Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (9 page)

Well, that’s not exactly accurate.
To Kill a Mockingbird
is one of the most commercially successful novels of all time, and its setting is as far removed from urban America as one can get. But because the novel sends its taproot deep into the loamy soil of vital American concerns, its appeal stretches far beyond its rural setting.

In the isolated backwoods of Maycomb, Alabama, the large moral and political issues of the Depression era sifted into the courtroom and the front parlor, the public schools and the church sanctuary. Like Scarlett, Scout Finch roams the social spectrum. She journeys to places no ordinary character could take us, from First Purchase African M.E. Church, to the living room of the pious upper-crust church ladies who are supporting missionaries in distant lands, and on to the angry streets where a lynch mob gathers to murder Atticus Finch’s black client. Scout sees it all and takes us on a tour of the nooks and crannies of Maycomb. Luckily for us, she is an astute observer of the sociological structure of her hometown.

The Crawfords mind their own business, a third of the Merriweathers are morbid, the Delafields are all born liars, the entire Buford clan have that same strange walk. Scout can reel off every detail of the caste system in Maycomb effortlessly.

Scout truly scouts the entire social gamut from top to bottom and back again in this brief but expansive story. Though the city limits of Maycomb may be cramped and the population small, the sweep of Scout’s gaze is unbounded, stretching outward toward the nation that resonates beyond the borders of her small town.

The Da Vinci Code
challenges the core values of institutions no less vast than the Catholic Church and Western art, to name only two, yet lest we forget the grandness of scale the novel is operating on, we are given repeated reminders in the form of superlatives of every kind. You want big? I’ll give you big. Here are nine examples, but there’s virtually one on every page.

1. “the world’s most famous paintings …”
   
2. “the longest building in Europe …”
   
3. “the most famous mathematical progressions in history …”
   
4. “the most famous piece of art in the world …”
   
5. “one of the world’s most documented inside jokes …”
   
6. “the most sought-after treasure in human history …”
   
7. “one of the most enduring mysteries of all time …”
   
8. “the most famous fresco of all time …”
   
9. “one of history’s greatest secrets …”
   

Superlatives abound. Greatest this, biggest that. Most famous this, earthshaking that. Another elbow in the ribs and another. Get it? Get it? This is important! This is big! Really, really huge!

Surely most readers glide past these passages without a blink, so swept up in the constant puzzle solving and didactic passion for all things related to Catholicism, symbolism, goddesses,
Western art, and Parisian and London travel guide info. In fact, in the case of
The Da Vinci Code
, such trumpet-blaring announcements of the importance of the story are unnecessary, because the scale of the story, the grandeur of its subject, and the momentous nature of its revelations would have easily carried the day.

Tom Clancy puts Jack Ryan on the largest geopolitical stage going: two superpowers using their highest-tech toys to play saber-rattling games somewhere in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans are trying desperately to locate a Russian nuclear submarine so quiet, so undetectable by conventional technology, it could shift the military balance of power once and for all.

Though we know little about Jack Ryan’s inner life, he’s smart and well schooled in military matters, and though he’s reluctant to do so, he bravely answers his country’s call and uses his good old American common sense and his military savvy to avert World War III. How can we not care about such a man? And why do we really need to know more about the mechanics of his state of mind to be fully engaged with his bold and enterprising deeds?

Mario Puzo gives us not just a story about a Mafia family, but a story about the Mafia. Like
Gone with the Wind
,
The Exorcist
,
Jaws
, and
The Hunt for Red October
, it’s a war story. One Mafia family at war against other Mafia families and the Corleones at war with the civilized law-abiding world.

Part of the novel’s appeal is that it provides us with an exhaustive diagram of the power structure of a vast and widespread
criminal organization that reaches into nearly every corner of American society. That we learn little of Michael Corleone’s psychodynamics or spend practically no time at all inside the Don’s mind seems a small price to pay for such a thorough tour of this network of killers and thieves.

And what of
Jaws
and that great white shark that rises from the sea like … a supersilent, supersecret nuclear-powered submarine? It is not some puny fish, no, but the ultimate shark, the shark to beat all sharks, coming from earthshaking depths. It rattles the entire island town of Amity, from lowly fishermen to the haughty mayor, and the ripples of its passing spread well beyond the tiny town it’s taken such an interest in. A shark with scope.

Then there is
The Exorcist
. Is it possible to find an antagonist of any greater scale than Satan himself? Not likely. It is Satan’s voice and Satan’s sickening smell and Satan’s horrifying possession of a young girl-child that calls forth the full weight of Christianity to exorcise it. Good versus Evil with head-spinning terror.

Peyton Place is not simply a small New England town. It is
every
small American town with its secrets, its hypocrisies, its abortions, its incest, its teen sex, its pulsing, heaving, sweaty sexual violence. Peyton Place is America, the polite, mannered façade pulled back to reveal the squirming reality below. Like
To Kill a Mockingbird
, the book is a broad examination of the corrupt mores and class warfare that Americans would rather not admit to. In that sense, it is far more than a lurid exposé of the naughty private lives of the citizens of a small New England town. It attempts to chronicle the principal social issues of the postwar era—primarily the repression and exploitation of women and the impoverished—and seeks to record their brave attempts at emancipation.

In
The Firm
, John Grisham doesn’t just take us on a ride through the inner workings of a small southern law firm. He sends a top Harvard Law School grad, Mitch McDeere, to work for a firm so shady, so murderous, so utterly corrupt, that a man no less grand than the director of the FBI shows up in an isolated public park to recruit Mitch to exorcise this malignant multinational business from American life. As one FBI agent puts it to Mitch:

“You can build a case from the inside that will collapse the firm and break up one of the largest crime families in the country.”

Big, bigger, biggest.

When Jacqueline Susann creates an early incarnation of
Sex and the City
, she plops her three young working gals into two of the biggest American cities, New York and Los Angeles, sending them off to mingle with the most glamorous celebrities and showbiz personalities of all time. We are dazzled by movie stars, Broadway celebrities, the most influential entertainment power brokers, and debauchery on the grandest of scales.

In
The Dead Zone
, Stephen King sets John Smith’s story against a backdrop of political upheaval, the sixties and early seventies. Woodstock, Watergate, Kent State. John misses four years of that tumultuous period while in a coma and wakes to find the Vietnam War ended and Nixon hounded from office. Putting the novel in political context is crucial to the foreground story, for after John wakes from his Rip van Winkle snooze, he must decide whether or not to put his precognitive abilities to use in a scheme to assassinate Greg Stillson, a megalomaniacal politician with his eyes on the White House. By this point in the novel, John’s “second sight” has
been widely publicized and his exploits have become the stuff of national news.

In the smaller foreground story, set against this sweeping backdrop, John Smith realizes with growing dread that he must execute Stillson, because John has seen in one of his precognitive visions of the future that Stillson plays a crucial role in promoting evil. Stillson is about to become a Hitler or bin Laden, and John Smith is the world’s only hope to prevent a certain Armageddon.

The stakes are high. They couldn’t be higher.

While Americans can stake no claim to the epic form, or to novels with panoramic sweep, we do have a national predisposition for expansiveness in general and a weakness for boastful, sprawling Whitmanesque stories. I am large, Whitman liked to say, referring to America. I contain multitudes.

It seems that when book buyers decide to spend the price of a restaurant meal for a work of fiction, most want their stories to be more than just a plate of tapas. They want to gorge on big, bustling, manifest destiny, shining city on a hill, sloppy Joe calories. We want our books to measure up to our own supersized sense of what matters most.

So it is that Scarlett and Mitch McDeere and Jack Ryan and Scout and their brethren are unmistakably American in the vastness of their aspirations and their outsized bravery in the face of enormous tasks and dangers. Though these characters are defined far more by their social class and their families and extended families and by their jobs than by the inner
workings of their psyches, what they may lack in emotional dimensionality they make up for in scale.

Just as I expected before I read any of these novels, their pages are populated with apparent stereotypes—the self-absorbed, superficial southern belle, the young lawyer on the make, the stalwart, stuffy CIA analyst, the guileless small-town girl who loses her innocence. So how is it that each of these characters blindsided me with such force that they made me question my cocky assumptions that psychological complexity was the sine qua non of literary achievement?

My students and I came to believe that the answer lies partly in the wide scope of bestsellers. Because these characters perform against the vast backdrops of American politics and social upheaval, and because their personal destinies, their wishes, and their dreams are inextricably fused with the largest and most crucial concerns of the nation, Scarlett and Mitch and Jack and Scout and the others cannot help but stir us. They are ordinary American folks from humble roots who have answered some resounding call and risen beyond their limitations to impossible heights. If their battles had been smaller, less important, less connected to the national pulse, frankly, most of us wouldn’t have given a damn.

I
t’s hard to top Fitzgerald when it comes to rhapsodizing about the New World, but here’s Thomas Morton in 1622, a more or less typical colonial settler, enthusing about the lush wilderness of America: “I do not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be parallel’d … so many goodly groves of trees; dainty fine round rising hillucks … sweet crystal fountains, and cleare running streams.”

Nearly four hundred years after Morton stepped ashore, fictional portrayals of the natural world still have immense power to stir our American hearts. And it seems that bestselling authors have absorbed this lesson well.

As my students and I were beginning to compare bestsellers from past eras, this feature was one of the first we spotted—images of a lost Eden. We came to refer to this recurring phenomenon as the Golden Country, a phrase we lifted from George Orwell’s bestseller
Nineteen Eighty-four
.

In a time of perpetual war, with the thought police and Big Brother constantly spying, Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel, escapes frequently to this wistful, sexy fantasyland to reestablish his connection to a lost natural world he only vaguely recalls. It is a place of languid streams and verdant fields and swaying elm trees with leaves stirring “in dense masses like women’s hair.”

What relief Winston feels from the pressures of his robotic routines is fleeting. Yet for the reader, the lyrical glow of these fragments stands out sharply against the no-frills prose Orwell uses throughout the novel to portray the drab and oppressive futuristic society.

American writers typically portray Eden with a bit more ambivalence than the Englishman Orwell. Take the famous portrait of American paradise in
Walden
, Thoreau’s celebrated treatise on living in the wild. Utopian, yes. Edenic, yes. But
Walden
is at least as much a pragmatic how-to manual as
it is an inspirational document. Thoreau was an American writer through and through, as interested in the utilitarian methods of surviving in the wilderness as he was in the rhapsodic descriptions of natural beauty. And so it is with the presentation of nature in American bestsellers, where we find Edens that for all their restorative beauty are both ephemeral and dangerous landscapes that must be mastered.

American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself. Surely part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.