Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (6 page)

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner may have been right, but one of the elements of speed my students and I identified in bestsellers is that references to the past are mostly pared down to essential information. By streamlining the narratives and minimizing the use of what Hollywood refers to as “backstory,” these twelve novels keep the reader’s eye fixed to the page much the way good Hollywood films keep us transfixed by the images on the screen. We don’t want to miss what happens next, because something is always happening. No dead space, no long asides, hardly a moment to catch your breath.

This is not an easily measured factor, but over many years of classroom study, I was regularly struck by how little background information was provided about the previous lives of characters like Mitch McDeere or Jack Ryan or even Scarlett O’Hara. They seem to arrive fully formed on the stage before
us, and we learn about them mainly through the things they do and say in the here and now.

Another device that grabs our lapels and accelerates the pace is the use of suspense, in particular the threat of danger. Without fail, some form of serious peril, be it physical or psychological, appears within the early pages of each novel and our pulse is given a serious bump; then, as the pages go by, this giddy arrhythmia gradually accelerates.

Although half of the biggest bestselling novels of all time are novels of suspense, the other half are not. However, when you examine all twelve books side by side, whether they are coming-of-age novels, love stories, or thrillers, the techniques of suspense they employ are remarkably similar.

The Dead Zone
opens with Johnny Smith skating on an icy pond. He falls and bumps his head. His mind clears quickly, and he’s back out on the ice in no time. But the foreboding is palpable. That minor accident has changed Johnny. We’re not sure exactly how, but he’s not the same cheerful kid he was before the fall. In the chapter immediately following, we meet Greg Stillson, who’s selling Bibles door-to-door when he’s confronted by a growling farm dog. Stillson brutally murders the dog without a second thought, and at that moment, less than ten pages into the novel, we realize these two men will eventually cross paths, and from that instant forward the reader’s anxiety level is jacked up and continues to be jacked up, notch by notch by notch.

Atticus Finch takes on the rape case of Tom Robinson, a black man accused by a white woman of raping her, thus initiating
a series of growing threats against the Finch family. When Atticus accepts the case we are one-quarter of the way into the story, at a structural point that a modern screenwriter would consider plot point one, that watershed moment when the story line takes an unexpected yet inevitable turn.

Scout’s anxiety level follows a rising arc along with these increasing tensions, from racial taunts at school, to the facing down of a lynch mob, to the high drama of the courtroom scenes, then to the aftermath of the guilty verdict when Bob Ewell, who feels he’s been humiliated by Atticus on the witness stand, first spits on Scout’s father and then later threatens to kill him. Suspense builds as Ewell stalks the perimeter of the Finches’ lives until these threats reach a climax when Ewell attacks Scout and Jem as they’re walking home in the dark after a school play.

It would be difficult for all the other elevated issues of social justice and racial intolerance that give the novel its moral heft to capture our attention without the load-bearing underpinning of that suspense story.

Early on in chapter 3 of
The Firm
, we learn there are microphones planted within the walls of Mitch and Abby’s home; the couple’s conversations are being recorded, their views of the firm analyzed. And we also discover there were multiple mysterious deaths among Mitch’s predecessors at the firm. These warning signals are in place early, and they spice the early chapters with an unmistakable creepiness, made more suspenseful because the reader is privy to facts that Mitch and Abby are not. This is what literary types call “dramatic irony,” a private exchange between author and reader, a device that when it’s working well can create increased sympathy in the reader’s heart for the unsuspecting hero.

In
Jaws
, a great white shark sucks down a skinny-dipper before you’ve had time to draw your first breath. And without further ado, any reader knows the shark has fixed its sights on the juicy citizens of Amity. That primordial threat hovers over every scene thereafter, until the shark returns to eat again at this well-stocked human buffet.

The dangers of the small and outwardly charming town of Peyton Place are also established early. We discover right away that this town is “highly sexed” and has a volatile tension among the folks living on opposite sides of the tracks. We’re less than a fifth of the way into the novel when Selena Cross, an adolescent girl, is sexually attacked by her shiftless, drunken stepfather, an act that her school friend Allison MacKenzie happens to witness. The seeds of danger have been planted, and the consequences of this violent act roll through the story, galvanizing the two main female characters and causing the central dramatic events of the novel to unfold, including a court trial much like the one in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, which does much to shape the destinies of the main characters.

We’re barely a tenth of the way into
The Godfather
when that celebrated horse’s head winds up on the pillow next to its owner. A classic cringeworthy moment. If somehow a reader has not already sensed the book’s direction, this outlandish threat of violence makes it clear both to Jack Woltz, the owner of the horse, and to any reader that the Godfather is a man capable of extreme acts of brutality. Henceforth, we are on full alert.

Within the first few pages of
The Bridges of Madison County
, readers are forewarned that the story we are about to read might be considered “tawdry,” but despite the danger that it could sully the reputations of a husband and wife, it is too “remarkable” and “worth telling” to ignore. Once Robert
Kincaid has arrived at Francesca’s front porch and finds this beautiful lady is temporarily absent her husband, the sexual tension kicks in, as does the inevitable anticipation that a nosy neighbor—or even worse, Francesca’s husband—will walk in unexpectedly and catch the couple in flagrante delicto. Is this threat as physically dangerous or as primal as the ones posed by
The Exorcist
or
The Dead Zone
? Well, farmers have been known to be mighty protective of their spousal units. Shotguns, pitchforks, and all that.

The threat is established early in this slender romance, just as it is from the start of the tragic story of Anne, Jennifer, and Neely, the dauntless and doomed heroines of
Valley of the Dolls
. Each of these young ladies will face hazards that are as life-threatening as anything offered up in the other novels. Their heads will spin because they’re drugged on love and out-of-control ambition and caught in a spiral of self-destructive chemical addiction. They will each be bitten in half by the razor-sharp teeth of exploitive men.

The character at the center of the novel, Anne Welles, has escaped the dangers of a loveless engagement to a fiancé she can’t stand and fled a suffocating middle-class existence back in Lawrenceville for an adventure in the city; but before she makes her getaway, she is warned of an even greater danger awaiting her in the wider world. “There is no such thing as love,” Anne’s mother counsels before Anne sets off, a dire “beware the Ides of March” prophecy that Anne will verify in the cruelest of ways. Within hours of her arrival in Manhattan, Anne is cautioned a second time by her new employer about a certain aptly named scoundrel, Lyon Burke: “Lyon keeps blinding you with that smile and it fools you at first. You think he’s friendly. But you can never get really close to him. No one could.”

The red flags are rippling wildly. There’s a shark out there, he’s big and bad and circling closer, beware, beware his empty smile. But does any of this keep Anne Welles from paddling out into ever-deeper water? Oh, no.

Within a few pages of the opening of
The Exorcist
, Chris MacNeil hears something spooky rapping and tapping inside the walls of her sleeping daughter’s bedroom. The sounds “were odd. Muffled. Profound. Rhythmically clustered. Alien code tapped out by a dead man.”

Forget about calling a plumber, girl, get yourself a priest and quick.

The furniture mysteriously takes new positions, the clothes in Regan’s closet are rearranged, the youngster herself is talking to an imaginary being. Nothing too extreme, but any vigilant reader knows something nasty is slithering our way.

The threat of danger that opens
The Exorcist
or
Valley of the Dolls
is not even close to the bloodcurdling predicament Jacques Saunière, curator of the Louvre, finds himself in in the opening pages of
The Da Vinci Code
. I’ll skip a recounting of the early violence and threats of violence. Suffice it to say that on the structural level, the novel is a breathless series of high-speed chases and cliff-hanging feats of derring-do and ricocheting bullets, interlarded with hundreds of disquisitions on matters arcane and distressing, much like a meaty lecture tucked inside the warm bun of suspense.

The power of the ticking clock to seize our attention and stress our hearts dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when men and women of the soil, who’d always earned their
bread the old-fashioned seasonal way, migrated to the city, where their usefulness was thereafter measured by the merciless heartbeat of a machine. Modern man has come to react to the pressures of time in ways so reliable that writers of popular novels had to take notice. And did they ever.

The barbecue party at Twelve Oaks has hardly begun before the thunderclouds of war that were gathering all afternoon begin to rumble. We are roughly one-tenth of the way into Scarlett’s story when the boys saddle up, and with a whoop and a holler they ride away to glory.

Events speed up accordingly once the Big Ben of the Civil War begins to gong the hours. Scarlett is married and becomes a widow in a single sentence at the beginning of chapter 7. Thereafter, the steady march of the Yankee army gives the novel its subliminal pulse. Like clockwork, the invaders inch toward Atlanta, and every new crisis in Scarlett’s romantic journey seems timed to the next footfall of their approach.

The war brings deprivations and hardships to the good southern ladies; it forces them to spend their hours amusing other ladies like themselves (and therefore engage in their own version of an uncivil war); from time to time, the advancing war fills the dancing floors with dashing uniformed men on leave, then fills the hospitals with sweet young boys with missing limbs; then, as that giant clock ticks on, the war finally shows up in all its gruesome glory on the outskirts of the city.

Naturally, Scarlett waits till the last possible second before fleeing amid explosions and chaos, and the advancing front lines of the war race her back to Tara. Then comes the terrible aftermath of the war, with its scalawags and new racial order ticking off the final hours of the Old South.

Without this ever-moving second hand constantly raising
the anxiety level, all the romantic skirmishes in the novel might easily become tedious and harebrained. It’s unlikely that even the escapades of a man-hunting genius like Scarlett, who was “constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself,” could keep us enthralled without the hypnotic beat of that dreadful drummer boy.

Each of the other books finds an ingenious way to up the ante by forcing its characters to beat the clock. Francesca and Robert, the adulterous lovers of
The Bridges of Madison County
, must time their affair to the fixed return of Francesca’s husband. John Smith is watching the hours tick by until election day, which will likely mark the end of his chance to assassinate Greg Stillson. The clock is running out on Mitch and Abby, minutes flying by as fast as the Xerox machine spitting out incriminating documents that may or may not save their lives. The Soviet submarine heading to the shores of America is making damn good time as well, and before another day or two, Jack Ryan’s last chance to intercept the ship at sea is gone. Regan MacNeil can’t hold out much longer, as Satan has his way with her. It’s a toss-up who will die first, the sweet, innocent girl or the exhausted priest who’s trying to save her.

I
f ripping a story from the headlines were all there was to it, anyone could sit down with
The Washington Post
and construct a novel that sold a million copies. The formula would be simple. Select an issue that makes the blood boil in many normally levelheaded Americans. Old reliables like abortion, gay marriage, church and state, global warming, school prayer, gun control, race relations, immigration policy, or capital punishment are always handy. Then gather up the loaded language of that subject matter. Create a simple story
line that idealizes one position and demonizes the other and you’re ready to roll.

But there’s a crucial second half to this hot-button equation that deepens and broadens the subject matter, an approach that all our bestsellers employ to one degree or another. For a hot-button issue to have real wallop, it also must express some larger, deep-seated, and unresolved conflict in the national consciousness.

Take the Civil War. Now there’s a hot-button winner. Thousands of books about the Civil War, fiction and nonfiction, have mined the same vein but have failed to exhaust the supply of combustible material. Why is that?