Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (8 page)

Grisham takes both sides of the “greed is bad vs. greed is good” debate that seethed back then just as it has off and on for most of the nation’s history. The novel starkly portrays the Reaganomics of the era. It was a time when supply-side trickle-down voodoo economic arguments could ignite furious passions. MBAs and law degrees were being minted as
fast as new tax laws cut marginal rates. Corporate deregulation and union busting were in the air. Go to it, boys. Make a fortune. Wallow in a little luxury, don’t be shy.

One of the key theoretical arguments supporting Reaganomics was something suitably named the Laffer curve, which supported the idea that cutting taxes led to a rise in total revenues. Enter Mitch McDeere, a highly educated lawyer whose specialty is tax cheating. He heads south to work for a WASPy firm whose clients turn out to be not some legitimate struggling small-business CEOs overburdened by taxes and regulations, but mobsters who want to launder their money and not let any of it trickle down to law-abiding citizens. The huge tectonic plates of dissension grinding beneath Mitch’s story give the novel a shuddering larger significance. When Mitch and Abby sail away on their schooner as winners in this sweepstakes of greed, both sides of this American hot-button issue have further fuel for their arguments.

Nuclear Family

In 1992, when Robert Kincaid came striding into bookstores across the land, “family values” was the hot-button issue on the lips of many, including Vice President Dan Quayle, who that same year notoriously derided the prime-time TV show
Murphy Brown
for its “poverty of values.” Mr. Quayle’s complaint, which was supported by a great many voters, was that the show positively portrayed a single professional woman who had decided to bear a child alone, and thus the show was helping to undermine the sanctity of the nuclear family.

The nuclear family and its sacredness was smack dab in
the foreground of
The Bridges of Madison County
, which opens with a don’t-think-about-it-too-hard explanation of why the two Johnson siblings allowed their mother’s private journal to be published for all to see.

Bridges
heated up the passions of a few million readers and divided them along party lines, stimulating fond memories and regrets over loves lost and paths not taken in one group while irritating the self-righteous sensibilities of others who’d held firm against such adulterous temptations.

Holy Mother

There’s a type of novel that courts controversy and scandal, like
The Da Vinci Code
, that might be categorized as speculative history. Such books try to imagine what might have gone on backstage at the scenes of celebrated events, then they tantalize us with half-truths and gradually weaken our resistance with allegations that are impossible to disprove and spread themselves virally among us with their provocative and outlandish claims.

When the target of such feverish accusations is a once omnipotent but now weakened entity, like the modern-day Catholic Church, whose followers make up a quarter of the population, a strong reaction is guaranteed.

The hullabaloo and polarizing debate that erupted after Dan Brown’s novel was published set staunch defenders of the church in passionate opposition to legions of cynics and nonbelievers who were happy to finally see their own grievances, doubts, and prejudices portrayed so entertainingly. A killer monk. A two-thousand-year-old conspiracy. Sexual rituals. Yes, yes, I knew it must be happening!

In the face of this awesome display of provocative storytelling, we can do nothing but bow in awe and kiss the ring of the holy mother of all hot buttons.

So popular novels are fast and they appeal unapologetically to the baser emotions. Now we also know a few key devices and tricks of the trade that authors have used to hook us and keep us hooked. These stories grip us by using an intriguing high-concept premise, and their speed is enhanced by accessible prose, by pressures of time, by the use of unrelenting suspense, and by favoring action over interior monologues. Matters of the heart dominate. Our heroes and heroines are passionate in their devotion to some cause and act boldly to achieve their ends. Their passion grows hotter as the original premise grows more complex and their challenges become more difficult to overcome. And all of these stories explore some hot-button social issue of their day that is rooted in a long-term national dispute.

Next we will turn to considerations of substance. As we’re flying through the pages of bestsellers, gulping down this
comfort food, some might want to know: Is it possible that something that tastes this good and goes down so easily can actually be nourishing?

The chapters that follow take on this question, but I can provide the one-word answer now. Yes.

F
rom its earliest days, the novel portrayed individuals struggling against the large and indifferent machinery of class and racial prejudice and social injustice. Over the last two centuries of the novel’s existence, most of the successful literary characters have been more than simple individuals; they have been men and women who were embodiments of their age.

Most of the great American masterpieces like
Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn
,
Moby-Dick
,
The Age of Innocence
,
My Ántonia
,
The Great Gatsby
,
The Grapes of Wrath
,
The Invisible Man
,
From Here to Eternity
, and
Native Son
tend to have a sociological orientation—they are more likely to be stories about the ways in which men and women work out their destinies within large groups and communities rather than alone.

Again and again, American bestsellers depict the broad affairs and actions of men, their customs, their beliefs, placing their heroes and heroines on expansive historical or social stages, rather than focusing on the finer calibrations of their thoughts and the subtle renderings of their emotions and consciousness.

As a purely practical matter, just as there is a seesaw effect between action and characterization in most novels (as one goes up, the other inevitably goes down), there is a similar relationship between the creation of inner lives versus the creation of outer lives. As an author devotes more narrative energy to placing a character in historical context with attention to such matters as customs, behaviors, dress, and the artifacts of the age, there is simply less time left to devote to the specific density of the interior self.

Wide-angled scope has been a feature of many of the most popular and some of the most grudgingly respected novels of all time. Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, James Jones, John Steinbeck, James Michener, and any number of American novelists adopted a panoramic view and set their characters against backdrops of enormous scale and consequence.

A small story told against a sweeping backdrop—that’s the pattern repeating again and again in the most successful bestsellers.

Early on in
Gone with the Wind
Scarlett O’Hara gazes at her father, Gerald, and tries to explain why she finds him so comforting: “There was something vital and earthy and coarse about him that appealed to her. Being the least analytic of people, she did not realize that this was because she possessed in some degrees these same qualities.…”

Scarlett’s lack of introspection is a common feature among the protagonists of these novels. What’s true for Scarlett is also true for Allison MacKenzie and Jack Ryan and Mitch McDeere and Professor Robert Langdon. These characters are not self-absorbed or contemplative. Instead, they are shown primarily from external observations. We see their social interactions, their behavior, their dress, what they say and what they do in public and in private, but rarely do we go wading into the stream of their consciousness.

Readers are carried away by big stories, stories of import set on a large stage, ones that also feature a wide assortment of social classes. For scope applies not just to a wide-angle treatment of subject matter, but to demographics as well.

From the very beginning, novels have been the most democratic literary form, written in a raw, simple prose that gives free and easy access to all comers. It required little education beyond simple literacy to read the first English novels, and it requires little more today to consume a bestselling work of
fiction. In fact, the democratic spirit that defined the first English novels is still the defining characteristic of the American bestseller.

The novel was born in the eighteenth century as the industrial age was making it easier for men and women at every class level to lift themselves up in rank. From the outset, those early English novelists considered it their primary duty to inform their readers about how this transformation might be achieved, using the most accessible language and style available to them and creating characters who originated from the vital, earthy, and coarser classes.

Today, the most commercially successful American novels continue to appeal to the same demographic and to focus on the same issues those first novels did two hundred years ago: social mobility; racial, gender, and class fairness; the struggles and triumphs of the poor set alongside similar conflicts of the powerful. In other words, they are stories about characters pitted against large forces, not characters in conflict with themselves.

Scarlett spends most of the novel struggling to return to the safe, predictable haven of the prewar Tara, where once she could bat her eyelashes and men would fall at her feet. Though her nostalgic wish to return to a prewar world is as hopeless as her fantasy of marrying Ashley Wilkes, that harsh fact never seems to dim her ambition.

The fact that Scarlett doesn’t grasp the magnitude of the historical moment is part of her silly charm. She’s simply annoyed at the inconvenience of the war, a little grumpy at all the nonsense she’s required to do to survive, and she winds up whining more than whooping in protest. In that sense, she’s almost a comic character, unaware of the gravity of her situation
and therefore innocently undaunted by the overwhelming obstacles facing her. It simply never occurs to Scarlett that she’s acting heroically.

For most of the novel, Scarlett’s tribulations center around mundane matters of survival in the social realm, and most readers would surely understand how treacherous this realm can be. Scarlett has to master the complex minuet of manners and proper behavior of polite society at the very moment those things are in a state of radical transformation.

As she is coping with wartime realities and the new condition of being a widow and living in Atlanta’s hothouse of decorum, Scarlett’s personal story unfolds against the backdrop of the most tumultuous period in our history. Scarlett thrives, turning herself into a smashing business success, chiefly by marrying anyone who can help her achieve her ends. In this sense, the novel is as much a story about female empowerment and the redefining opportunities of the industrial age as it is a flirty romance. Big themes, sweeping issues, a very large stage for one of American fiction’s biggest stars.

Later, in scenes with panoramic sweep, Scarlett O’Hara takes charge of her family and leads them home to Tara amid smoldering scenes of battle and death and destruction. She must tear up her petticoat to use as a halter for a cow. Later she must pick cotton to survive. She kills a Yankee soldier who invades her house. She loses a child and two husbands (a third, if you count Rhett), and she rises to every occasion, fueled by romantic longings as vast as the larger-than-life landscape she passes through.

Scarlett’s focus is outward. She keeps her sights on the exterior realities of social politics, the finer points of corsets and ball gowns—the nitty-gritty sociology of her era. Without the giant wheels of history clattering behind her, her story might
have collapsed into a froth of silliness. But with the enormity of change occurring before our eyes, the violent death of the Old South and the reinvention of American life, the cataclysmic changes in racial arrangements and class and gender values, Scarlett’s struggles take on greater scale and more heft as well.

As is the case with most bestsellers, two stories are at work, one small, one large. And two Scarletts are required to merge these stories into one. The foreground narrative is about the emotional cravings of a petty, narcissistic ingenue—Scarlett’s ceaseless pining for Ashley and her schemes to win his love—while the other story is a broad-canvased epic that features a tough-as-nails young woman who confronts Yankee soldiers, triumphs in a ruthless business world, and successfully adapts to the most wrenching social changes our country has ever known.

An entirely different type of scope is found in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. On first blush, this portrait of secluded small-town life rendered through the eyes of a preadolescent girl would seem an improbable candidate for a novel of scale.

Many of us have a tendency to associate the large political and social convulsions of any particular era with urban centers, believing those upheavals to be muted to inconsequence by the time they filter out into the hinterlands of rural America. Al Zuckerman, in his guide to writing a “blockbuster,” puts it bluntly: “Less than 1 percent of the population can afford to buy hardcover fiction with regularity, and that affluent group tends to be more interested in rich people than in
poor ones, in city dwellers rather than in rural folk, in movers and shakers rather than in the downtrodden.”