Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (26 page)

As the trial continues, Atticus Finch questions Mayella about the details of the night in question, and Scout is exposed to two additional facts of life most girls her age and class would be shielded from—that daughters can sometimes be the victims of sexual and physical abuse from their fathers
and that sexual desire can be driven by needs far more perverse than love.

Though Scout and the reader can only guess what really happened in the Ewells’ shack that November evening, the novel strongly suggests Mayella made a pass at Tom, a provocative come-on that he was in the process of rejecting when Mayella’s father arrived on the scene.

Tom ran. And Mayella was beaten by her father for her crime of interracial lust. To cover his shame and vent his anger, Bob Ewell summoned the sheriff and claimed Tom raped his daughter. All this Scout manages to infer from the Ewells’ evasive court testimony.

Scout’s training in gender politics actually begins long before the trial starts when Miss Maudie, who has been the target of religious zealots, explains to Scout that these “foot-washers think women are a sin by definition.” Scout hears the same sexist message again in a sermon given at a black church when the preacher inveighs against the whole female race as impure and the root of all temptation.

Like Scarlett O’Hara, Scout is bombarded with messages about proper female behavior. Calpurnia chides her constantly about her tomboy antics. Her own brother, Jem, is increasingly uncomfortable with her gender.

As much as Scout would like to avoid the whole subject of sex and gender, she can’t. By the end of the novel, the carnal desire Mayella felt for Tom warps into violence that overtakes Scout and her brother in the form of a knife-wielding Bob Ewell.

In the scene that follows, Scout meets Boo Radley face-to-face for the first time in a bedroom at the Finches’ house.

At the moment when Scout and Boo touch, there is something electric, even sensuous, in their exploratory give-and-take
and the gentle coaching that passes between them, as if this scene might be the innocent mirror image of the coarse encounter between Mayella and Tom Robinson.

In a reversal of traditional male and female roles, Scout leads Boo back to his house and drops him at his door. They part wordlessly, like lovers who’ve exhausted the possibilities between them. After this moment Scout will never see Boo again, but she is changed by the encounter, just as Allison is forever altered by her first intimate contact with a man. Both young women are stronger and more independent at the conclusions of their stories, budding feminists who are seemingly on their way to escaping the gender stereotypes that trap the other female characters in these novels.

In
The Dead Zone
, John Smith and Sarah Bracknell are about to have sex for the first time when fate intervenes. A violent car crash sends Johnny into a coma for four and a half years, and when he wakes, Sarah has moved on. She’s married Walt Hazlett, and the couple has a child. But Sarah’s not over Johnny, and he’s definitely not over her.

For starters, Sarah can’t help comparing her cynical husband with the good-hearted Johnny, a comparison that undermines her fidelity to Walt.

Johnny wasn’t that way. He had a heart of gold before the coma, and when he wakes, Sarah decides she must get back in touch. She finds him unchanged by his ordeal, and the pent-up, unresolved sexual tension between them erupts. What follows is a sensuous fulfillment of all that was long deferred. For the two young people, sex is not an opening of a door to the future, but a closing of the door to the past.

This sexual moment cauterizes their wounded hearts and allows each of them to let go of their romantic past. Sarah returns to Walt, and when we see her again at the end of the novel, she’s had another child and seems reconciled to her marriage. Johnny goes on to use his energies and his psychic powers to help capture a sexual predator, the Castle Rock Strangler, and then moves on to his great act of world-saving self-sacrifice.

For both characters, the sexual moment between them was a watershed event, reminding them of what they’d lost and what they might have had if fate had been kinder. Johnny says as much in a letter to Sarah that she reads after his death: “But I wanted you to know that I think of you, Sarah. For me
there really hasn’t been anyone else, and that night was the best night for us.…”

Here, as with the other bestsellers on my list, this single sex scene is decisive, and without it events and characters would have moved in markedly different directions.

Jaws
repeats the pattern with raunchy zest. In the novelistic version, the story opens with a sex scene between a nameless woman and a drunken man. He falls backward onto the beach and pulls her onto him, and they claw at each other’s clothes. When they’ve satisfied themselves, the woman is still ready for a swim, but her date has already drifted off to sleep.

She walks naked into the Atlantic and paddles offshore, where the great white “smells her” and proceeds to take her apart limb by limb.

Given the novel’s focus on the shark’s highly developed sense of smell, one might reasonably ask if the shark would have located that swimmer had she not just had sex on the beach. The suggestion is unavoidable: The shark becomes an avenging angel, punishing the dissolute behavior happening back on shore. A kind of nasty Puritan backlash against counterculture types with their dope-smoking, self-indulgent lack of moral discipline. It’s entirely possible that shark would’ve passed right by Amity if there hadn’t been such a strong scent of decadence in the water.

The opening scene of the movie version avoids that question but raises another. A drunken college kid picks up a willing girl at a beach bonfire where dope is smoked, guitars are strummed, and necking is widespread. In the film, the drunken guy simply falls into a heap at the shoreline still clothed, while his would-be lover strips naked and walks into the waves, then swims out into the ocean as if flaunting her sexual freedom. In this case, one could ask if the self-sufficient woman
who abandons her man in a drunken daze is being punished for the sin of independence.

Presumably Steven Spielberg made this alteration, having his shark target a liberated woman rather than a decadent one, because a feminist victim might arouse trendier emotions than a woman who was simply licentious.

Either way, it’s a hell of a sexy way to open. Coupling the shark’s violent rampage with the naked fumblings of two lovers puts into motion an erotic undercurrent that moves through the entire novel.

The only other true sex scene in
Jaws
involves a tête-à-tête between Brody’s wife, Ellen, and Hooper, the visiting shark expert. Ellen’s motivation for straying has more to do with a need to affirm her sexuality and her upper-class background than with a romantic attraction to Hooper.

Ellen gets her wish and spends a few steamy hours engaged in a hotel romp with Hooper. The experience redefines her in ways she hadn’t expected. Hooper, it turns out, is about as sexy as an android on autopilot.

Hooper must’ve learned his mating habits from the fish he studies—so spasmodic, so inhuman, so violent.

It would be a stretch to claim that Sarah and Ellen are “liberated” by their adulterous affairs. But both women do return to their marriages with a gratitude and calm that is noticeably similar. One could make the case that such a pattern might be simply a wishful fantasy that male bestseller
authors promote about infidelity—that strong and wayward women will eventually see the light and return to the marriage bed with new commitment. Wishful fantasy or not, these two twentieth-century married women wind up sharing a similar toughness and resolve to renew their commitment to a traditional marriage.

John Grisham puts a tempting island girl in Mitch McDeere’s path while he’s off on a business trip to the Cayman Islands. On the deserted beach in the tropical darkness, this dark-haired beauty shucks off her bikini top and hands it to Mitch and wades into the sea. (Doesn’t she know there are sharks out there?)

Mitch debates it for a sentence or two, then strips and wades out after her. They consummate their encounter back on the sand, with Mitch chanting to himself that no one will ever know.

Not so quick. The woman was a setup, part of the firm’s master plan to keep their legal associates in line. Pictures were taken of Mitch and the island beauty, and the firm’s enforcer shows them to Mitch with a threat. Play along, buy your new, flashier car, your bigger house, just like the other lawyers at the firm. But don’t try to be heroic. Or these pictures will destroy your marriage.

Although it’s an errant husband this time instead of a straying wife, the formula holds, for Mitch’s infidelity eventually helps to renew the marriage. His relationship with Abby is under serious strain from Mitch’s workaholic schedule. Abby chafes in the role of model wife and homemaker. She’s
increasingly lonely and frustrated, a young wife who has made one too many candlelit dinners that her husband failed to attend. For a marriage under so much stress, Mitch’s one-night stand could be the final straw.

Like Sarah Bracknell’s infidelity in
The Dead Zone
and Ellen Brody’s motel fling in
Jaws
, Mitch’s beach shenanigans become a watershed moment in his marriage. He never actually confesses, but he certainly sweats bullets when one evening he comes home to find Abby with a mailing envelope marked “Photographs” lying at the foot of the bed. It takes a few moments before Mitch realizes the mailer was empty—just a sadistic reminder from his adversaries that they have the power to expose his unfaithfulness.

After this crisis, the marriage takes a turn. Though we never see Mitch acknowledging his deceit, his guilt seems to tip the balance of power between him and Abby and gives him a new appreciation for his marriage. And though Abby is unaware of the cause of this change, she energetically embraces her new role as Mitch’s co-conspirator. If they’re not exactly equal partners, it’s awfully close.

Holed up in a shabby apartment, copying incriminating evidence on Bendini, Lambert & Locke, Abby sheds her passivity and blossoms into a strong, decisive woman. One evening when Mitch arrives at the door of the rented apartment where Abby’s working, it’s like old times back in that law school flat—this time with Abby as the initiator of sex and behaving every bit like Mitch’s coequal. Abby pulls open the door and throws herself on Mitch. The sex scene that follows is more heated and more satisfying than any before or after. It’s a watershed moment between these two. Sex that seals the deal and establishes the terms of their new, more equal partnership.

The couple eventually pull off their scheme and escape to a safe Caribbean sanctuary, well beyond the reach of the Mob or the FBI or financial worries. However, the aftereffects of Mitch’s hanky-panky linger.

In the novel’s final scene, alone on their island paradise, Abby fills their cocktail glasses with another hit of rum punch and declares that as long as the two of them are together she can endure anything, even this Spartan isolation. As things warm up between them, she asks innocently if Mitch has ever had sex on the beach.

He fumbles for a moment, then lies and says no, he hasn’t.

One could certainly argue that Mitch’s dishonesty might eventually undermine the authenticity of the McDeeres’ more balanced relations. But even with that caveat, it’s clear that the Abby we see in the final scene is a stronger woman than we’ve seen before. With a new assertiveness in full flower, she is given the novel’s last words. Calling the shots in a way that would have been unthinkable a hundred pages earlier. A newly independent woman determined to have her own version of a traditional family.

“Then drink up, sailor. Let’s get drunk and make a baby.”

At the head of the class of adultery bestsellers is
The Bridges of Madison County
. Though Francesca’s marriage to her boring farmer husband is not rejuvenated or strengthened in any way that we can see by the long hours of extramarital sex with Robert Kincaid, she certainly stores away sufficient memories of erotic satisfaction to console her for the rest of her days. And without a doubt, she’s changed as radically by
the brief affair as Allison or Scarlett or Abby or Sarah or Ellen Brody.

Indeed, the language of the one long and detailed sex scene suggests that Robert Kincaid’s transformative powers are virtually supernatural. He takes “possession of her, in all of her dimensions.” He seems “shamanlike” as he whispers in her ear … kissing her between his words. The man’s a talker all right, almost hypnotic in his seductive powers.

This erotic possession could be seen as a much kinder, gentler version of the one described in
The Exorcist
when prepubescent Regan MacNeil, invaded by Satan, masturbates with a crucifix and spews vile sexual come-ons to the celibate Father Karras.

Though Francesca describes in flattering terms the otherworldly power Robert exerts over her, one can’t help but question whose point of view is being stated when he “ran his tongue along her neck, licking her as some fine leopard might do in long grass out on the veldt.”