crazy stress.

If you Google “every family is dysfunctional,” you’ll get around 144,000 results in .2 second. Compare that with Googling “every family is healthy,” where a meager 8 hits appear. And in 5 of those 8 cases, the word not precedes every.

Okay, so that isn’t exactly what you’d call scientific proof. Still, it supports the conventional wisdom that a lot of us have a lot of experience with fractured families.

Families under economic stress, families at emotional war, families splitting apart, families with a missing parent, families dealing with disease, death, infidelity, job stress, or outright life-threatening danger. You name it. Badly destabilized families are featured in each of our twelve bestsellers.

1. Scarlett O’Hara loses a daughter, three husbands, and both parents. Fails to win the heart of the man she thinks she loves while losing the man she realizes belatedly she might have loved.

2. Scout and Jem Finch have no mother, nor does Mayella Ewell, whose phony rape claim sets off a tragic cascade of events. Boo Radley lost his mother before he was imprisoned by his father in his own house.

3. Allison MacKenzie, the star of Peyton Place, is illegitimate and fatherless, while her best friend, Selena Cross, is also fatherless as well as a victim of sexual abuse from her stepfather.

4. Anne Wells in Valley of the Dolls is also missing a father, and her mother is a suffocating bore. Neely has no parents. Jennifer has no father, and her mother goads her to exploit her body for cash.

5. Michael Corleone loses the love of his life in a bomb blast, but otherwise his family stays relatively intact until the Don is badly injured in an assassination attempt; then Michael’s brothers begin to die until the family threatens to implode.

6. Regan MacNeil, who is possessed by the devil, is first dispossessed by her own father, who divorces her mother and forgets to call on Regan’s birthday. Two fathers (priests) are required to save her.

7. While Police Chief Brody defends the beaches of Amity from a terrorizing shark, his wife is straying into the tricky currents of an affair with a visiting shark expert.

8. After four years in a coma, John Smith wakes to find his mother has become a hopeless religious lunatic; shortly thereafter, the zealous lady has a stroke and dies. The young woman John intended to wed marries another man instead but has a brief fling with Johnny anyway. Greg Stillson, Johnny’s antagonist, is also fatherless.

9. Ramius deceives his shipboard family and hijacks the Red October and heads off to America because his wife died needlessly, a victim of the incompetent Soviet medical system.

10. Mitch McDeere is also fatherless and estranged from his mother, while the new law firm that adopts him as a son turns out to be lethally dysfunctional.

11. Robert Kincaid is divorced and has a hankering for vulnerable married women. Francesca Johnson is unfaithful to her husband and never fully recovers from her love affair with Robert.

12. Sophie Neveu’s parents are both dead, and she’s estranged from her only relative, her grandfather, who dies in the first scene. She may be a distant relative of Jesus Christ, a family connection that nearly costs her her life.

So there you go. Twelve of the most successful novels in American publishing history and not a traditional, fully functioning family among them, yet all our heroes and heroines find ways to make peace with their extreme losses.

FAMILY THERAPY

While entertainment is one of popular fiction’s obvious jobs, its other enduring function has been to educate readers, to provide, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, “equipment for living.” As we’ve seen, this responsibility takes many forms, from presenting factual information to critiquing religious practice. As important as any other educational function that the popular novel provides is its emphasis on the emotional struggles characters experience within the family structure.

Long before Dr. Phil and Oprah and a host of media therapists invited TV viewers into daily family therapy sessions, mass culture looked to popular novels for good counsel and insight into affairs of the heart.

Increasingly in the last few decades that good counsel has been sorely needed. From 1936, when Gone with the Wind was published, to 2003, when The Da Vinci Code appeared, stresses on the American family skyrocketed. Sociologists, our dependable cultural explainers, see many reasons for this: the ever-increasing divorce rate, unrealistic marital expectations, a rapid expansion of women entering the workforce, shifting gender roles, and the appearance of no-fault divorce, to name a few.

Then for the fun of it, add to the list such large external forces as the Great Depression, two world wars, and two regional wars that killed thousands, maimed thousands more, and psychologically damaged many who served, while keeping married partners separated for long periods of time. All further strained family bonds. Throw in a rising tolerance of promiscuity and the growing sense that multiple marriages was the new normal, and what you have is a family structure that is redefining itself at warp speed.

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, the number of unmarried couples cohabitating grew by a factor of seven to a figure that today reaches more than five million couples. Forty percent of babies born in 2007 came from unmarried parents. Such statistics send shivers through conservative pundits and political theorists like William Bennett, a staunch defender of the familial status quo, who no doubt speaks for millions of Americans when he claims (in The Broken Hearth) that “the nuclear family, defined as a monogamous married couple living with their children, is vital to civilization’s success.” Bennett goes on to claim that the “dissolution of the family is the fundamental crisis of our time.”

“Dissolution” is a somewhat dire description of what some would say is simply a modernization of the family structure or a set of changes that reflect other transformations in modern culture.

Nevertheless, few would argue with the assertion that the traditional family model is in a state of flux. With such rapid transformations, where do individuals go for perspective? Aside from the low-cost alternatives like Oprah and her fellow empathizers, some go where they’ve always gone, to their closest friends. But we all know what that advice is worth. Many go to church and speak to the wise men there. For others who can afford it and overcome the stigma, there’s always psychiatry.

But it’s safe to say that many Americans looking for a vicarious connection with another troubled soul could do worse than snuggle up with Scarlett O’Hara or Francesca Johnson, Mitch McDeere or John Smith.

LIFE TRAUMAS

In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe studied the medical records of more than five thousand patients in an attempt to determine if stressful events caused illnesses. Eventually the good doctors listed forty-three life traumas, each with a “stress score.” The study came to be known as the Holmes and Rahe stress scale.

While the focus of this chapter is on the stresses and conflicts within families, the Holmes and Rahe stress scale makes a handy checklist of dramatic situations that might find their way into the narrative of almost any novel and certainly would keep the familial pot boiling:

LIFE EVENT

LIFE CHANGE UNITS

Death of a spouse

100

Divorce

73

Marital separation

65

Imprisonment

63

Death of a close family member

63

Personal injury or illness

53

Marriage

50

Dismissal from work

47

Marital reconciliation

45

Retirement

45

Change in health of family member

44

Pregnancy

40

Sexual difficulties

39

Gain a new family member

39

Business readjustment

39

Change in financial state

38

Death of a close friend

37

Change to different line of work

36

Change in frequency of arguments

35

Major mortgage

32

Foreclosure of mortgage or loan

30

Change in responsibilities at work

29

Child leaving home

29

Trouble with in-laws

29

Outstanding personal achievement

28

Spouse starts or stops work

26

Begin or end school

26

Change in living conditions

25

Revision of personal habits

24

Trouble with boss

23

Change in working hours or conditions

20

Change in residence

20

Change in schools

20

Change in recreation

19

Change in church activities

19

Change in social activities

18

Minor mortgage or loan

17

Change in sleeping habits

16

Change in number of family reunions

15

Change in eating habits

15

Vacation

13

Christmas

12

Minor violation of law

11

Subject: Ms. Scarlett O’Hara

Death of a spouse: check, check

Death of a close family member: check, check, check

Pregnancy: check

Sexual difficulties: check

Change in residence: check, check, check, check

No doubt about it, Scarlett tops the list for stress events. And a few stressors not even on the list surely rank high on her inventory. The nuisance of the Civil War, for one, all those cannonballs exploding in the Atlanta streets. And there’s that dashing young man Ashley Wilkes, who doesn’t fancy her as much as she fancies him.

What are Scarlett’s psychological coping strategies? How does our heroine manage the ever-mounting pressures thrown at her for nearly a thousand pages? What psychological lessons does she have to pass on to the mass audience hungry for insight? Well, fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett suggests y’all should just think about all that tomorrow.

Actually, for much of the novel Scarlett is shielded from the harsher realities by her caring mother, her willful but indulgent father, her protective mammy, and her selfless sister-in-law, Melanie. This portrait of a successfully functioning family might have been Scarlett’s model if the war hadn’t interrupted things so abruptly and brought an end to her childhood before she’d fully matured.

After losing her mother’s emotional counsel, then her father’s blunt and accurate appraisals of human nature, Scarlett is basically on her own. Still a girl, but suddenly a wife, then just as suddenly a widow. Nothing to guide her but her adolescent fantasies and her will to survive at any cost.

Those survival instincts lead Scarlett to consider any husband besides Ashley as nothing but a necessary bother—strictly a means to an end. That end is not the nurturing warmth of family or any kind of domestic bliss. Husbands are not for love or even sexual satisfaction, and, oh my, they certainly aren’t for having babies. For Scarlett, husbands are all about money and the physical security they bring. Tenderness and affection are merely weapons in her arsenal used to bring down her man.

Scarlett’s notion of family relationships is just as cynical, a fact made clear when we witness her stealing her sister’s fiancé because he can provide the goods and services she wants. And how does Scarlett respond to her sister’s outrage and pain? She blows it off with a fiddle-dee-dee.

However, she continues to maintain one emotional soft spot: Scarlett’s cynical view of marriage alternates with a delusional romantic vision of her ideal mate, Ashley Wilkes. This same vacillation between romanticism and cynicism is also a defining characteristic of the heroines of Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the heroines of those novels hold out hope that a fairy-tale version of true love awaits them and marriage to the right man will one day heal all their wounds and disappointments.

Anne Welles of Valley of the Dolls snags her right man, Lyon Burke, but the guy is as much a downer as the pills Anne is increasingly dependent on. Ducking out of her own party at the conclusion of the novel, Anne lies down on her bed, happy to have escaped the din of actors and actresses and entertainment types who are jamming her apartment.

Then who slips into the darkened room but the former man of her dreams and now her husband, Lyon Burke. Except he’s not alone. He’s brought along his latest hottie, a young actress type named Margie. Unaware of her lying nearby, they smooch and whisper in the dark while Anne lies listening. When they’ve gone, Anne rises from the bed, brushes her hair and freshens her makeup, and runs through the list of things she should be grateful for: “She looked fine. She had Lyon, the beautiful apartment, the beautiful child, the nice career of her own, New York—everything she’d ever wanted.”

And though she understands Lyon will be unfaithful to her forever, she’s reconciled to that. Her solace now comes in pill form, her own chemical fiddle-dee-dee. The way she’ll get through the lonely nights ahead is by gulping down “the beautiful dolls.” In fact, she decides to pop a couple tonight. Hey, why not? It’s New Year’s Eve.

Readers looking to these novels for psychological insight (“equipment for living”) would see that Scarlett and the young ladies from Valley of the Dolls are tragically doomed and have sabotaged their chances for authentic love and familial happiness. Part romance novel, part critique of romance novel, these two stories strip bare the hopeless, swooning fantasies of their heroines.

SACRED FAMILY

To Don Corleone, family is sacred. He’s willing to fight and die for his kinfolk and demands the same loyalty in return. Indeed, as part of his role as everybody’s Godfather, he will occasionally agree to act as guidance counselor as well. When his godson Johnny Fontane, a Sinatra-like singer, comes to the Don in desperate need, the Godfather gives him some tough love, a chewing out the likes of which Scarlett never heard but probably should have.

Johnny is confined to a one-month sentence with the Don as his warden. Johnny must eat well, sleep, and rest. No booze, no girls, not even singing.

But Don Corleone’s kids are a harder challenge. Even a man with the Don’s menacing demeanor has a hard time keeping them in line. Sonny, his eldest, is just too reckless and self-destructive for anybody’s good. When the boy is involved in a stupid armed robbery that nets next to nothing, the Don is livid. He rages at his son until Sonny has had enough and cuts his father off at the knees, telling him he saw Don Corleone kill a man.

The Don is dumbstruck. He hadn’t known that as a child Sonny witnessed the Don’s murder of the neighborhood tyrant. That life lesson, a stressor that Holmes and Rahe forget to add to their list, will overshadow every other good lesson the Don has to teach his boy. Sonny is lost to him, and all he can say at that moment is, “Every man has one destiny.”

In effect, from that moment on, he washes his hands of parental responsibility for Sonny. It’s the Don’s own fiddle-dee-dee.

As for the women, well, they don’t wield much power in this powerful family. In the superpaternalistic structure of the Corleone clan, Mama Corleone virtually disappears into insignificance. The same is true for Kay Adams, who marries Michael without knowing the real nature of his family business or fully understanding that she is brought aboard to fulfill the appearance of an all-American marriage. Her own romantic dreams about marriage evaporate as well.

Female empowerment, it would seem, is a fantasy that drives these women into relationships, but that fantasy is quickly shattered by the realization that the male-dominated world each of these women enters is more rigid and permanent than any of them bargained for.

FEMALE-FREE ZONE

Again and again, despite the vastly different subject matter in these bestsellers, family tensions and parental legacies underpin critical events in the stories.

Even in The Hunt for Red October, a nearly female-free zone, family issues crop up at odd and crucial moments. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the families that get the most face time in The Hunt for Red October are the crews of the submarines. In fact, the American submariners seem to be a happier family unit than any we see in Scarlett’s world or the Don’s.

The crew of the Dallas was like one big family … the captain was the father. The executive officer, everyone would readily agree, was the mother. The officers were the older kids, and the enlisted men were the younger kids.

Family is even at the root of the tensions between the two superpowers. None of these world-endangering events would have happened had Ramius, the Soviet sub commander, had a normal childhood. The kid never knew his mother and was deeply alienated from his old man, and thus was starved for human love.

Compared with Ramius, Jack Ryan has a solid family life, though he’s a little sketchy on the details. A wife, two kids.

There might have been any number of reasons for Ramius’s defection, money, power, influence, ego. But it’s none of those. Family, pure and simple, is at the root of his rejection of the Soviet way of life. Without the foundation of a nurturing childhood, Ramius pours all his love into his marriage. So when his wife, Natalia, dies from Soviet medical negligence, Ramius descends into utter despair.

Natalia … had been his only happiness … he was tormented by her memory; a certain hairstyle, a certain walk, a certain laugh encountered on the streets or in the shops of Murmansk was all it took to thrust Natalia back to the forefront of his consciousness.…

Of course, the rivalry between superpowers that nearly leads to all-out war is the major narrative thread, the one that grabs the reader’s attention and makes the pages fly by. An emotionally charged passage like the one above easily gets lost amid the detailing of hardware and naval maneuvering. But to Clancy’s credit, flesh-and-blood creatures bound by ties of love and affection and driven by haunting memories form a human counterweight to this story of nuclear engines and the supersecret technology that threatens the world.

Though maybe it’s a little hokey, Clancy is determined to give Jack and Ramius, his two adversaries, clear and certain family lives that reflect the nations that spawned them. America is painted as the land of stability, where, by golly, a decent man has a wife and two kids and is happily married. On the other hand, his counterpart’s Soviet family is shown to be destabilized by the ravages of an ancient war and by the strains of the gray bureaucracy that suffocates even its heroes.

After the two men play cat and mouse for a couple of hundred pages, Ramius and Jack Ryan finally meet face-to-face. They shake hands, and the first words Ramius speaks are oddly personal.

“You have a family, Commander Ryan?” Ramius asked.

“Yes, sir. A wife, a son, and a daughter. You, sir?”

“No, no family.”

Ramius turns away abruptly and addresses a junior officer in Russian. But the point is clear. To Ramius, family is of primary importance. It’s where everything begins.

In this regard, Clancy is more subtle than he’s usually given credit for. Despite all the political bluster and the machinery, the endless nuts and bolts of warfare that seem, at first glance, to overshadow all else in his work, lurking just below the surface, barely making a ripple on the thin skin of the sea, are his deep concerns with the relationships between his people, be they submariners or hapless CIA information analysts. It seems that Clancy’s vision is as familial as it is political. For Clancy, both the dirty Commies and the freedom-loving Americans have the same urgent human need for domestic relationships. And it is the destruction of that, the shredding of the fabric of family life, that in Clancy’s view is our greatest peril.

FAMILIES STAYING TOGETHER

For readers in search of families more dysfunctional than their own, Peyton Place would be an excellent choice.

Allison MacKenzie, writer-in-training, is doing fieldwork one day at her friend Selena Cross’s tar-paper shack. She’s interviewing Selena’s mother, trying to grasp how a family manages to stay together in the face of the kind of sexual and physical abuse that Allison witnessed earlier, and Nellie Cross is giving her the lowdown, a glimpse into the cruel machinery of connubial relations.

“Why, honey, beatin’s don’t mean nothin’.” Nellie cackled again, and this time her eyes did turn vague. “It’s everythin’ else. The booze and the wimmin. Even the booze ain’t so bad, if he’d just leave the wimmin alone. I could tell you some stories, honey—” Nellie folded her arms together, and her voice took on a singsong quality—“I could tell you some stories, honey, that ain’t nothing like the stories you tell me.”

Allison pokes around in other people’s lives with a voyeuristic fascination, all in the name of learning her craft as a writer. The likelihood is that she will succeed in that tough literary field, for she’s got the one great advantage of high-achieving people. She’s missing a parent.

Her mother, Constance, says as much when musing about her daughter. She wonders if it’s true that bastards are often successful in their chosen fields because they are driven to compensate for not having had a father.

MISSING PARENTS

Missing fathers, or missing mothers, or missing wives, propel most of these characters to greater attainments. Scout Finch’s mother died of a heart attack when Scout was only two years old. Jem is still troubled by her loss. Sometimes in the middle of play, he will suddenly sigh and walk off to be alone. Scout understands and keeps her distance. Though she pretends she’s unaffected by her absent mom, we can see through her bluff. The very fact that she’s so aware of the source of her brother’s pain is proof enough.

This missing-parent paradigm shows up as frequently in bestsellers as it does in traditional fairy tales. As Bruno Bettelheim noted in The Uses of Enchantment, his landmark work on the psychological function of fairy tales, the recurrence of missing-parent imagery serves a fundamental purpose in the education of a child. For one thing, it prepares a youngster for the wrenching passage to adulthood. At some stage in the process of growing up, the protective and kindhearted mother seems to vanish, replaced by a stern disciplinarian who sets rigid boundaries and rules. Fairy tales lay the groundwork for the jarring change of adolescence.

In the absence of a nurturing birth mother, Scout Finch has three surrogates: Calpurnia, the African American housekeeper, who monitors Scout’s comings and goings; her aunt Alexandra, who endlessly disapproves of Scout’s tomboyish ways; and Miss Maudie, a neighbor who plays the comforting, pampering fairy godmother role, though, as is true in fairy tales, her influence can’t last forever. Like Scout’s real mother, she drifts away symbolically, which leaves Scout to fend for herself and thus to learn how to break the ties of reliance on parental protection and become fully independent. These are the lessons that Cinderella had to learn, just like Scarlett and Allison MacKenzie.

That big bestsellers and fairy tales both use this pattern with such regularity is not surprising, because both storytelling forms serve a similar broad social purpose, to remind us of the archetypal journey we all share, a mythic passage from the safe, cozy nest where we spent our early days, shielded from the dangers of the world, to a challenging and often menacing larger world where we must rely on our own inner resources to survive.

MIRROR IMAGES

The families are so much alike in Peyton Place and To Kill a Mockingbird, it’s hard to shake the idea that a little harmless cribbing was at work in Harper Lee’s effort. Both books feature young female narrators who explore their small towns from stem to stern. The Ewell family who live beside the dump are a perfect mirror of the earlier Cross family in their shantytown, right down to a nearly identical incestuous relationship between father and daughter. A threatened lynching and a big explosive trial full of seamy revelations is a centerpiece of both books. Justice is served in Peyton Place, while justice fails in Maycomb. There’s even a precursor to Boo Radley living down the street from Allison MacKenzie. Her name is Miss Hester, and she has the same creepy reputation and reclusive habits as Boo. And there’s also a kid who accepts a dare to go up to her house and sit on her porch and see what she sees. But there the similarity ends. From Boo’s porch, Scout has her major revelation and discovers empathy, finally viewing the world from Boo’s point of view.

Norman Page’s interaction with the bogeyman of Peyton Place results in a very similar outcome. He was “terrified of Miss Hester, and Allison had laughed at him and tried to frighten him even more by saying that Miss Hester was a witch.” Determined to overcome that terror, Norman seizes an opportunity when Miss Hester makes a rare departure from her house.

He hangs around till she’s gone, then runs across the street and through the scary lady’s gate. It’s the first time he’s stepped onto her property.

He wades through the tall, unkept grass to the back porch and looks around the neighborhood from this new vantage point. What Norman Page sees through a split in the hedge is Mr. and Mrs. Card, the next-door neighbors, fondling each other, and Mr. Card unbuttoning Mrs. Card’s dress and stroking her pregnant belly.

Norman gets a hot and heavy peek into the world of passion, while Scout gazes out with growing sympathy as she absorbs the neighborhood from Boo Radley’s vantage point. At first these sharply dissimilar views seen from very similar porches suggest these two novels have little in common. One raunchy, one chaste. A missing father for Allison. A missing mother for Scout. But though their methods are radically different, their intentions are exactly the same.

Allison’s mother, Constance, has never fully recovered from her affair with Allison’s father and has sublimated her sexual energy, redirecting it toward raising her daughter and running her dress shop. But she will eventually find release in the arms of the new high school principal, Tomas Makris. Overcoming her sexual inhibitions brings Constance to a moment of discovery that could stand as the final psychological offering of this novel.

Makris and Constance are in bed together, engaging in some spirited back-and-forth. Constance first:

“Do it to me then.”

He raised his head and smiled down into her face. “Do what?” he teased. “Tell me.”

“You know.”

“No, tell me. What do you want me to do to you?”

She looked up at him appealingly.

“Say it,” he said. “Say it.”

She whispered the words in his ear and his fingers dug into her shoulders.

“Like this?”

“Please,” she said. “Please.” And then, “Yes! Yes, yes, yes.”

Later she lay with her head on his shoulder and one hand flat against his chest.

“For the first time in my life I’m not ashamed afterward,” she said.

What Constance accomplishes in this scene is echoed throughout. Conquering sexual repression. Breaking taboos. Speaking the forbidden words. Shrugging free of puritanical prohibitions. The aspirations of this novel are as American as Hawthorne, as warm and gooey as apple pie. (Her maiden name, after all, is Standish, an echo of Longfellow’s poem about an independent-minded woman being courted by an uncertain fellow named Miles.)

This novel that shocked the nation and was banned in Boston and railed against from pulpits has a simple and pure-at-heart intention. To heal by revealing, to cure by exposing, to alleviate the pressure we all feel by unzipping the tight girdle of false piety and showing us how families truly operate.

So from the porch of Peyton Place we peep on our neighbors’ shameful acts and are given a glimpse of the unashamed reality of love. While from the front porch of the Radley house, we look through the eyes of a damaged young man and glimpse his longing and isolation. Two different paths for reaching the same destination: discovering the shared bonds of the human family.

LEGAL FAMILY

A solid family life is a requirement for employment at the legal firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke. It’s even part of the job interview, one of the first questions Mitch McDeere is tossed.

“Tell us about your family.”

“Why is that important?”

“It’s very important to us, Mitch,” Royce McKnight said warmly.

They all say that, thought McDeere. “Okay, my father was killed in the coal mines when I was seven years old. My mother remarried and lives in Florida. I had two brothers. Rusty was killed in Vietnam. I have a brother named Ray McDeere.”

Subject: Mitch McDeere

Death of a close family member: check, check (and a half check—brother Ray is in prison)

That criminal brother, Ray, meets with Mitch in the prison visiting room, and how do they use this precious time together? The two of them try to recall better days of their family’s past. Once again we are reminded of the profound effects of fractured families—in this case fractured by madness.

They paused and studied their fingers. They thought of their mother. Painful thoughts for the most part. There had been happier times, when they were small and their father was alive. She never recovered from his death, and after Rusty was killed the aunts and uncles put her in an institution.

From the Don to Ramius to Scout to Allison and Mitch, the characters in these stories are struggling, first and foremost, with family issues. And no matter whether the novel is populated by submarines or sharks or mobsters or southern belles, the real focus is on healing the fractures, overcoming the loss, finding a way forward through family tragedies.

These bestsellers don’t offer one pat answer to this recurring struggle. In some cases, as with Scout and Allison, healing means discovering empathy, or it can involve simply toughing it out in manly silence, as Jack Ryan, Robert Kincaid, and Mitch McDeere choose. Sometimes, for those like the Don and Scarlett and Anne Welles, it means simply saying fiddle-dee-dee and moving ahead ruthlessly into tomorrow.

FEATURE #12

The Juicy Parts

When I’m good I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.

—MAE WEST

In every novel on our list, one key sexual encounter plays a decisive role in the outcome of the plot and in the transformation of the protagonist.

Sex sells, they say, and of course they’re right.

Those in the business of quantifying such things have even nailed down the numbers, at least in a general sort of way. In their academic study on those bestselling novels that were published in the period between 1965 and 1985, Karen Hinckley and Barbara Hinckley tabulated that “books about sex are second in frequency [of sales] only to historical novels and are about as frequent as tales of spies and intrigue” (American Bestsellers: A Reader’s Guide to Popular Fiction).

For the purposes of their study, they defined “books about sex” this way: “The topic—whether an activity, a preoccupation, or a problem—forms a major theme or is described frequently enough to be important to the book … one scene of battle does not make a war novel, and one scene of sex sufficient for an R movie rating does not make a book about sex.”

Using their classification, only two of the books on our list of twelve megasellers are “about sex.” Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls feature numerous sexual encounters from masturbation to oral sex to lesbian encounters to incest and rape.

But numbering sexual acts tells us nothing about the role that sex actually plays in shaping the meaning of the novel. As my students and I discovered, in every novel we examined there was a striking repeating pattern: One key sexual encounter, no matter how slight it might have seemed or how euphemistically it was rendered, inevitably played a decisive role in the outcome of the plot and in the transformation of the main character.

What we also came to see was that sex scenes in bestsellers seem to be at the red-hot center of gender relations. The sweaty realities played out on fictional couches and beds and in the backseats of automobiles more often than not reenact one of America’s most dramatic social movements in the twentieth century, the struggle of women for empowerment, equality, and independence.

GLORIED IN IT

After nine hundred pages of enduring Scarlett’s childish fixation on the vapid Ashley Wilkes, Rhett Butler, the dark prince of Gone with the Wind, has had all he can take. Furious after witnessing an intimate encounter between his wife and Ashley, Rhett proceeds to get drunk and sweep Scarlett roughly into his arms. He hauls her up the stairs, and on the landing he kisses her savagely, and as she is about to faint away from his overwhelming passion, she realizes that Rhett is the first man she’s ever met who is stronger than she is, someone she cannot intimidate or control, someone who in fact is intimidating and controlling her.

During the violent sex that follows, Rhett Butler “humbled her, hurt her, used her brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it.”

Gloried in it?

Well, yes. Because to Scarlett the quasi rape is evidence that she now has the one thing she craves most of all, control. Decades before the sexual revolution and the gender wars began to consume the American mass media’s attention, Scarlett was experimenting with a feminist vocabulary by casting the sexual dynamics between a man and a woman in the political lingo of power and exploitation.

Scarlett glories in the thought that now Rhett is at her mercy. She knows the chinks in his armor. She has him exactly where she wants him and now “could make him jump through any hoops she cared to hold.”

Oddly, the identical phrase appears in a crucial passage in Peyton Place, a postcoital moment after Allison MacKenzie has lost her virginity to Bradley Holmes, an experienced older man. Allison also glories in the mistaken belief that she has gained power over her sexual partner. After a weekend of sex, Allison is a changed woman. She is able to strut naked in front of Brad, feeling his eyes on her body, without experiencing a trace of shame or a flicker of fear, because she “had arched her back, and lifted her heavy hair off her neck, and pressed her breasts against his face, and gloried in his swift reaction to her.”

Allison and Scarlett will soon discover their celebration of control and power over their lover was premature. For Rhett and Brad, the sexual events that meant so much to Scarlett and Allison were far from life-altering.

But these sexual episodes are watershed moments for the female characters. In the final pages of these two novels, after the heroines are rejected by the men they thought they controlled, each woman goes on to discover that true empowerment is far harder to achieve than the fleeting dominance they wielded in the bedroom.

Shortly after her rejection by Rhett, in a rare moment of candid self-appraisal, Scarlett succinctly describes the limitations and immaturities that have characterized her for the thousand preceding pages. Scarlett admits to herself that she never fully understood the two men she’d loved. If she’d truly known Ashley, she wouldn’t have loved him. And if she’d truly understood Rhett, she’d never have lost him. For a moment, she wonders if she’s ever really known anyone.

With almost any other literary character, this epiphany would stand as the climactic moment in an arc of development—a revelation about self that would propel that character to a new understanding in the final pages. But Scarlett O’Hara is so mired in her habits of mind, this moment of recognition is quickly shunted aside with her standard psychological dodge. Oh, fiddle-dee-dee. She’ll worry about all that tomorrow.

In Frankly, My Dear, an analysis of both the film and the novel of Gone with the Wind, Molly Haskell argues that beneath her hoop skirts and petticoats, Scarlett is actually a revolutionary character for her era, a woman with some of the features of a modern feminist, “a predator who marries three men she doesn’t love,” “a rotten mother,” and “a successful business woman.”

Ordinarily, Haskell observes, a female literary character behaving in these “inappropriate” ways would be made to suffer “one or more of the following: sexual and psychological humiliation, a barrage of self-satisfied diatribes and blandishments from the people she’s wounded; death, or, in its stead, an eleventh-hour reversal whereby she repents her wicked ways, is brought back to heel, and is transformed by love into a submissive female.”

I beg to differ. While it’s true that Scarlett transformed herself in some fashion into a modern woman by becoming an independent business owner who is every bit as savvy, hard-nosed, and cynically aggressive in her financial dealings as any man, at her core she failed to evolve, and we leave her in the last scene pretty much as we found her at the opening, just as silly and man-dependent.

In this respect, Scarlett is unique among the major female characters on our list of bestsellers. Most of the heroines break with gender stereotypes in a way that’s more in line with modern feminism—they become stronger, more independent, more rigorously self-aware, and less deluded by the fantasies and fairy tales they believed in earlier. In terms of my study, what’s truly striking about these gender transformations is that almost always the radical change of perspective is triggered by a single intense sexual encounter.

Allison MacKenzie’s first sexual fling ends with the discovery that Brad Holmes, her lover, is married. He deceived her and exploited her innocence. When Allison “gloried in his swift reaction to her,” she was clearly mistaking the rush of blood for something more lasting and real.

Like her mother before her, Allison flees the arms of her deceitful lover and returns home to Peyton Place. But Allison is from a new, more liberal generation. Unlike Constance, Allison does not allow her disillusionment with one man to fester into suspicion and bitterness toward them all. Instead, her own erotic discoveries help Allison come to peace with the crude sexuality that’s always galled her in the affairs of Peyton Place.

In a final scene, Allison stands on a hillside with the toylike town spread before her, and in language she might use to address her ex-lover, Brad, she expresses sympathy and forgiveness for Peyton Place. Accepting its meanness, its generosity, its cruelty. Now that she truly knows the town, truly understands the complex emotions at work in its narrow streets, Peyton Place no longer frightens her.

Her encounter with Brad Holmes makes this final reconciliation with her hometown possible. Wiser in the ways of sex, Allison now sees the behavior she’d once taken as lewd and sordid to be a natural and vital part of the human story. This discovery is crucial in her growth as an independent woman, and it’s essential to her evolution as a fiction writer. For we know Allison MacKenzie now will be able to revise her manuscript with a greater understanding of her subject and create a full and mature portrait of Peyton Place. The tangible result of her journey of sexual discovery is a novel very much like the one we’ve been reading.

RUTTING

Sex is certainly not the first thing that comes to mind when considering To Kill a Mockingbird. Most readers would probably label the book as a young adult novel about racial tensions in a small southern town. But the fact is, the novel’s plot as well as Scout’s personal transformation are driven chiefly by a single sexual event.

Though the encounter between Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson is a total fabrication devised by the Ewells, their lie radically changes numerous lives, spawning a lynching attempt, an explosive rape trial, the death of an innocent man, the attempted murder of two children, and the violent death of Robert Ewell. And on the psychological level, that same sexual accusation fuels Scout Finch’s change from an innocent child to a young woman with a more mature understanding of the intimate relations between men and women.

If eight-year-old Scout at first doesn’t understand what rape is, the courtroom testimony by Bob Ewell and Mayella removes any doubt. Speaking before an overflow crowd that includes the Finch children, Robert Ewell recounts his version of events of a recent November evening when he was bringing a load of firewood home and heard his daughter, Mayella, screaming. He dropped his load and ran to the window of his house and saw Tom Robinson “ruttin’ on my Mayella.”

As the trial continues, Atticus Finch questions Mayella about the details of the night in question, and Scout is exposed to two additional facts of life most girls her age and class would be shielded from—that daughters can sometimes be the victims of sexual and physical abuse from their fathers and that sexual desire can be driven by needs far more perverse than love.

Though Scout and the reader can only guess what really happened in the Ewells’ shack that November evening, the novel strongly suggests Mayella made a pass at Tom, a provocative come-on that he was in the process of rejecting when Mayella’s father arrived on the scene.

Tom ran. And Mayella was beaten by her father for her crime of interracial lust. To cover his shame and vent his anger, Bob Ewell summoned the sheriff and claimed Tom raped his daughter. All this Scout manages to infer from the Ewells’ evasive court testimony.

Scout’s training in gender politics actually begins long before the trial starts when Miss Maudie, who has been the target of religious zealots, explains to Scout that these “foot-washers think women are a sin by definition.” Scout hears the same sexist message again in a sermon given at a black church when the preacher inveighs against the whole female race as impure and the root of all temptation.

Like Scarlett O’Hara, Scout is bombarded with messages about proper female behavior. Calpurnia chides her constantly about her tomboy antics. Her own brother, Jem, is increasingly uncomfortable with her gender.

As much as Scout would like to avoid the whole subject of sex and gender, she can’t. By the end of the novel, the carnal desire Mayella felt for Tom warps into violence that overtakes Scout and her brother in the form of a knife-wielding Bob Ewell.

In the scene that follows, Scout meets Boo Radley face-to-face for the first time in a bedroom at the Finches’ house.

At the moment when Scout and Boo touch, there is something electric, even sensuous, in their exploratory give-and-take and the gentle coaching that passes between them, as if this scene might be the innocent mirror image of the coarse encounter between Mayella and Tom Robinson.

In a reversal of traditional male and female roles, Scout leads Boo back to his house and drops him at his door. They part wordlessly, like lovers who’ve exhausted the possibilities between them. After this moment Scout will never see Boo again, but she is changed by the encounter, just as Allison is forever altered by her first intimate contact with a man. Both young women are stronger and more independent at the conclusions of their stories, budding feminists who are seemingly on their way to escaping the gender stereotypes that trap the other female characters in these novels.

WATERSHED SEX

In The Dead Zone, John Smith and Sarah Bracknell are about to have sex for the first time when fate intervenes. A violent car crash sends Johnny into a coma for four and a half years, and when he wakes, Sarah has moved on. She’s married Walt Hazlett, and the couple has a child. But Sarah’s not over Johnny, and he’s definitely not over her.

For starters, Sarah can’t help comparing her cynical husband with the good-hearted Johnny, a comparison that undermines her fidelity to Walt.

In that moment she hated [Walt], loathed him, this good man she had married. There was really nothing so terrible on the reverse side of his goodness, his steadiness, his mild good humor—just the belief, apparently grounded in the bedrock of his soul, that everybody was looking out for number one, each with his or her own little racket.

Johnny wasn’t that way. He had a heart of gold before the coma, and when he wakes, Sarah decides she must get back in touch. She finds him unchanged by his ordeal, and the pent-up, unresolved sexual tension between them erupts. What follows is a sensuous fulfillment of all that was long deferred. For the two young people, sex is not an opening of a door to the future, but a closing of the door to the past.

Sinking into her was like sinking into an old dream that had never been quite forgotten.

“Oh, Johnny, my dear …” Her voice in rising excitement. Her hips moving in a quickening tempo. Her voice was far away. The touch of her hair was like fire on his shoulder and chest. He plunged his face deeply into it, losing himself in the dark-blonde darkness.

This sexual moment cauterizes their wounded hearts and allows each of them to let go of their romantic past. Sarah returns to Walt, and when we see her again at the end of the novel, she’s had another child and seems reconciled to her marriage. Johnny goes on to use his energies and his psychic powers to help capture a sexual predator, the Castle Rock Strangler, and then moves on to his great act of world-saving self-sacrifice.

For both characters, the sexual moment between them was a watershed event, reminding them of what they’d lost and what they might have had if fate had been kinder. Johnny says as much in a letter to Sarah that she reads after his death: “But I wanted you to know that I think of you, Sarah. For me there really hasn’t been anyone else, and that night was the best night for us.…”

Here, as with the other bestsellers on my list, this single sex scene is decisive, and without it events and characters would have moved in markedly different directions.

Jaws repeats the pattern with raunchy zest. In the novelistic version, the story opens with a sex scene between a nameless woman and a drunken man. He falls backward onto the beach and pulls her onto him, and they claw at each other’s clothes. When they’ve satisfied themselves, the woman is still ready for a swim, but her date has already drifted off to sleep.

She walks naked into the Atlantic and paddles offshore, where the great white “smells her” and proceeds to take her apart limb by limb.

Given the novel’s focus on the shark’s highly developed sense of smell, one might reasonably ask if the shark would have located that swimmer had she not just had sex on the beach. The suggestion is unavoidable: The shark becomes an avenging angel, punishing the dissolute behavior happening back on shore. A kind of nasty Puritan backlash against counterculture types with their dope-smoking, self-indulgent lack of moral discipline. It’s entirely possible that shark would’ve passed right by Amity if there hadn’t been such a strong scent of decadence in the water.

The opening scene of the movie version avoids that question but raises another. A drunken college kid picks up a willing girl at a beach bonfire where dope is smoked, guitars are strummed, and necking is widespread. In the film, the drunken guy simply falls into a heap at the shoreline still clothed, while his would-be lover strips naked and walks into the waves, then swims out into the ocean as if flaunting her sexual freedom. In this case, one could ask if the self-sufficient woman who abandons her man in a drunken daze is being punished for the sin of independence.

Presumably Steven Spielberg made this alteration, having his shark target a liberated woman rather than a decadent one, because a feminist victim might arouse trendier emotions than a woman who was simply licentious.

Either way, it’s a hell of a sexy way to open. Coupling the shark’s violent rampage with the naked fumblings of two lovers puts into motion an erotic undercurrent that moves through the entire novel.

The only other true sex scene in Jaws involves a tête-à-tête between Brody’s wife, Ellen, and Hooper, the visiting shark expert. Ellen’s motivation for straying has more to do with a need to affirm her sexuality and her upper-class background than with a romantic attraction to Hooper.

Ellen gets her wish and spends a few steamy hours engaged in a hotel romp with Hooper. The experience redefines her in ways she hadn’t expected. Hooper, it turns out, is about as sexy as an android on autopilot.

His teeth were still clenched, his eyes still fixed on the wall, and he continued to pump madly.… After a while, she had tapped him on the back and said softly, “Hey, I’m here too.”

Hooper must’ve learned his mating habits from the fish he studies—so spasmodic, so inhuman, so violent.

It would be a stretch to claim that Sarah and Ellen are “liberated” by their adulterous affairs. But both women do return to their marriages with a gratitude and calm that is noticeably similar. One could make the case that such a pattern might be simply a wishful fantasy that male bestseller authors promote about infidelity—that strong and wayward women will eventually see the light and return to the marriage bed with new commitment. Wishful fantasy or not, these two twentieth-century married women wind up sharing a similar toughness and resolve to renew their commitment to a traditional marriage.

CHEATING

John Grisham puts a tempting island girl in Mitch McDeere’s path while he’s off on a business trip to the Cayman Islands. On the deserted beach in the tropical darkness, this dark-haired beauty shucks off her bikini top and hands it to Mitch and wades into the sea. (Doesn’t she know there are sharks out there?)

Mitch debates it for a sentence or two, then strips and wades out after her. They consummate their encounter back on the sand, with Mitch chanting to himself that no one will ever know.

Not so quick. The woman was a setup, part of the firm’s master plan to keep their legal associates in line. Pictures were taken of Mitch and the island beauty, and the firm’s enforcer shows them to Mitch with a threat. Play along, buy your new, flashier car, your bigger house, just like the other lawyers at the firm. But don’t try to be heroic. Or these pictures will destroy your marriage.

Although it’s an errant husband this time instead of a straying wife, the formula holds, for Mitch’s infidelity eventually helps to renew the marriage. His relationship with Abby is under serious strain from Mitch’s workaholic schedule. Abby chafes in the role of model wife and homemaker. She’s increasingly lonely and frustrated, a young wife who has made one too many candlelit dinners that her husband failed to attend. For a marriage under so much stress, Mitch’s one-night stand could be the final straw.

Like Sarah Bracknell’s infidelity in The Dead Zone and Ellen Brody’s motel fling in Jaws, Mitch’s beach shenanigans become a watershed moment in his marriage. He never actually confesses, but he certainly sweats bullets when one evening he comes home to find Abby with a mailing envelope marked “Photographs” lying at the foot of the bed. It takes a few moments before Mitch realizes the mailer was empty—just a sadistic reminder from his adversaries that they have the power to expose his unfaithfulness.

After this crisis, the marriage takes a turn. Though we never see Mitch acknowledging his deceit, his guilt seems to tip the balance of power between him and Abby and gives him a new appreciation for his marriage. And though Abby is unaware of the cause of this change, she energetically embraces her new role as Mitch’s co-conspirator. If they’re not exactly equal partners, it’s awfully close.

Holed up in a shabby apartment, copying incriminating evidence on Bendini, Lambert & Locke, Abby sheds her passivity and blossoms into a strong, decisive woman. One evening when Mitch arrives at the door of the rented apartment where Abby’s working, it’s like old times back in that law school flat—this time with Abby as the initiator of sex and behaving every bit like Mitch’s coequal. Abby pulls open the door and throws herself on Mitch. The sex scene that follows is more heated and more satisfying than any before or after. It’s a watershed moment between these two. Sex that seals the deal and establishes the terms of their new, more equal partnership.

The couple eventually pull off their scheme and escape to a safe Caribbean sanctuary, well beyond the reach of the Mob or the FBI or financial worries. However, the aftereffects of Mitch’s hanky-panky linger.

In the novel’s final scene, alone on their island paradise, Abby fills their cocktail glasses with another hit of rum punch and declares that as long as the two of them are together she can endure anything, even this Spartan isolation. As things warm up between them, she asks innocently if Mitch has ever had sex on the beach.

He fumbles for a moment, then lies and says no, he hasn’t.

One could certainly argue that Mitch’s dishonesty might eventually undermine the authenticity of the McDeeres’ more balanced relations. But even with that caveat, it’s clear that the Abby we see in the final scene is a stronger woman than we’ve seen before. With a new assertiveness in full flower, she is given the novel’s last words. Calling the shots in a way that would have been unthinkable a hundred pages earlier. A newly independent woman determined to have her own version of a traditional family.

“Then drink up, sailor. Let’s get drunk and make a baby.”

SEXUAL AWAKENING

At the head of the class of adultery bestsellers is The Bridges of Madison County. Though Francesca’s marriage to her boring farmer husband is not rejuvenated or strengthened in any way that we can see by the long hours of extramarital sex with Robert Kincaid, she certainly stores away sufficient memories of erotic satisfaction to console her for the rest of her days. And without a doubt, she’s changed as radically by the brief affair as Allison or Scarlett or Abby or Sarah or Ellen Brody.

Indeed, the language of the one long and detailed sex scene suggests that Robert Kincaid’s transformative powers are virtually supernatural. He takes “possession of her, in all of her dimensions.” He seems “shamanlike” as he whispers in her ear … kissing her between his words. The man’s a talker all right, almost hypnotic in his seductive powers.

This erotic possession could be seen as a much kinder, gentler version of the one described in The Exorcist when prepubescent Regan MacNeil, invaded by Satan, masturbates with a crucifix and spews vile sexual come-ons to the celibate Father Karras.

Though Francesca describes in flattering terms the otherworldly power Robert exerts over her, one can’t help but question whose point of view is being stated when he “ran his tongue along her neck, licking her as some fine leopard might do in long grass out on the veldt.”

The guy’s an animal, the graceful kind who dominates with soft power.

The love affair transfigures Francesca. Her womanliness is awakened, her life is given a meaning and dimensionality it was lacking before. In a parting letter to her children, Francesca sums it up succinctly:

“In four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole.”

Of course, some would argue that Francesca’s epiphany is nothing more than the sexist fantasy of a self-indulgent male author—behold what magical powers a man can bestow on a woman if she would just peel off that dress and lie back.

If Bridges were the only novel on our list of bestsellers that depicted the transformative power of sex, such a critique might carry more weight. But the pattern recurs with such regularity in bestsellers, whether written by men or women, that we must ask the larger question: Why does a single sexual episode play such a pivotal role in so many hugely successful American novels?

Well, it might have something to do with our intense and deeply rooted national ambivalence about sex and adultery. Our libraries are filled with works that many consider classics in which two opposing moral forces are at war: America’s prudishness vs. its rebellious and rule-breaking spirit.

At the dawn of American literary history, we find a well-known precursor to the moral story line of so many bestsellers. Remember Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth and Hester Prynne and her out-of-wedlock daughter, Pearl, from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter? In her Puritan settlement, Hester’s promiscuity, which is made apparent by the birth of Pearl, is punished by a prison term. Upon Hester’s release from jail, with Pearl in her arms, she is required to wear a red letter A emblazoned on her chest. Shunned by her God-fearing neighbors, Hester is the target of universal contempt, but somehow through it all she manages to retain a humble and forgiving demeanor.

Dimmesdale, the young, eloquent “cheating minister” who is Hester’s secret lover, is the one who is truly tormented by guilt. As the story unfolds, little by little Hester wins back the respect of the townsfolk through acts of charity and kindness until finally this profligate woman is on the verge of being readmitted into mainstream society. But wait, there’s a complication. Hester and Dimmesdale want more than forgiveness—they want to live together as man and wife.

Despite the danger, the lovers can’t be kept apart. In a forest meeting, the two decide to flee to Europe, where they will be free to live openly with their child. Transformed by this decision, Dimmesdale gives a passionate sermon before his congregation that makes the identical case Atticus Finch will make again almost two centuries later. A paean to empathy in which Dimmesdale extols those “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind … that his chest vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.”

In 1850 when Hawthorne’s novel was published, reactions ranged from deep suspicion to outright scorn. Many believed Hester’s promiscuity was treated far too sympathetically by the author. And, of course, those self-righteous critics were absolutely correct. Hawthorne’s moral outrage was clearly leveled at the repressive society that ostracized Hester rather than at her adulterous misbehavior.

So it was from the beginning in American letters that sin and religious beliefs and moral righteousness were a central part of the discussion when it came to literary criticism. To many American readers, if not most, novels that were not morally uplifting were considered devious and corrupt.

However, Hawthorne saw it otherwise, and in that way he had written a novel that greatly resembles the twelve we’re examining. From Hawthorne’s time forward, the notion that a single sexual act, even if it’s an act of adultery, can have a redemptive power has been a central pattern in American fiction.

At the very least, we can say that Americans are deeply conflicted about sex, and that powerful ambivalence is what we’re seeing in these highly successful books.

RELIGIOUS SEX

In the beginning, Dan Brown created The Da Vinci Code, and it was good, and everybody liked it because it was about sex. No, scratch that. It was about religion. Well, no, make that religion and sex. Oh, okay, it was about religion, sex, and feminine power, and the long and sordid history of male suppression of women.

Here’s a spoiler, so those two or three people who’ve not yet read The Da Vinci Code should skip the following paragraph.

Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene. And lo, she became heavy with child, and the celibate priests, fearing the loss of their power, declared women to be unclean and hid Mary’s pregnancy. A few righteous insurgents spirited away her child to some secret place, and forever after, the sinister wing of the Catholic Church went to great lengths in their pursuit of Christ’s heirs and used every resource at their disposal, including murder, to keep Christ’s sexiness hidden from humanity for a couple of millennia until Robert Langdon yanked back the curtains and exposed the truth.

So there’s the capper—the big secret. Two thousand years ago, Jesus had sex. Women are not unclean after all. They’re actually goddesses. Especially Sophie Neveu, who apparently is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ himself.

It should be clear by now that Mr. Brown was making use of a narrative pattern we’ve seen a few times before: one sex scene that changes everything.

In fact, this particular sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a moment that of course is never actually presented dramatically but which readers are invited to imagine for themselves, is the driving force in this novel, the cornerstone on which is built the elaborate structure of a worldwide, multicentury conspiracy. It’s the event that sets in motion the murder spree of an albino monk, and it’s the cause of all the deadly machinations of Opus Dei that send our sturdy hero, Robert, and his plucky sidekick, Sophie, running for their lives through one long, treacherous maze.

That long-ago sexual incident is the equivalent of the love affair and marriage that fuel Ramius’s desertion to America (The Hunt for Red October). It’s the terrible sexual hypocrisy and double-dealing that are at the core of Peyton Place and Mockingbird. It’s the dance of sexual exploitation that drives Gone with the Wind and Valley of the Dolls. It’s the shark that punishes women who have sexually liberated themselves in Jaws. It’s the devil that impregnates the blossoming young daughter of a proudly independent woman (The Exorcist). Again and again we see permutations of this pattern in our twelve megahits, as though bestselling novelists were channeling the biblical story of Eden: Once the snake has done its sneaky job, a new world dawns.

AMERICAN SEX

Five centuries after Boccaccio’s Decameron first appeared, featuring sweaty sexcapades between Italian nuns and monks in convents, the book was seized and destroyed by American authorities. James Joyce’s Ulysses suffered a similar fate, as did Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was not available from a U.S. publisher until almost thirty years after it first appeared in a French edition. And numerous literary luminaries including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner wrote novels deemed by many to be grossly improper, if not downright degenerate. While those novels were not banned outright, they were certainly the object of strong moral disapproval from many quarters.

Which is to say that it’s important to remind ourselves that puritanism is alive and well in mainstream America and that many of us, despite a private devotion to the multibillion-dollar business of pornography, are still just a short distance removed from our book-burning ancestors.

It was in 1873 that Anthony Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization determined to regulate the morality of the public. So successful was Comstock in making his case, he eventually engineered the passage of the Comstock Act in the United States Congress, making it illegal to deliver or transport “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Or for that matter any information relating to birth control.

Though Comstock died in 1915, his priggish disciples live on today, targeting books like the Harry Potter series and even poor old Huck Finn as corrupting influences, trying to expel them from public libraries or high school lit classes or to publish new editions with all the offensive parts purged.

Despite what Comstock would have had us believe, naughty narratives have been heating things up since the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament and the Roman Satyricon. The Far East has its Kama Sutra, Europe has its bawdy Chaucerian tales, and there’s that dirty old man Shakespeare and the whip-wielding Marquis de Sade, to name just a few. Even the earliest English novels were juicy: Indecent sexual romps like Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, and Tristram Shandy delighted in bawdily mocking the pomposity of the upper classes, a tendency that still lingers in the form today.

America, however, is a different story. Even in the supposedly enlightened twentieth century, a large portion of the straitlaced populace howled in protest over that dry account of sexuality, Masters and Johnson’s 1966 tome, Human Sexual Response. Suffice it to say, those wails naturally had the effect of turning it into a notorious sensation and bestseller, all for the terrible sin of debunking some misconceptions about matters like female orgasm and lubrication.

Americans didn’t invent censorship, but we’ve certainly worked long and hard on its behalf. There’s a lengthy list of books that were once condemned as morally objectionable but which have now become literary standards. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Native Son, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, have all made that journey from notorious to respectable, though there remains a small ongoing effort to ban even some of those books in certain pockets of America.

In the swinging sixties, sexuality swaggered across the national literary stage and confirmed forever, in the minds of many, a connection between elite cultural values and depravity. Back when college kids were growing their hair long, burning their bras and draft cards, and making real and literary forays into prurience, dirty books were everywhere. Nearly all of us of a certain age can make a list of books we privately feasted on during those wanton years: Terry Southern’s Candy, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.

Published a decade prior to Woodstock and the sexual revolution, Peyton Place certainly helped pave the way for more sexual candor in fiction. In its day the novel was considered so raunchy, so luridly extreme, that it was banned outright in a few districts here and there and lambasted from pulpits across the country, though it was largely available in the depraved urban centers. To some, Peyton Place’s acceptance into the mainstream signaled that the pornification of American literature was under way.

These days, of course, what writer wouldn’t want his or her book banned? Notoriety would be at the top of any publicist’s wish list. However, of the twelve books we’ve been considering, only Peyton Place had that rare distinction. Famously disreputable, the novel became a guilty pleasure for millions of Americans who no doubt stashed it away in underwear drawers and on closet shelves and confirmed their worst suspicions about what their neighbors were doing behind closed doors.

Though To Kill a Mockingbird has now and then raised the hackles of a few moral arbiters and book-banning nutcases, it’s never drawn much serious fire from hard-core moralists. Which is also true for the other books on our list of twelve. In fact, what’s unique about the way sexuality is handled in these blockbusters is that the descriptive language is relatively euphemistic and chaste, PG-rated and for the most part less explicit than many modern Disney films.

The sexual language may be toned down to broaden the books’ mainstream appeal, but copulation, both violent and extreme, still plays a crucial role in the outcomes of all these stories. So while Americans may give lip service, as it were, to a more virtuous sensibility, somewhere in our national consciousness we know that one good roll in the hay can change everything.

Hey, Adam. Come on, just have a little taste of this juicy morsel.

Once Again, Quickly

These twelve very different bestsellers share a great many common features. They’re fast, emotionally charged. They’re full of familiar character types. They’re fun to read—the opposite of work. Irresistible, unputdownable, brimming with schmaltz.

Written in earthy, simple, earnest, transparent prose with plots that are driven by a “high concept” and a minimum of backstory or psychological introspection, they are peopled by characters whose burning emotions drive them to commit bold and decisive actions. The various motives that drive the characters to such passion are clear and precise and easy to sympathize with. Early on in each narrative, the hero seems to be in well over his (or her) head, which helps to stir the reader’s sense of pity and dread.

Within the first quarter of the story, though usually sooner, some threat of danger inevitably occurs, and that danger grows in intensity as the story progresses, while simultaneously the relentless pressure of time increases the stress on the characters.

Each of these novels explores some controversial or divisive issue of its day, an issue that is rooted in some larger national clash that has existed for a long time and still continues to trouble the heart of American culture.

Bestsellers are novels of scope, which means the stakes are large, the cast of characters represents a broad demographic spectrum, and the small story told in the foreground is set against a sweeping backdrop of epic consequence.

Images of nature or wilderness that might be described as Edenic occur with regularity. Usually these wild places are sexually charged or they glow with an idealized sense of innocence and purity before they are violently transformed.

Bestsellers assume a didactic role and are full of facts and information. They teach the reader while they entertain. The facts might be as mundane as descriptions of the nuts and bolts of a submarine or the more subtle rituals and manners governing the social interactions of a small southern town or a pre–Civil War plantation. These novels all plunge us into exotic worlds and give us the road maps for how one would survive or flourish within them.

Each novel features some form of secret society. In true American fashion, the heroes of these novels penetrate and expose the workings of these clandestine groups and battle to neutralize their corrosive effects.

The heroes and heroines often move between rural landscapes and urban centers, a journey that dramatizes a clash between agrarian values and the cultural norms of the city.

Conventional religious beliefs and practices are often the object of criticism in these novels. Commonsense or secular viewpoints are offered up as better alternatives.

These novels either celebrate or harshly critique some of America’s most cherished myths. For instance, the notion that the poorest and most disenfranchised among us can achieve prosperity, material wealth, and personal freedom is frequently glorified and just as frequently mocked as false.

Rebels and loners and mavericks play the leading parts in all of these novels. These outcasts struggle mightily against the pressures of conformity and conventionality, often risking their lives to do so.

Broken families are spotlighted in all the books, and their faults and eccentricities and neurotic group dynamics threaten the well-being of the heroes and heroines and force them to find remedies or methods of escape.

In all the novels, sexual incidents play pivotal roles. The story’s outcome is frequently dependent on the hero or heroine coping successfully with the result of some extreme sexual act.

A Bonus Chapter:

No Tears for the Writer

Back when I first had the bright idea to teach a course in popular novels, I was also trying to publish a novel of my own. In fact, I’d written four of them by the time I taught that first bestseller class. Modeled on the experimental fiction I was teaching, my novels were populated by flamboyantly absurd characters and were rendered in surreal and disjointed narratives and lavish prose, and the narrators were all smug and self-conscious critics of many aspects of modern culture, including the novel form.

By the time I first taught Gone with the Wind, those four experimental novels had collected some fabulous rejection letters, but no publisher had seen fit to put any of them into print.

After that first eye-opening semester, while I was flush with newfound admiration for bestsellers, I decided to make a radical course correction in my creative life. Instead of imitating those hip, high-culture novels I’d been teaching, I drew a deep breath and decided to take a crack at a crime thriller like the ones I’d been sinfully snacking on in private for years.

My semester of reading these popular books had been so liberating, the decision seemed inescapable. Two years after I completed that original bestseller class, my first crime thriller, Under Cover of Daylight, was published. It got some great reviews and sold several times what the average first novel sells, winding up on a number of bestseller lists. My metafiction days were officially over. I was now a crime novelist, and a bestselling one at that.

Of course, I give a lot of credit for this success to the techniques I absorbed in that first bestseller class. But there was something else I discovered in the long hours that I labored over that first thriller. Simply using the recurring features as a paint-by-numbers template wasn’t good enough. The early drafts of that novel were flat and dull—not exactly the characteristics you want in a thriller. It took a while, but I finally saw that by depending too heavily on the recurring features, using them as a formula, I had allowed my writing to become little more than a mechanical process.

“No tears for the writer,” said Robert Frost, “no tears for the reader.” From the beginning of my writing career, this had been an article of faith. All writing was personal. Without something emotionally at stake, the writing process is a sham, and the resulting work is likely to be nothing but a sterile exercise. It had to matter to me before it could matter to anyone else. This was the value I’d temporarily lost sight of as I struggled to employ the bestseller techniques.

So before I turned back to that early draft of Under Cover of Daylight, I spent a while trying to discover how these elements might be linked to my personal concerns and passions. How did the story I was trying to tell dovetail with the elements at the core of so many commercially successful novels, and how were my own passions connected to the themes and approaches my class and I had spotted in those bestsellers of the past?

HERE’S A SAMPLING OF

WHAT I DISCOVERED

In my teens, when I started reading for pleasure, I found that books could teach me secrets about the real world that I could discover nowhere else. Over the years, as my study of literature became more academic and sophisticated, the objective of reading turned into an intellectual exercise that emphasized literary dissection and careful analysis of the storytelling process. In short, I lost my connection with one of the simple joys of reading—experiencing some new corner of our common world.

After that first bestseller class, I decided I needed to do more than just write beautiful sentences. I needed to know a few things that were worthy of communicating. This shift in my goals as a writer changed my creative process in a fundamental way. I began to place a greater value on the nonfiction aspects of fiction writing.

Today, each of my sixteen novels is invested with a high dose of factual information, which means I spend a month or two before starting each novel doing research in some area the novel will feature. My research has led me to some exotic places, from Borneo, where I investigated international animal smuggling, to the Gulf Stream, where I got firsthand knowledge of big-game marlin fishing, and to police departments and newspaper offices and rape clinics in big-city hospitals.

That month or two of fact-finding, of acquainting myself with my chosen subject, is now one of the most fruitful periods in my writing cycle. It’s the time when I accumulate characters and settings as well as facts and start to test my enthusiasm for the dynamics of my chosen subject. It’s also the time when, much to my dismay, I sometimes realize I’ve taken up the wrong subject entirely and have to start fresh.

Since it takes me around a year to research and write a book, the nonfiction subject I choose has to meet a rigorous standard. It cannot be simply a subject that might have topical or popular interest to others. My chosen field of study must be sufficiently rich to sustain my interest for a long stretch—a year to explore, refine, and dig deep into one of my passions.

Another result of my bestseller studies is that Edenic imagery has become a mainstay of my work. Nothing gets me churning like watching the desecration of paradise. Of course, living in Florida makes such research easy. As a lover and student of the natural world, an outdoorsman since my youth, I’ve had an intimate education in the subject. For forty years this feature has been in my blood. Depicting the strangely beautiful flora and fauna, birds and fish, weather and light, and fragile landscapes of my adopted homeland also allows me to keep my poetic muscles toned. Describing the loss of the unspoiled landscape inevitably suggests other forms of innocence lost, a theme that the best crime novels regularly explore.

When my students and I spotted the recurring tensions between rural and urban values in those first bestsellers, it struck a chord with me. I was born and raised in a small town in Kentucky but have lived all my adult life in America’s urban centers. The conflicts between those two Americas is very real to me, and as I came to discover, it’s fertile creative ground.

Most of my novels are set in Key Largo, where I lived for years—a small island community fifty miles south of Miami. The clash between the city life of Miami and the island life of Key Largo has come to play an organic role in most of my novels and expresses a deep-seated tension in my own heart. I am a country boy who has relocated to the city, and though I move about freely in both environments, I also regularly experience twinges of that modern malaise known as cognitive dissonance. That feeling of being a half step removed from the place I call home.

Many of the families in my novels are royally dysfunctional, another subject I come by naturally. I’ll spare you the particulars, but as Flannery O’Connor liked to say, I believe that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.

All my novels explore the complicated dynamics of fathers and sons and daughters and mothers and brothers and sisters. Those endless permutations of conflicts among loved ones continue to fuel my imagination. Even after using families as a centerpiece of the plots in seventeen novels, I’m still fascinated by the subject, all the varied ways that blood relations can turn deadly and the many heroic means that families use to heal even the deepest wounds.

Perhaps because I was raised in a religious home, my earliest career goal was to be a preacher. Though I must admit the attraction was based largely on my misperception that a preacher worked only one day a week. Seemed like a pretty good gig. The college I attended was Presbyterian in name only, for as I came to discover, its curriculum was devoted largely to a questioning of conventional faith. My faith didn’t hold up long to such close inspection, and gradually I decided to swap a religious career for an academic one. The perks weren’t quite as good—three days a week of teaching instead of one day preaching—but it still looked better than five days slaving in an office. In any case, my formative years were marked by religious considerations. And in my fiction, the conflicts between secular and religious views of justice and the ways in which men of different moral orientations face down evil have become two of my most productive themes.

I could go on, but surely you get it. The missing ingredient, the magic elixir that breathed life into my first novel, was personal passion. Knowing the twelve elements was not enough. I had to figure out how each expressed a deeply rooted emotion of my own.

Without this one last ingredient, a novel might easily contain all the recurring features but still remain a lifeless pile of mush. So call it the yeast or call it the magic powder that catalyzes these inert ingredients—this last recurring feature is key.

It is the author’s honest passion that breathes life into Scarlett and Scout and Mitch and dear old Professor Langdon. It’s an earnest, wholehearted devotion to the material at hand. As sentimental as the story of Robert Kincaid and Francesca may be, it’s honest sentimentality. And sure, the girls of Valley of the Dolls are a dopey bunch, but they are as genuine as the three young women sharing the apartment down the hall. No amount of fakery would have produced the desired results.

While it may sound self-evident that writers should choose subjects that honestly stir their own hearts, I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find in my best writing students a tendency to select story lines and characters they have little interest in themselves, solely because they think these ingredients will stir the passions of their teachers or potential editors.

The writers of these twelve bestsellers, however, did not make that mistake. They all tapped some wellspring of feeling in themselves. They believed deeply in Scout and Francesca and Michael Corleone and Sheriff Brody, and they felt pity and fear for their predicaments. And in so doing, they managed to stir the hearts of millions of readers.

This one’s for my students.

For four decades you’ve given me more than I’ve given you. Testing me, pushing me, opening my eyes, clarifying what I didn’t understand, forcing me to consider and rethink comfortable ideas I’d clung to, all the while letting me pretend I was in charge when it was never true. You were always running the show. I couldn’t have done it without you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There were several early readers of this book who provided invaluable, though often daunting, criticisms and guidance. Chief among them was my wife, Evelyn Crovo-Hall, whose suggestions were crucial in correcting some early wrong turns. At every stage Les Standiford, my colleague and friend, gave sage and practical advice about the focus of this book, helping to rescue it from academic stuffiness. I must give special thanks to John Unsworth, dean and professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, who kindly posted his extensive website describing his bestseller class at the University of Virginia. This site proved to be an invaluable tool for my own teaching and research over the years. Chuck Elkins, professor emeritus at Florida International University, read an early draft of the manuscript and provided critical and incisive suggestions that greatly improved the final product. David Gonzalez, who wrote the plot summaries at the end of this book, was also a helpful sounding board as the book was taking shape. Without the inspired editing and excellent judgment of Millicent Bennett and Kate Medina, I would never have found the real book hiding inside the early drafts.

And I must thank that long-ago librarian who got me hooked on books and steered me to a larger, more interesting world than I would have known otherwise. Librarians like her exist today, as well as many valiant English teachers, who against great odds are still guiding readers, young and old, to books they would otherwise not discover—making countless lives richer in the process and instilling a lifelong passion for reading in generations to come.

TOASTING A FEW OF MY STUDENTS

At the time Barbara Parker entered one of my bestseller classes, she was writing romance paperback originals. After that semester, she changed direction and turned her attention to legal thrillers. Her novels, such as Suspicion of Deceit, eventually became New York Times bestsellers.

To my surprise, she kept attending seminars and classes that I was teaching in bestsellers. Though by then she was something of a star, her enthusiasm for the material was undiminished. For Barbara, there was always something to learn from these commercially successful novels. Discoveries that delighted her and fueled her own work for years.

Barbara Parker passed away in 2009, at the age of sixty-two. At the time of her death, she had published twelve mystery novels. One of her books was a finalist for the Edgar Award and was subsequently made into a CBS television movie of the week entitled Sisters and Other Strangers.

Dennis Lehane was writing literary short fiction when he arrived in graduate school, though his knowledge of popular culture, both films and commercial novels, ran deep. I remember arguing with him in the bestseller class about a novel we were studying by Dean Koontz. Dennis believed the plot was too familiar, and he ticked off several other novels that had employed a similar structure. I didn’t argue on behalf of Koontz’s originality but made the case that narrative structures could be similar and still the stories could be vastly different, just as the underlying structure of the skull doesn’t limit a wide variety of facial appearances. The point Dennis was making demonstrated his ability to see the larger form and shape of a story, a skill that most of his fellow grad students lacked. Lehane’s success as a novelist (Mystic River, Shutter Island, The Given Day, all New York Times bestsellers) is due in some measure to this talent for seeing the global structure of his stories so clearly, which frees him to manage its many moving parts with great dexterity.

Dennis was in the same class with Barbara Parker and a couple of other students who have gone on to publish successful novels. When I asked him what, if anything, he recalled from the class, this was his answer:

What I most remember from the class was the concept of bestsellers imparting new or specialized information and/or distilling complex theories into more user-friendly forms, as Crichton did with chaos theory in Jurassic Park. It’s something I still see at play, most often in good television, where we are brought into the specifics of a world that we didn’t know as much about as we thought we did—N.Y. advertising in Mad Men or the crank trade in Breaking Bad, for example.

Lynn Kiele Bonasia took the same graduate class in bestsellers as Dennis and Barbara, but in a different semester. She was an aspiring novelist who hadn’t yet broken into print. Since then she has gone on to publish two novels, Summer Shift (2010) and Some Assembly Required (2008), both published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. The booklist of bestsellers that Lynn studied was different from Dennis Lehane’s or Barbara Parker’s, but the same elements in bestsellers emerged. What she remembers about the class touches on the last ingredient I listed here, the catalyzing power of the writer’s emotional commitment to the materials:

It was really fascinating to take a look at a very diverse group of bestselling novels such as The Exorcist, From Here to Eternity, The Virginian, and Valley of the Dolls—books that many would feel have little in common—and be able to isolate characteristics that they all shared: a secret code to successful fiction. To this day, I find myself measuring bestselling books against these components.

The challenge becomes how to use this information, because I believe a good novel has to grow organically and can’t be based in contrivance. You can’t just throw the ingredients into the pot; you need to literally inhabit the soup for a while. Every now and then, when we write, we step away from our work and assess what we’ve got. Perhaps this is the time to reflect on what Jim’s book teaches us. It was a surprise to me how many of these elements my first novel contained, perhaps unintentionally, or because I had learned these components and subliminally wove them in.

Sandra Rodriguez Barron was a student in the bestseller course while she was working on her first novel. That book eventually was titled The Heiress of Water and was published by HarperCollins. Her second novel, Stay with Me, was published in 2010, also by HarperCollins.

Interestingly, Sandra was already employing one of the twelve recurring features in that first novel, but the class helped her see that depending on this feature too heavily might actually be counterproductive.

This course gave me the confidence to lean more deeply into the emotional aspect of story writing. When I started writing fiction, my comfort zone involved weaving in a lot of facts about nature, science, and medicine. (I think the graduate workshop environment triggered this.) But taking the course made me realize that although facts can provide a fascinating intellectual backbone to a plot, readers want to see these elements used to heighten emotion.

After all, they can go research any subject themselves. What readers want the writer to do is to breathe life into it; take it to a new level. If the writer’s ego and desire to sound “smart” creeps into the writing, it drains it. The books with the broadest appeal are the ones that can strike a balance between making the reader think and feel.

Christine Kling also was starting her first novel when she took one of my early classes in the bestseller. That first manuscript turned into the novel Surface Tension, a fine thriller published by Ballantine and followed by numerous excellent suspense novels, including Cross Current and Wreckers’ Key.

Like many of my students over the years, Christine felt guilty about the kinds of books she secretly loved. Part of the importance of the class for her was to liberate her from this uneasiness and give her permission to write the books she truly wanted to write.

Throughout my days as an undergraduate English major and then in the MFA program, I kept quiet about the books I really loved—the guilty-pleasure books by Stephen King, John D. MacDonald, Hammond Innes, and the like. They were books to be gobbled up, not savored. I recognized that the books I loved transported me to other worlds in ways that good literature often did not. In the “good reads,” the proscenium of the physical book disappeared and “I” ceased to exist. Losing myself in the story like that was pure incomprehensible magic to me. Your class, then, was like going to a magic show where the magician shows you how he does the tricks, and surprisingly, it doesn’t ruin the magic—quite the contrary, because you come to appreciate the magician’s skill at creating his illusions. You started me down this long road of trying to figure out what makes a story you can lose yourself in—to understand that story is where the magic is, and it is not merely a sum of its literary parts.

APPENDIX

Plot Summaries

To refresh the memories of those who haven’t reread these novels lately, and to inform those who haven’t yet gotten around to them, here are plot summaries of each. The summaries were written by a graduate student of mine, David Gonzalez. David is in his early thirties, born and raised in Miami, and though he’s a passionate reader and a highly accomplished fiction writer, believe it or not, he had not read any of the novels on this list prior to taking on the job of summarizing these books.

In that way, David was like most of the students who took this course from me over the years. Like many of my former students, David Gonzalez has been immersed in the works of Ray Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, Junot Díaz, Charles Baxter, and Herman Melville. Quite an eclectic mix.

What limited exposure David had to these popular bestsellers came through their film versions. So I was pleased, though not surprised, that he greatly enjoyed reading these hits of the past. His favorite was Gone with the Wind, and his least favorite was Peyton Place, which he found rambling and poorly plotted, its narrator (Allison MacKenzie) “aimlessly floating around town.” He also found the sappy and egocentric voice of Robert Kincaid, the narrator of The Bridges of Madison County, hard to take seriously.

David says that when he originally read Valley of the Dolls, he was “turned off by the daytime soaps vibe to it.” But months later, upon reflection, his opinion changed: “I’m glad that I read it. I can appreciate it for the standard it set, albeit a relatively trashy one.”

I’ve tried not to tamper too much with David’s voice in these plot summaries to give a feel for the views of one fervent reader of Generation X.

GONE WITH THE WIND, Margaret Mitchell, 1936

Scarlett O’Hara is young, brash, seductive, and stubborn. Not exactly the usual traits synonymous with young debutantes of the pre–Civil War South. But she can’t help it. She takes too much after her father, Gerald O’Hara, a hard-drinking Irish immigrant with the proverbial heart of gold, who wiggled his way into society using the power of money and a gritty determination.

The novel begins when Scarlett learns that Ashley Wilkes will propose to Melanie Hamilton at a party at the Wilkeses’ family plantation. When Scarlett professes her love to him, Ashley admits that he does care for her but that “like must marry like,” and he likes Melanie. After Ashley leaves, Rhett Butler, a handsome and devilish rogue, admits to overhearing the entire conversation. Scarlett is doubly humiliated and, in a fit of anger and jealousy, accepts the marriage proposal of Charles Hamilton, the shy, awkward, somewhat pitiable brother of Melanie.

Only weeks after their marriage, Charles suffers an ignoble death in a sick tent on the Civil War battlefield, and Scarlett is forced to “grieve” publicly over the loss of a husband she’s secretly glad to be free of. In an attempt to assuage Scarlett’s melancholy, her mother, Ellen, decides to ship her off to Atlanta, where Scarlett finds work at a hospital, caring for the wounded. It’s not quite Scarlett’s ideal job, since most of the available men are either missing limbs or dying.

At a charity ball for the hospital Scarlett again encounters Rhett, and the two quickly become Atlanta’s most popular bit of gossip.

News arrives that Ashley has been captured. At the same time, Melanie is desperately ill with her pregnancy, and every day the sounds of battle inch closer, until finally cannonballs start landing in Atlanta’s streets. Scarlett assists at the birth of Melanie’s child, then leads a group of family, friends, and slaves on a dangerous escape back to Tara, the O’Haras’ plantation. When she arrives, she finds her home has been ransacked, her mother has passed away, both her sisters are sick, and her father is going nuts.

This is it. Scarlett’s had it. Never again will she allow her family to suffer or to starve. The person she used to be, shallow, self-involved, is gone, and left in her place is a single-minded woman full of determination who will stop at nothing to safeguard her future. Even murder. Scarlett doesn’t even hesitate when she shoots and kills a Yankee who has invaded their home.

When the war ends, Ashley returns to Tara, but after he and Scarlett share a passionate encounter, he tells her that he cannot, in good conscience, stay at Tara with his wife and child, under the thumb of Scarlett’s charity. But Scarlett needs manpower and, more important, money, if she is to keep Tara from the grubby carpetbaggers who have gained power and raised the taxes on her property. She begs Ashley to stay, and she leaves to talk to the only man with money at a time like this: Rhett Butler. Unfortunately, he is where all the good rogues wound up after the war, in a Yankee prison.

Rhett learns of her scheme and promises to leave all the money in his will for her after he is hanged. Scarlett wishes the Yankees would hurry up, then.

In a fit of panic over the fate of Tara, Scarlett convinces Frank Kennedy, a former Confederate, to marry her. When Frank falls ill, Scarlett takes over his business and becomes a ruthless entrepreneur, so desperate to make money that she even consorts with the Yankees and carpetbaggers in town, an act deemed unforgivable in the eyes of the Old Southern society.

Scarlett’s reckless independence leads to her being attacked one day by some squatters living in the woods. Avenging her honor, Ashley and her husband, Frank, raid the camp of squatters. Ashley is severely injured, and Frank is killed. For the first time, we see Scarlett suffer a flutter of grief and remorse. If only she hadn’t been so stubborn and willful, Frank, her meal ticket, would still be alive.

No sooner is Frank buried than Rhett (now freed from prison) proposes marriage. If the members of the Old Southern society were in a tizzy when Rhett and Scarlett danced at a charity event, their marriage so soon after Frank’s death is downright revolting. Neither of them cares much for their reputation, but when Scarlett gives birth to Bonnie Blue Butler, Rhett sets about repairing their family image, if only for his daughter’s sake.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Rhett becomes a different man now that he’s a father. But when Bonnie Blue dies, all that made Rhett a decent man dies with her.

Everything Scarlett has treasured is gone. Rhett has become an angry drunk. Her children are terrified of her. Her parents have passed away, and the people of the Old South shun her. Melanie, the only friend who loved her unconditionally, is dead, and Ashley, who was always a little frail and dreamy, is a shell of his former self. At the close of the novel, after Rhett tells Scarlett he doesn’t give a damn about her anymore, our heroine, in denial to the bitter end, begins to scheme for a way to lure Rhett back.

PEYTON PLACE, Grace Metalious, 1956

When Samuel Peyton, a freed slave, returned from Europe a very rich man and engaged to a white woman, he quickly realized that he would not be welcomed by society. In a fit of anger and hurt, he imported a medieval castle, rebuilt it brick by brick, shut its doors, and lived the remainder of his life locked within those walls—an inauspicious beginning for the town that eventually would bear his name.

When it comes to Peyton Place, a fictional New England community in the 1930s, few things are as highly valued as image, status, and reputation. And practically everyone in Peyton Place carries with them some secret, some dark, sordid mishap in their past, that they try to hide at all costs.

Take Constance MacKenzie. Her daughter, Allison, was conceived in a love affair with a married man, and although this man passed away when Allison was three years old, Constance lives in fear that the truth about her daughter’s illegitimate birth will one day be discovered.

Constance is a beautiful woman, but her guilt and remorse have kept her from remarrying; she prefers the role of the hardworking and sympathetic widow. As a result, Constance is cold, stern, and single-minded in her withdrawal from romance and its repercussions. Allison, on the other hand, is sensitive and thoughtful, full of aspirations, and doesn’t see the world through her mother’s grim eyes. At least not yet, anyway.

Allison’s closest friend is Selena Cross, a sensuous young girl from the “tar-paper shacks” who lives with her mother and her stepfather. Allison has no idea of the skeletons that lurk inside the closets of Peyton Place, until one day when she peers through the window into the Crosses’ kitchen and sees Selena’s stepfather, Lucas, tearing drunkenly at Selena’s blouse.

Soon after, Lucas is carted off to a hospital because of his alcoholism, and Selena finds romance and comfort with Ted Carter, a handsome and generous young man from an affluent family. Constance then hires Selena to work at her apparel store and hires Nellie, Selena’s mother, to clean her house.

When the principal of the local high school passes away, Leslie Harrington, the wealthiest, most powerful man in Peyton Place—and chairman of the school board—hires Tomas Makris to replace him. Makris is a handsome Greek man, Ivy League educated, from New York. Constance immediately fears that he may have some connection to her past and dreads the presence of the new stranger in town. The moment he sees her, however, Makris falls in love and sets about wooing the unwilling Constance MacKenzie.

Two years later, Allison, who dreams of being a writer, lands a job at the local newspaper writing human-interest stories about the people and events that shape Peyton Place. By this time, Makris has made headway in his romancing of Constance. They’re secretly engaged, a fact that Makris keeps insisting Constance reveal to her daughter.

Meanwhile, Selena Cross visits Doc Swain because she’s discovered she is pregnant and knows that her stepfather, Lucas, is responsible. Abortions are illegal, but Doc Swain performs one anyway, believing himself to be saving Selena from a terrible situation. The procedure is a success, and soon afterward Doc Swain forces Lucas to leave town.

Bereft over her miserable existence, Nellie Cross hangs herself in Allison’s closet. Allison, having lashed out at Nellie for her harsh view of the people in Peyton Place, blames herself for Nellie’s death, but Doc Swain lies and says that Nellie Cross was seriously ill and committed suicide as a result.

Under cover of night, Lucas slinks back into town and attempts to rape Selena yet again. This time Selena murders him, and together she and her younger brother bury him in the sheep pen in their yard. Selena’s crime is soon discovered, and she is taken to jail.

Allison, now working as a reporter for a New York magazine, returns on assignment to cover the sensational trial of her old friend. During the testimony, Doc Swain, at the risk of destroying his career and possibly being sent to jail, reveals the truth about Selena’s abortion. The jury acquits Selena. And Doc Swain, so admired for his brave actions, is excused for his behavior by the citizens of Peyton Place.

When Allison returns to Peyton Place, she, like her mother before her, is having an affair with a married man. Realizing she is on the verge of making the same mistakes her mother did, Allison sees that the only way to avoid the same fate is to break free of the love affair and finally come to peace with the cruelty, the kindness, and the ugliness of her hometown, Peyton Place.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Harper Lee, 1960

Atticus Finch is a widowed lawyer in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. His daughter, Scout, her brother, Jem, and their friend Dill spend their summers relishing all the mischief their childhood can provide. They work on their tree house, playact some of their favorite stories, and, in a fit of boredom, decide to lure Boo Radley, the town bogeyman, out of his home.

As the school year nears its end, Scout and Jem discover that someone is leaving them treats and toys inside the knothole of the tree in front of the Radley place. They find chewing gum, Indian Head pennies, soap sculptures, and a broken watch. But as soon as the children begin leaving things themselves, the knothole is filled with cement. The children are saddened at losing the connection to Boo but gradually realize he is still reaching out to them in other understated ways.

One day at school, Scout is teased about her father’s defending the black man Tom Robinson. The town begins to ostracize the children, and Atticus pleads with Jem and Scout not to argue or fight back. Tom Robinson is being accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, and Atticus, who believes the man is innocent, knows Robinson doesn’t stand a chance of getting a fair trial. Even his sister, Alexandra, thinks Atticus is shaming their family by taking on this case.

When the trial begins, Jem, Scout, and Dill all watch from the upstairs balcony, the only place blacks are allowed. Sure enough, even after Atticus does a convincing job of establishing Tom’s innocence, the jury finds Tom guilty. Atticus soon goes to work on an appeal, but Tom, sensing the unfairness of the system he’s up against, attempts to escape from prison, only to be shot and killed. Atticus tries to console Jem and Scout by suggesting that because the jury had taken a long time to reach their verdict, some “progress” on racial issues is being made.

Later that fall, Scout plays the role of a ham in a school pageant. Scout wears her costume home, and Jem walks along with her. The children are soon attacked by Bob Ewell, the man accused by Atticus of beating his daughter and lying about Tom Robinson’s rape. In the struggle, Jem’s arm is broken and he falls unconscious. Scout, because of her costume, can’t rightly tell what happens. When she arrives home, a strange man is carrying Jem inside the house, and Scout realizes the man is Boo and that he was the one who saved them from Bob Ewell.

In fact, Ewell had a knife and tried to stab Scout; only her costume protected her from injury. During the scuffle with Boo, Bob Ewell “fell” onto his knife and died almost instantly.

Tom Robison is dead, and so is Bob Ewell. It wasn’t pretty, but the children are wiser to the strange sort of justice alive in Maycomb, Alabama. In a final moment, when Scout walks Boo back to his house, she gets a glimpse of the view their strange neighbor has always had and understands what Atticus has been harping on for so long, that we can understand others only by standing in their shoes.

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, Jacqueline Susann, 1966

It’s New York, 1945. The war is over and the world is brimming with optimism. When she arrives in the Big Apple, so is Anne Welles. Anne is beautiful, resourceful, and sincere, thrilled by even the simplest pleasures of living in the big city. She’s beautiful enough to be a model, but Anne Welles just wants to work in an office and soon lands a secretarial job at Bellamy and Bellows, one of the top theatrical firms in town.

Anne befriends Neely O’Hara (Scarlett’s granddaughter?), a talented young ingenue who stars in a two-bit vaudeville act and lives in Anne’s building, and Jennifer North, a buxom blonde with all the talent of a tin can.

Before you know it, Anne is enamored of Lyon Burke but is engaged to Allen Cooper, a dopey insurance salesman who turns out to be a multimillionaire; Jennifer has just dumped her Arabian prince boyfriend and has now set her sights on Tony Polar, the debonair lounge lizard; and Neely, soon to become a star in her own right, is engaged to her boyfriend, Mel Harris.

Neely becomes a huge star in Los Angeles and completely neglects Mel. She drinks and does drugs. He grows bored, and they divorce.

Jennifer learns that Tony has a form of mental retardation. His sister controls his image, his decisions, and his life, and she tells Jennifer that whatever Tony has, he’s likely to pass on to his children. Jennifer aborts their child, and they too divorce.

Anne never wanted to marry Allen but was engaged regardless. She calls it off and professes her love for Lyon Burke. Burke claims to love her, too, but won’t marry her until his career as a writer can support the two of them. When Anne’s mother passes away and leaves her the house in Lawrenceville, Burke offers Anne a compromise. He’ll marry her right away if they can live in this house. But Anne so desperately wants to stay away from her hometown that she denies Burke’s offer, and, brokenhearted, he leaves for England.

Jennifer visits Neely in Los Angeles and learns that she’s going to marry her fashion designer. Neely also fills Jennifer in on which “dolls” can help her sleep at night and which can help take the weight off after a pregnancy. If Jennifer is going to star in French art-house films (which she is), she’s going to have to look her best. It’s topless, at least.

With Lyon Burke out of the picture, Anne marries Kevin Gillmore, the owner of Gillmore Cosmetics. Anne finally attempts a career at modeling and becomes an overnight sensation. Her union with Gillmore is passionless and unsatisfying, and he reintroduces Anne to Burke as a test of her love—a test she fails miserably as she and Burke renew their romance.

Neely, on the other hand, is drinking heavily, addicted to the “dolls,” and losing money for the film studios; she has witnessed her husband kissing another man, missed her children’s birthdays and attempted suicide once.

In a fit of desperation, she begs Anne to let her come to New York and stay with her. Just as she’s poised to make her comeback, she loses her voice. Fearful and anxious, Neely slits her wrists. She survives, barely, and is committed to a sanitarium.

Jennifer then returns to the United States from her art-film sojourn and becomes engaged to Senator Winston Adams. She thinks she’s finally found the right man, but when she’s diagnosed with breast cancer, she realizes he loves only her body. Jennifer opts to take her own life rather than lose a breast.

Anne concocts a scheme to help Burke buy out the agency and take on Neely, fresh from her stint in rehab, as their first major signing. The setup works for a while until Neely and Burke begin to have an affair. Anne is already pregnant, so instead of losing the marriage, she ignores the betrayal.

Neely demands that Burke divorce Anne, but he refuses to leave her because it might mean losing his daughter. The agency then signs a newer, younger sensation, Margie Parks, and Neely attempts suicide a third time when she realizes that Burke is having an affair with this younger actress.

During a New Year’s Eve party at their house, Anne witnesses Burke’s infidelity with Margie. Realizing that there will always be a line of Neely O’Haras and Margie Parkses, and steadied by her dependence on the “dolls,” Anne returns to the party understanding that in some strange and unfortunate way, she got everything she wanted.

And they all live unhappily ever after.

THE GODFATHER, Mario Puzo, 1969

According to Sicilian tradition, no father can deny a request for a favor on the day of his daughter’s wedding, and so it is that Don Vito Corleone is meeting privately with guests who hope to receive the help and support of their Godfather. All the Don asks in return is their undying loyalty and friendship. One favor he won’t grant, however, is supporting Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo’s foray into drug trafficking. The Don’s denial of Sollozzo is what ultimately sets off “the five families war of 1945.”

Angry at the rejection of his business plan, Sollozzo arranges a hit on the Don. The Godfather is badly injured, and Sonny, the eldest son, rages out of control with bloodlust. Fredo, the middle child, was with the Don when the hit happened and is now shell-shocked, terrified, and useless. And Michael, the youngest son, wayward since birth, the only Corleone son who resisted the ways of his father, finds himself drawn into the fray.

When Sollozzo sends word that he wants a truce, Michael is the only member of the Corleone family that Sollozzo trusts not to try to kill him. Together with a crooked Irish cop, Sollozzo arranges a meeting with Michael in a secure Italian restaurant. After smuggling a gun into the restaurant, Michael kills them both. The blood has barely dried on the bistro floor when Michael is put on a boat and shipped to Sicily for his safety.

Later, Sonny gets word that Carlo Rizzi, his sister’s husband, is beating her again. Sonny flies off in a fit and heads straight for their apartment, only to be ambushed and brutally murdered at a tollbooth. The Don, wishing there to be no more violence, calls for a meeting of the five families of New York. At the meeting, the Don requests that Michael be allowed to return safely to the United States. To ensure Michael’s safety, the Don accedes to the wishes of the other dons and agrees to use his political influence to protect the drug trade.

Meanwhile, in Sicily, Michael falls in love with and marries the beautiful Apollonia. Don Tommasino, charged with the protection of the young Corleone, warns him that his marriage has made his whereabouts known to his father’s enemies. Passionately in love, Michael ignores the warning, and a short while later an attempt is made on his life. The bomb meant for him kills Apollonia instead. When Michael regains consciousness, he tells Don Tommasino that he wishes to return home to be with his father and to ascend to the position that’s been waiting for him his entire life.

Back in America, Michael marries Kay Adams, his longtime girlfriend. He confesses to her that he’s now running his father’s empire and vows that within five years the enterprise will be completely legitimate. Before that can happen, however, he has a few loose ends to tie up.

Michael heads to Las Vegas and makes Moe Greene (a wayward member of the Mob) an offer he can’t refuse. Moe refuses and is ultimately killed.

Then the Don, joyful since his retirement from the “olive oil business,” dies of a heart attack while tending to his tomato garden, and although the death is sudden, Michael’s plan is already in motion and the Mob war begins.

Philip Tattaglia is murdered in a motel with his mistress, Don Barzini is killed by a hitman disguised as a cop, and Tessio, one of the Don’s most trusted caporegimes, is sniffed out as the rat and “taken for a drive.” Michael personally visits Carlo and says he knows he was responsible for Sonny’s murder. Carlo is strangled to death.

And just like that, with a series of swift and brutal moves, Michael Corleone rises to take over his father’s throne and to restore power and respect to the family.

But this, of course, was the last thing he ever wanted.

THE EXORCIST, William Peter Blatty, 1971

Chris MacNeil, divorced single mother and celebrated actress, moves to Washington, D.C., with her daughter, Regan, to finish her latest film. Regan soon grows bored and starts using a Ouija board to play with Captain Howdy, an imaginary friend who finds it amusing to move Regan’s furniture around and make things go bump in the night.

Regan’s father neglects to call her on her birthday, and Chris believes that’s the reason for Regan’s sudden shift in mood. Once curious and cheerful, Regan grows sullen, temperamental, and capable of some seriously salty language. Doctors believe she’s suffering from a strange form of epilepsy, with symptoms that include speaking in tongues, lifting the bed into the air, and feats of superhuman strength.

Unsatisfied with the diagnosis, Chris reaches out to Father Damien Karras, a handsome young priest who is dejected and full of doubt about his faith. Karras agrees to see Regan, but he warns Chris that the church does not easily hand out permission for exorcisms. He has to make an indisputable case for demonic possession.

When Karras first meets Regan, the child claims to be the devil, impersonates the voice of Burke Dennings—the film director that the demon threw out of Regan’s bedroom window to his death—speaks in the voice of Karras’s recently deceased mother, then covers him with a stream of projectile vomit. Karras, still unconvinced, decides to record the demon’s voice.

After studying the recording, Karras realizes the demon isn’t speaking an ancient language but is instead talking backward in English. The following day, he’s given the go-ahead by his superiors to begin the exorcism, and to assist him, the church sends Father Lankester Merrin, an elderly priest who has struggled with exorcisms before.

Merrin arrives immediately, prepares Karras, and sets about performing the exorcism. After three days of nonstop exorcising, the men are beset by emotional and physical fatigue. Merrin falls dead of an apparent heart attack, and Karras, enraged by the death of the priest, demands the demon leave Regan and take his body. The demon gladly accepts, and once Karras is fully possessed, he leaps through the window to his death.

JAWS, Peter Benchley, 1974

It’s mid-June, and the resort town of Amity is hoping for another prosperous summer catering to the beachgoers from the city when a young woman is killed by a shark attack during a late-night swim.

Police Chief Martin Brody meets with Harry Meadows, editor of the Amity-Leader, to issue the beach closure. Meadows insists that he will not run the story of the girl’s death, nor will he issue the beach closing. Meadows tells Brody that a number of local businesses have already demanded the Leader not run the story for fear of scaring off the tourists Amity so desperately needs.

After the tourists begin arriving, the shark soon attacks again, this time taking the life of a six-year-old boy. As Brody is hosting a press conference regarding the attack, another victim, a sixty-five-year-old man, is claimed.

The next day the Amity-Leader admits the three fatalities, including the first victim whose death went unreported. The mother of the young boy storms into Brody’s office and blames him for the death of her son. Brody, racked with guilt but sworn to secrecy, accepts full responsibility.

Brody and a fellow officer take a boat to visit Ben Gardner, a fisherman hired to track down the shark, only to find the boat deserted and damaged, with all signs pointing to Gardner’s being the fourth of the shark’s victims. Back at the police station, Meadows introduces Brody to Matt Hooper, a scientist from the oceanographic institute, and Brody realizes that the only way to return the town to normalcy is to kill the shark.

Brody learns of a shark hunter named Quint, and when Brody reaches out to him, Quint agrees to hunt the shark (for the right price, of course), with the help of Brody and Hooper.

Once they’re all on the boat, there is no sign of the shark. The second day is even quieter still, until the baited lines are snapped clean. The shark breaches near the boat, and the men try to harpoon it to no avail.

The following day, Hooper brings a steel cage to the marina. At sea, they locate the shark and toss the empty cage into the water. The shark ignores the cage, and Hooper dives right in. The shark then attacks the cage head-on. The shark mangles the cage, squeezes his head inside, and kills Hooper with one vicious bite.

On the third day, Brody and Quint take to the sea by themselves and are immediately attacked by the shark. Quint manages to lodge two harpoons in the shark and tries to run the ropes through a winch in order to drag the shark. Instead, the shark launches itself onto the back of the boat. The boat begins to sink, and as the shark slips back into the water, the rope from the harpoons gets tangled around Quint and drags him down to his death.

The bow of the boat is almost vertical, and Brody grabs a cushion to keep himself afloat. As the boat sinks, the shark heads straight for Brody. Just as the shark is about to attack, the harpoons lodged in its massive body take their toll and the shark dies, mere feet away from Brody.

Brody plunges his head underwater, opens his eyes, and sees that the shark is kept from sinking by the barrels, and Quint’s body, still tethered to it, floats just above the shark. Satisfied that the shark is dead, Brody paddles for shore.

THE DEAD ZONE, Stephen King, 1979

Johnny Smith didn’t know he had acquired the ability to see the future when he hit his head on a frozen lake in the winter of 1953. And when he and his girlfriend, Sarah Bracknell, take in the carnival in the fall of 1970, he didn’t know he was seeing the future then, either, but he was. With his power, strange and uncontrollable, he wins over five hundred dollars on roulette that night at the carnival. It’s cause for celebration, except Sarah notices that something isn’t right with Johnny and it makes her ill. She blames it on a bad hot dog but needs to go home. Johnny, riding home alone in a cab, gets into a horrific wreck with a pair of drag racers and spends the next four and a half years in a coma.

During that time, his mother develops an unhealthy obsession with Christian fanaticism, Sarah marries another man, Walt Hazlett, and bears his child, and the Castle Rock Strangler (a serial killer) continues to add victims to his growing toll.

As soon as Johnny awakens, his power is fully evident. By touching people, he can see into their future. He warns a nurse that her house is on fire and tells a doctor that his mother, who he presumed was dead, is actually living in California. Stories leak out about Johnny’s paranormal powers, and soon the national media arrives.

His mother watches a live interview with her son and is so shocked, she suffers a stroke. Before she dies, she insists that his power is a gift from God and he must, above all else, “heed the voice when it calls.”

When it does call, it’s in the form of Sheriff George Bannerman from Castle Rock. He and his detectives have exhausted all options, and even though he doesn’t completely believe Johnny’s brand of hokum, he’s willing to try anything to locate the Strangler. And they do, if a bit late.

By the time Johnny and Bannerman locate him, Frank Dodd, trusted officer on the force, is already dead of an apparent suicide—a note tacked around his neck that reads, “I confess.”

Soon after, Johnny moves in with Roger Chatsworth, a successful businessman, to tutor his athlete son, Chuck. Johnny enjoys his anonymity, and as a hobby, he begins attending political rallies throughout New Hampshire. Johnny makes it a point to shake hands with each candidate to sneak a glimpse behind the political veneer. But all that changes when he encounters Greg Stillson, a dangerous megalomaniac running for the House of Representatives. When Johnny shakes his hand, he sees visions of a nuclear holocaust.

Johnny feels he has no choice in the matter. He writes two letters, one to his father and one to Sarah, explaining his actions, and sets out to assassinate Greg Stillson. Johnny fails, but in the ensuing chaos, Stillson grabs a small child to use as a human shield. An eyewitness snaps a picture of this outrageous act, effectively crushing any hopes Stillson had of a career in politics. Johnny is shot and killed, but before he dies, he reaches out and touches Stillson’s ankle and sees that the world is safe.

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, Tom Clancy, 1984

It is 1984, the height of the cold war, and Captain First Rank Marko Ramius sets sail from a Soviet submarine station deep in the Arctic. In his charge is the Red October, Russia’s newest top-secret nuclear submarine. His orders are to perform a two-week training exercise in which the Soviet fleet will attempt to locate him while he avoids detection using the sub’s experimental new propulsion system.

Soon after leaving the base, Ramius murders a political officer in his wardroom and replaces the official orders with a set of forged documents. Ramius informs the crew of the horrible “accident” that claimed the zampolit’s life and delivers the bogus orders to the crew. Their mission, Ramius explains, is to head to Cuba, the home of their socialist brothers, and avoid detection by American and British ships alike, thereby establishing the dominance of the Russian navy. The crew rallies around this objective, while one crewman, a cook, feels something is amiss with the commander’s orders.

Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, an author of naval histories and part-time information analyst, arrives at CIA headquarters with photographs (taken by British agents) of the Red October. Ryan requests permission to show these images to an old friend and mentor in order to figure out what the new features on the sub are capable of.

Skip Tyler, Ryan’s former teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy, figures the Russians have developed a silent propulsion system similar to a version the United States fumbled with in the 1960s. Ryan relates this information to the CIA and outlines a disastrous scenario where the Russians could use this propulsion system to sneak as close as the continental shelf and attack without warning.

Back in Moscow, a high-ranking political official receives a letter from his nephew Ramius detailing his intentions for the Red October. Within a few hours, the Russian navy is ordered to locate the Red October and sink it.

Unbeknownst to Ramius, the sonar man for the USS Dallas, Sonar Technician Second Class Ronald Jones, has picked up his frequency. Soon after, Jones hears a number of Russian subs speed up in unison, signaling the beginning of a major operation.

The CIA is aware of the activity at sea but is unsure why it is taking place. Ryan deduces that the Red October is about to defect. He explains his theory and then advises that the United States welcome her with open arms and that they should keep the Red October. There is some dissension among the ranks, but there is also an interest in the possibility of obtaining the experimental submarine.

One of the Red October’s chief officers (also involved in the conspiracy) provides the sub’s doctor with a series of contaminated radiation badges. The officers immediately begin to check for leaks and determine that most of the systems are working properly.

Meanwhile, Yuri Padorin, a high-ranking Soviet official, faces the members of Moscow’s Politburo, the Russian parliament. Padorin assures them that the agent embedded on the Red October has strict orders to sink the sub himself should anything go awry.

The USS Dallas finally makes contact with the Red October and informs the Soviet commander of the plans to help him defect. The Red October continues to suffer from a series of “malfunctions,” and Ramius announces to his crew that the work of a saboteur is now evident.

Ramius tells his crew that it is much too dangerous to continue to operate the Red October and that they must abandon ship. Together with his high-ranking officers, he will scuttle the sub once the crew has been safely transferred.

Meanwhile, as the plan to help the officers of the Red October is under way, the helicopter carrying the agents charged with completing the ruse suffers a malfunction and crashes into the sea, leaving no survivors. As a result, Jack Ryan, now aboard a British carrier, is ordered by the president to make direct contact with the Red October himself. Ryan boards the Red October and begins removing the crew, not realizing that one crew member has suddenly disappeared.

When a gunshot is heard aboard the Red October, Ramius and Ryan go to investigate. They find one Russian official dead and an American severely injured. Ramius himself gets shot, but Ryan is able to kill the embedded agent only seconds before he can destroy the ship. The Ethan Allen, a dated American sub, is then scuttled and everyone is led to believe that it was the Red October that was detonated.

The hunt for the Red October is called off, but as the subs are being recalled to port, Soviet Naval Command orders a few submarines to linger behind to possibly recover intelligence on the Americans.

As the Red October makes its final attempt to reach an American naval base, Viktor Tupolev, one of Ramius’s former students, discovers the Red October. Tupolev attempts to destroy the submarine only to be rammed by his former teacher. Its hull ruptured, the sub sinks to the bottom of the sea.

Ramius and his conspirators are welcomed to the United States, and Jack Ryan is finally able to fly back to his family for the holidays.

THE FIRM, John Grisham, 1991

Mitch McDeere is the one and only Harvard Law School grad that the tax firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke is interested in hiring. He’s young, brilliant, and married (a must), and he was raised in abject poverty, which makes him a perfect combination of talent and appetite. He’s already had offers from three of the most prestigious law firms in the country, but the representatives from Bendini, Lambert & Locke make him an offer he can’t refuse. With a phenomenal starting salary, the promise of a low-interest mortgage on a home, and a BMW in the color of his choosing, Bendini, Lambert & Locke’s offer seems too good to be true. And it is.

Unbeknownst to Mitch and his wife, Abby, the head of security operations for the firm has had them bugged from the moment their plane touched down. The limo is wired, their phones are tapped, and their house is full of listening devices, all in the interest of protecting the firm. It’s bad enough that Kozinski and Hodge, two of the firm’s lawyers, are already talking to federal agents and some of the firm’s more “senior partners” are asking for a contingency plan to silence the men, should they not listen to reason.

Before long, Kozinski and Hodge are killed in a scuba-diving “accident” while on a business trip in Grand Cayman. As a result of the firm’s tragic loss, Mitch will have to pick up their slack, and he proves to be every bit the workhorse they hoped for.

During a brief break in his hectic routine, Mitch is approached by Agent Wayne Tarrance, FBI, and the lawyers at the firm press Mitch for details of their conversation. He wisely says little. Still, to be safe, Mitch consults a private investigator named Eddie Lomax, an old friend of his brother’s from prison. Mitch asks Lomax to look into other suspicious deaths of the firm’s lawyers and to see what he can dig up on Tarrance. Mitch isn’t sure whom to trust.

Soon after, Mitch travels to Grand Cayman on company business and is seduced by a local prostitute. Later, he learns that this was a setup by the firm to gain leverage over him. After his visit to the islands, he travels to Washington for a tax conference, and in a clandestine meeting, he’s told by FBI agents that the firm is a front for the Morolto family, a large crime syndicate based in Chicago. The FBI, of course, wants him to help take them down.

After much soul-searching, Mitch devises a plan that, if it works, will satisfy the FBI and free him and Abby from the grip of the firm. Together with Abby and Lomax’s former secretary (“former,” because Lomax has been murdered), Mitch begins to make countless copies of incriminating documents (it’s a lot more exciting than it sounds).

He and Abby escape to Panama City Beach, Florida, to meet up with Mitch’s brother, Ray, whose release from jail they’ve stipulated as part of the deal with the FBI. The three hide out in a motel room while the cops, the feds, and the Mob comb every inch of the beach looking for them. Abby sets up a video camera, and Mitch, quoting from the illegal documents, goes about making a deposition that exposes the firm’s activities.

By the time he finishes, it has taken Mitch sixteen hours and fourteen cassette tapes, but the evidence needed to convict the Moroltos is finally ready. Mitch puts in a call to the feds, tells them where they can find the tapes, and he and Abby escape to a tiny Caribbean island.

Not long after they’re settled, they receive a package of newspaper clippings relating the indictments of over fifty members of Bendini, Lambert & Locke and over thirty members of the Morolto clan. The McDeeres are safe and happy. For now.

THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY,

Robert James Waller, 1992

It’s early August 1965, and Robert Kincaid has been assigned by National Geographic to photograph the covered bridges of Madison County, Iowa. An outdoorsman and a well-seasoned traveler, Kincaid is lonely and spiritual, loveless and romantic. He’s fifty-two years old and a divorcé.

After a week on the road, Kincaid arrives in Madison County and has no trouble finding six of the bridges. It’s the last one, the Roseman Bridge, that proves difficult to locate.

Lost on the backcountry roads, Kincaid comes to the Johnson farmhouse and finds Francesca Johnson sitting on her front porch. As Kincaid asks for directions, she senses something sensual in him. She tells him the bridge isn’t far and she’d be happy to show him where it is. Richard, her husband, and their two children are away at the Illinois State Fair and will be gone a week.

After some initial scouting of the bridge, Francesca invites Kincaid to the farmhouse. Francesca soon admits that when she was growing up in Italy and imagined life in America, this Iowa farmland wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Kincaid tells her he understands, and sensing the stranger in the pickup truck may already know more about her than anyone else in her life, she asks him to stay for dinner.

As they prepare dinner together, Kincaid waxes poetic about his ex-wife, his job, his travels, and his dining habits. His level of sophistication is a marvel to Francesca, and she, trying to impress him, cracks open the seal on a bottle of brandy she’s been saving for years. After Kincaid leaves for the night—he does have to shoot the bridge at dawn—Francesca sneaks out to the Roseman Bridge and tacks a note on it, inviting him back again for supper.

The following night, Kincaid accepts the invitation. He showers while Francesca bathes, and when they reunite in the kitchen, they realize that they have fallen desperately in love with each other. They dance, kiss, and make love, an event so marvelous, Kincaid recites lines of poetry and recalls the sight of dolphins swimming off the coast of Africa.

For the next few days, Kincaid abandons photography and Francesca abandons her chores. Instead, they while away their days together tangled in each other’s arms. Inevitably, their conversation turns to the fact that Kincaid will soon leave and Richard will return.

Francesca is the rational one. She says that she can’t tame the wild force that is Kincaid, that he must be allowed to roam free. She also admits shame at the thought of humiliating Richard and her children. Both she and Kincaid are heartbroken but recognize that she’s right and go their separate ways.

Richard and the children arrive. While Richard and Francesca are driving about town, they pull up behind Kincaid in his truck. Francesca bids the long-haired photographer a private good-bye and begins to cry. Francesca tells Richard she’s okay, and Richard, satisfied, tunes in to a livestock report on the radio.

In 1975, Kincaid stops appearing in National Geographic. Four years later, Richard passes away. In 1982, Francesca receives a package from lawyers informing her that Kincaid has died. In his will he left her his bracelet, his chain, and the letter she first tacked onto the Roseman Bridge, where he had his ashes spread. Francesca dies in 1989, and she also has her ashes spread at the Roseman Bridge.

Soon after, her children uncover the truth about her relationship with Kincaid. As the novel comes to a close, they sit at the kitchen table in their old home in Madison County, Iowa, absorbing these revelations about their mother and drinking what’s left of her special brandy.

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, 2003

Jacques Saunière, head curator at the Louvre in Paris, is murdered in the middle of the night by Silas, an albino monk searching for a powerful secret. In his final moments, Saunière realizes that if he dies, the truth will die with him, so he scribbles out an elaborate set of riddles in his own blood and leaves a message to contact Robert Langdon.

Langdon, an esteemed Harvard symbologist, arrives at the scene and is met by Sophie Neveu, a French cop and cryptographer. She warns him that the police are trying to pin the murder on him, and together they divert the authorities and are left alone inside the Louvre to study the clues. It turns out that Saunière was Sophie’s grandfather. She loved him dearly but hadn’t spoken to him in years, not since she had witnessed him engaged in some sort of mysterious sexual ritual.

Langdon and Sophie flee from the Louvre with an item they discovered during their search, a key that bears the initials of the Priory of Sion, an elusive organization that Saunière was apparently associated with. Langdon suspects this key is somehow linked to the secret of the Holy Grail. The key leads them to a Swiss depository where they find a coded cryptex, a small combination vault that if forced open will destroy the materials inside. Langdon and Sophie then hijack an armored truck and head straight for the home of Sir Leigh Teabing, the foremost expert on the subject of the Grail.

Teabing explains to Sophie (and to the reader) that the Holy Grail is really a metaphor for Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus, the mother of his child. He explains that this is a secret the Catholic Church has been fighting for centuries to suppress. The Priory’s job is to protect it. Jacques Saunière, we learn, was the grand master of the Priory, which explains the bizarre sex ritual that Sophie witnessed.

Silas breaks up the conversation but is soon overtaken, bound, and gagged. It’s much too dangerous in France, so Teabing advises that they take his private jet to London. On the flight, they decode the cryptex, only to reveal a smaller cryptex. While in a creepy London church, Teabing’s manservant, Rémy, frees Silas and the two men kidnap Teabing and steal the cryptex. Turns out Rémy is working for the Teacher, the mastermind behind the entire plot. The Teacher congratulates Rémy with a drink from his flask, and wouldn’t you know it, the flask is poisoned. (Actually, it was just peanuts, to which Rémy was allergic.)

Yes, Teabing is the Teacher, and yes, he was responsible for Saunière’s death. At their final encounter, Teabing threatens Sophie’s life and Langdon threatens to shatter the cryptex. When Langdon tosses it in the air, Teabing stumbles after it. As he realizes it’s empty, he turns to see Langdon holding a piece of papyrus in one hand and a gun in the other. The police rush in and arrest Teabing. By novel’s end, Sophie learns she is a direct descendant of Jesus and Mary, and Langdon realizes that the Holy Grail is buried underneath the Louvre’s inverted pyramid.

HIT LIT

Cracking the Code of the

Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers

James W. Hall

A Reader’s Guide

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

FOR DISCUSSION

1. Are you less likely to read popular novels or more likely? Or does popularity even enter into your selection process for choosing what to read?

2. Why do some books grab you and others don’t? There are many possible reasons you might choose to read a particular novel, but what’s the number one aspect of a story that reliably and regularly hooks you? Why does it have so much appeal?

3. Which of the novels you’ve read lately, either popular or literary, contain some of the ingredients detailed in Hit Lit?

4. Which of the twelve recurring features do you think is most central to a book’s success in general? Which of the twelve is most central to your own reading experience?

5. Can you think of any other features that recur in these twelve novels—or other popular fiction—that aren’t noted in Hit Lit?

6. Which of the twelve novels that Hit Lit examines have you read? Of those you’ve read, which do you remember most vividly or most fondly? What aspects of that novel stay with you? Are any of these aspects related to one of the twelve recurring features the book describes?

7. What are some of the differences between these commercially successful books of the twentieth century and recent bestsellers, in your opinion?

8. Most of the books on this list of highly successful novels are not written in a literary style. Does that matter? Should it? Do novels that are full of beautiful prose have the same kind of emotional impact on you as those with more unadorned writing? Do you find that the style itself affects how you read a book, or not?

9. When you choose to read a book rather than watch TV or a film, what are some of the factors that go into making that decision?

10. In the “Juicy Parts” section, the author argues that in all these novels there’s one sexual episode that is life changing for a character, or somehow crucial to the outcome of the plot. Can you think of other novels you have read where this is also true? Why do you think this is such a widespread device?

11. One argument Hit Lit makes is that a common thread that runs through all these bestsellers is a focus on American values or American characters of various kinds. Do you think American bestsellers challenge conventional American myths and beliefs, or do they pander to the conventional views that Americans have about themselves and their society?

12. Why do we like mavericks as protagonists in fiction? Do these characters succeed because they rebel against convention, or do they eventually succumb to the pressures of normalcy? Take Scout, for instance. Will she always be a rebel, or will she learn to work within the system as Atticus does?

13. Discuss the tension between urban values and rural values Hall points out. Does this same conflict exist in other books you’ve read lately? Is this part of what some describe as the “Two Americas”?

14. Four of the twelve novels Hall discusses are written by women. How do these novels portray a different vision than the ones written by men? In particular, are women more richly characterized by the female writers, or do men sometimes achieve the same level of dimensionality?

15. When we read books like Jaws or The Godfather or The Exorcist, do you think what we are learning about human nature or the way the world works is different from when we read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Or do we gain similar insights, regardless of the type of fiction we read?

16. Should students of literature be required to study popular novels as well as the literary classics? Should schools include Valley of the Dolls, Jaws, or The Godfather in their English curriculum or only books like To Kill a Mockingbird? How do you think this would help, or hurt, our understanding of literature?

17. Which of the novels on this list of twelve bestsellers do you think people will be reading a hundred years from now and which won’t last? Why?

Also by James W. Hall

Dead Last

Silencer

Hell’s Bay

Magic City

Forests of the Night

Off the Chart

Hot Damn

Blackwater Sound

Rough Draft

Body Language

Red Sky at Night

Buzz Cut

Gone Wild

Mean High Tide

Hard Aground

Bones of Coral

Tropical Freeze

Under Cover of Daylight

About the Author

JAMES W. HALL is the author of seventeen novels, four books of poetry, two short-story collections, and a book of essays. He’s also the winner of the Edgar and Shamus awards.