Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (17 page)

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.

A
ccording 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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.