Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (32 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cracking the Code of the
Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers

James W. Hall

A Reader’s Guide

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?