Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (10 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.