Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (5 page)

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.

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.

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.