Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (15 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.