Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (24 page)

Anne Welles of
Valley of the Dolls
snags her right man, Lyon Burke, but the guy is as much a downer as the pills Anne is increasingly dependent on. Ducking out of her own party at the conclusion of the novel, Anne lies down on her bed, happy to have escaped the din of actors and actresses and entertainment types who are jamming her apartment.

Then who slips into the darkened room but the former man of her dreams and now her husband, Lyon Burke. Except he’s not alone. He’s brought along his latest hottie, a young
actress type named Margie. Unaware of her lying nearby, they smooch and whisper in the dark while Anne lies listening. When they’ve gone, Anne rises from the bed, brushes her hair and freshens her makeup, and runs through the list of things she should be grateful for: “She looked fine. She had Lyon, the beautiful apartment, the beautiful child, the nice career of her own, New York—everything she’d ever wanted.”

And though she understands Lyon will be unfaithful to her forever, she’s reconciled to that. Her solace now comes in pill form, her own chemical fiddle-dee-dee. The way she’ll get through the lonely nights ahead is by gulping down “the beautiful dolls.” In fact, she decides to pop a couple tonight. Hey, why not? It’s New Year’s Eve.

Readers looking to these novels for psychological insight (“equipment for living”) would see that Scarlett and the young ladies from
Valley of the Dolls
are tragically doomed and have sabotaged their chances for authentic love and familial happiness. Part romance novel, part critique of romance novel, these two stories strip bare the hopeless, swooning fantasies of their heroines.

To Don Corleone, family is sacred. He’s willing to fight and die for his kinfolk and demands the same loyalty in return. Indeed, as part of his role as everybody’s Godfather, he will occasionally agree to act as guidance counselor as well. When his godson Johnny Fontane, a Sinatra-like singer, comes to the Don in desperate need, the Godfather gives him some tough love, a chewing out the likes of which Scarlett never heard but probably should have.

Johnny is confined to a one-month sentence with the Don as his warden. Johnny must eat well, sleep, and rest. No booze, no girls, not even singing.

But Don Corleone’s kids are a harder challenge. Even a man with the Don’s menacing demeanor has a hard time keeping them in line. Sonny, his eldest, is just too reckless and self-destructive for anybody’s good. When the boy is involved in a stupid armed robbery that nets next to nothing, the Don is livid. He rages at his son until Sonny has had enough and cuts his father off at the knees, telling him he saw Don Corleone kill a man.

The Don is dumbstruck. He hadn’t known that as a child Sonny witnessed the Don’s murder of the neighborhood tyrant. That life lesson, a stressor that Holmes and Rahe forget to add to their list, will overshadow every other good lesson the Don has to teach his boy. Sonny is lost to him, and all he can say at that moment is, “Every man has one destiny.”

In effect, from that moment on, he washes his hands of parental responsibility for Sonny. It’s the Don’s own fiddle-dee-dee.

As for the women, well, they don’t wield much power in this powerful family. In the superpaternalistic structure of the Corleone clan, Mama Corleone virtually disappears into insignificance. The same is true for Kay Adams, who marries Michael without knowing the real nature of his family business or fully understanding that she is brought aboard to fulfill the appearance of an all-American marriage. Her own romantic dreams about marriage evaporate as well.

Female empowerment, it would seem, is a fantasy that drives these women into relationships, but that fantasy is quickly shattered by the realization that the male-dominated
world each of these women enters is more rigid and permanent than any of them bargained for.

Again and again, despite the vastly different subject matter in these bestsellers, family tensions and parental legacies underpin critical events in the stories.

Even in
The Hunt for Red October
, a nearly female-free zone, family issues crop up at odd and crucial moments. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the families that get the most face time in
The Hunt for Red October
are the crews of the submarines. In fact, the American submariners seem to be a happier family unit than any we see in Scarlett’s world or the Don’s.

Family is even at the root of the tensions between the two superpowers. None of these world-endangering events would have happened had Ramius, the Soviet sub commander, had a normal childhood. The kid never knew his mother and was deeply alienated from his old man, and thus was starved for human love.

Compared with Ramius, Jack Ryan has a solid family life, though he’s a little sketchy on the details. A wife, two kids.

There might have been any number of reasons for Ramius’s
defection, money, power, influence, ego. But it’s none of those. Family, pure and simple, is at the root of his rejection of the Soviet way of life. Without the foundation of a nurturing childhood, Ramius pours all his love into his marriage. So when his wife, Natalia, dies from Soviet medical negligence, Ramius descends into utter despair.

Of course, the rivalry between superpowers that nearly leads to all-out war is the major narrative thread, the one that grabs the reader’s attention and makes the pages fly by. An emotionally charged passage like the one above easily gets lost amid the detailing of hardware and naval maneuvering. But to Clancy’s credit, flesh-and-blood creatures bound by ties of love and affection and driven by haunting memories form a human counterweight to this story of nuclear engines and the supersecret technology that threatens the world.

Though maybe it’s a little hokey, Clancy is determined to give Jack and Ramius, his two adversaries, clear and certain family lives that reflect the nations that spawned them. America is painted as the land of stability, where, by golly, a decent man has a wife and two kids and is happily married. On the other hand, his counterpart’s Soviet family is shown to be destabilized by the ravages of an ancient war and by the strains of the gray bureaucracy that suffocates even its heroes.

After the two men play cat and mouse for a couple of hundred pages, Ramius and Jack Ryan finally meet face-to-face.
They shake hands, and the first words Ramius speaks are oddly personal.

Ramius turns away abruptly and addresses a junior officer in Russian. But the point is clear. To Ramius, family is of primary importance. It’s where everything begins.

In this regard, Clancy is more subtle than he’s usually given credit for. Despite all the political bluster and the machinery, the endless nuts and bolts of warfare that seem, at first glance, to overshadow all else in his work, lurking just below the surface, barely making a ripple on the thin skin of the sea, are his deep concerns with the relationships between his people, be they submariners or hapless CIA information analysts. It seems that Clancy’s vision is as familial as it is political. For Clancy, both the dirty Commies and the freedom-loving Americans have the same urgent human need for domestic relationships. And it is the destruction of that, the shredding of the fabric of family life, that in Clancy’s view is our greatest peril.

For readers in search of families more dysfunctional than their own,
Peyton Place
would be an excellent choice.

Allison MacKenzie, writer-in-training, is doing fieldwork one day at her friend Selena Cross’s tar-paper shack. She’s
interviewing Selena’s mother, trying to grasp how a family manages to stay together in the face of the kind of sexual and physical abuse that Allison witnessed earlier, and Nellie Cross is giving her the lowdown, a glimpse into the cruel machinery of connubial relations.

Allison pokes around in other people’s lives with a voyeuristic fascination, all in the name of learning her craft as a writer. The likelihood is that she will succeed in that tough literary field, for she’s got the one great advantage of high-achieving people. She’s missing a parent.

Her mother, Constance, says as much when musing about her daughter. She wonders if it’s true that bastards are often successful in their chosen fields because they are driven to compensate for not having had a father.

Missing fathers, or missing mothers, or missing wives, propel most of these characters to greater attainments. Scout Finch’s mother died of a heart attack when Scout was only two years old. Jem is still troubled by her loss. Sometimes in the middle
of play, he will suddenly sigh and walk off to be alone. Scout understands and keeps her distance. Though she pretends she’s unaffected by her absent mom, we can see through her bluff. The very fact that she’s so aware of the source of her brother’s pain is proof enough.

This missing-parent paradigm shows up as frequently in bestsellers as it does in traditional fairy tales. As Bruno Bettelheim noted in
The Uses of Enchantment
, his landmark work on the psychological function of fairy tales, the recurrence of missing-parent imagery serves a fundamental purpose in the education of a child. For one thing, it prepares a youngster for the wrenching passage to adulthood. At some stage in the process of growing up, the protective and kindhearted mother seems to vanish, replaced by a stern disciplinarian who sets rigid boundaries and rules. Fairy tales lay the groundwork for the jarring change of adolescence.

In the absence of a nurturing birth mother, Scout Finch has three surrogates: Calpurnia, the African American housekeeper, who monitors Scout’s comings and goings; her aunt Alexandra, who endlessly disapproves of Scout’s tomboyish ways; and Miss Maudie, a neighbor who plays the comforting, pampering fairy godmother role, though, as is true in fairy tales, her influence can’t last forever. Like Scout’s real mother, she drifts away symbolically, which leaves Scout to fend for herself and thus to learn how to break the ties of reliance on parental protection and become fully independent. These are the lessons that Cinderella had to learn, just like Scarlett and Allison MacKenzie.

That big bestsellers and fairy tales both use this pattern with such regularity is not surprising, because both storytelling forms serve a similar broad social purpose, to remind us
of the archetypal journey we all share, a mythic passage from the safe, cozy nest where we spent our early days, shielded from the dangers of the world, to a challenging and often menacing larger world where we must rely on our own inner resources to survive.

The families are so much alike in
Peyton Place
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, it’s hard to shake the idea that a little harmless cribbing was at work in Harper Lee’s effort. Both books feature young female narrators who explore their small towns from stem to stern. The Ewell family who live beside the dump are a perfect mirror of the earlier Cross family in their shantytown, right down to a nearly identical incestuous relationship between father and daughter. A threatened lynching and a big explosive trial full of seamy revelations is a centerpiece of both books. Justice is served in Peyton Place, while justice fails in Maycomb. There’s even a precursor to Boo Radley living down the street from Allison MacKenzie. Her name is Miss Hester, and she has the same creepy reputation and reclusive habits as Boo. And there’s also a kid who accepts a dare to go up to her house and sit on her porch and see what she sees. But there the similarity ends. From Boo’s porch, Scout has her major revelation and discovers empathy, finally viewing the world from Boo’s point of view.

Norman Page’s interaction with the bogeyman of Peyton Place results in a very similar outcome. He was “terrified of Miss Hester, and Allison had laughed at him and tried to
frighten him even more by saying that Miss Hester was a witch.” Determined to overcome that terror, Norman seizes an opportunity when Miss Hester makes a rare departure from her house.

He hangs around till she’s gone, then runs across the street and through the scary lady’s gate. It’s the first time he’s stepped onto her property.

He wades through the tall, unkept grass to the back porch and looks around the neighborhood from this new vantage point. What Norman Page sees through a split in the hedge is Mr. and Mrs. Card, the next-door neighbors, fondling each other, and Mr. Card unbuttoning Mrs. Card’s dress and stroking her pregnant belly.

Norman gets a hot and heavy peek into the world of passion, while Scout gazes out with growing sympathy as she absorbs the neighborhood from Boo Radley’s vantage point. At first these sharply dissimilar views seen from very similar porches suggest these two novels have little in common. One raunchy, one chaste. A missing father for Allison. A missing mother for Scout. But though their methods are radically different, their intentions are exactly the same.

Allison’s mother, Constance, has never fully recovered from her affair with Allison’s father and has sublimated her sexual energy, redirecting it toward raising her daughter and running her dress shop. But she will eventually find release in the arms of the new high school principal, Tomas Makris. Overcoming her sexual inhibitions brings Constance to a moment of discovery that could stand as the final psychological offering of this novel.