Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (27 page)

The guy’s an animal, the graceful kind who dominates with soft power.

The love affair transfigures Francesca. Her womanliness is awakened, her life is given a meaning and dimensionality it was lacking before. In a parting letter to her children, Francesca sums it up succinctly:

“In four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole.”

Of course, some would argue that Francesca’s epiphany is nothing more than the sexist fantasy of a self-indulgent male author—behold what magical powers a man can bestow on a woman if she would just peel off that dress and lie back.

If
Bridges
were the only novel on our list of bestsellers that depicted the transformative power of sex, such a critique
might carry more weight. But the pattern recurs with such regularity in bestsellers, whether written by men or women, that we must ask the larger question: Why does a single sexual episode play such a pivotal role in so many hugely successful American novels?

Well, it might have something to do with our intense and deeply rooted national ambivalence about sex and adultery. Our libraries are filled with works that many consider classics in which two opposing moral forces are at war: America’s prudishness vs. its rebellious and rule-breaking spirit.

At the dawn of American literary history, we find a well-known precursor to the moral story line of so many bestsellers. Remember Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth and Hester Prynne and her out-of-wedlock daughter, Pearl, from Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
? In her Puritan settlement, Hester’s promiscuity, which is made apparent by the birth of Pearl, is punished by a prison term. Upon Hester’s release from jail, with Pearl in her arms, she is required to wear a red letter
A
emblazoned on her chest. Shunned by her God-fearing neighbors, Hester is the target of universal contempt, but somehow through it all she manages to retain a humble and forgiving demeanor.

Dimmesdale, the young, eloquent “cheating minister” who is Hester’s secret lover, is the one who is truly tormented by guilt. As the story unfolds, little by little Hester wins back the respect of the townsfolk through acts of charity and kindness until finally this profligate woman is on the verge of being readmitted into mainstream society. But wait, there’s a complication. Hester and Dimmesdale want more than forgiveness—they want to live together as man and wife.

Despite the danger, the lovers can’t be kept apart. In a forest
meeting, the two decide to flee to Europe, where they will be free to live openly with their child. Transformed by this decision, Dimmesdale gives a passionate sermon before his congregation that makes the identical case Atticus Finch will make again almost two centuries later. A paean to empathy in which Dimmesdale extols those “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind … that his chest vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.”

In 1850 when Hawthorne’s novel was published, reactions ranged from deep suspicion to outright scorn. Many believed Hester’s promiscuity was treated far too sympathetically by the author. And, of course, those self-righteous critics were absolutely correct. Hawthorne’s moral outrage was clearly leveled at the repressive society that ostracized Hester rather than at her adulterous misbehavior.

So it was from the beginning in American letters that sin and religious beliefs and moral righteousness were a central part of the discussion when it came to literary criticism. To many American readers, if not most, novels that were not morally uplifting were considered devious and corrupt.

However, Hawthorne saw it otherwise, and in that way he had written a novel that greatly resembles the twelve we’re examining. From Hawthorne’s time forward, the notion that a single sexual act, even if it’s an act of adultery, can have a redemptive power has been a central pattern in American fiction.

At the very least, we can say that Americans are deeply conflicted about sex, and that powerful ambivalence is what we’re seeing in these highly successful books.

In the beginning, Dan Brown created
The Da Vinci Code
, and it was good, and everybody liked it because it was about sex. No, scratch that. It was about religion. Well, no, make that religion and sex. Oh, okay, it was about religion, sex, and feminine power, and the long and sordid history of male suppression of women.

Here’s a spoiler, so those two or three people who’ve not yet read
The Da Vinci Code
should skip the following paragraph.

Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene. And lo, she became heavy with child, and the celibate priests, fearing the loss of their power, declared women to be unclean and hid Mary’s pregnancy. A few righteous insurgents spirited away her child to some secret place, and forever after, the sinister wing of the Catholic Church went to great lengths in their pursuit of Christ’s heirs and used every resource at their disposal, including murder, to keep Christ’s sexiness hidden from humanity for a couple of millennia until Robert Langdon yanked back the curtains and exposed the truth.

So there’s the capper—the big secret. Two thousand years ago, Jesus had sex. Women are not unclean after all. They’re actually goddesses. Especially Sophie Neveu, who apparently is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ himself.

It should be clear by now that Mr. Brown was making use of a narrative pattern we’ve seen a few times before: one sex scene that changes everything.

In fact, this particular sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a moment that of course is never actually presented
dramatically but which readers are invited to imagine for themselves, is the driving force in this novel, the cornerstone on which is built the elaborate structure of a worldwide, multicentury conspiracy. It’s the event that sets in motion the murder spree of an albino monk, and it’s the cause of all the deadly machinations of Opus Dei that send our sturdy hero, Robert, and his plucky sidekick, Sophie, running for their lives through one long, treacherous maze.

That long-ago sexual incident is the equivalent of the love affair and marriage that fuel Ramius’s desertion to America (
The Hunt for Red October
). It’s the terrible sexual hypocrisy and double-dealing that are at the core of
Peyton Place
and
Mockingbird
. It’s the dance of sexual exploitation that drives
Gone with the Wind
and
Valley of the Dolls
. It’s the shark that punishes women who have sexually liberated themselves in
Jaws
. It’s the devil that impregnates the blossoming young daughter of a proudly independent woman (
The Exorcist
). Again and again we see permutations of this pattern in our twelve megahits, as though bestselling novelists were channeling the biblical story of Eden: Once the snake has done its sneaky job, a new world dawns.

Five centuries after Boccaccio’s
Decameron
first appeared, featuring sweaty sexcapades between Italian nuns and monks in convents, the book was seized and destroyed by American authorities. James Joyce’s
Ulysses
suffered a similar fate, as did Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
, which was not available from a U.S. publisher until almost thirty years after it first appeared in a French edition. And numerous literary luminaries
including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner wrote novels deemed by many to be grossly improper, if not downright degenerate. While those novels were not banned outright, they were certainly the object of strong moral disapproval from many quarters.

Which is to say that it’s important to remind ourselves that puritanism is alive and well in mainstream America and that many of us, despite a private devotion to the multibillion-dollar business of pornography, are still just a short distance removed from our book-burning ancestors.

It was in 1873 that Anthony Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization determined to regulate the morality of the public. So successful was Comstock in making his case, he eventually engineered the passage of the Comstock Act in the United States Congress, making it illegal to deliver or transport “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Or for that matter any information relating to birth control.

Though Comstock died in 1915, his priggish disciples live on today, targeting books like the Harry Potter series and even poor old Huck Finn as corrupting influences, trying to expel them from public libraries or high school lit classes or to publish new editions with all the offensive parts purged.

Despite what Comstock would have had us believe, naughty narratives have been heating things up since the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament and the Roman
Satyricon
. The Far East has its
Kama Sutra
, Europe has its bawdy Chaucerian tales, and there’s that dirty old man Shakespeare and the whip-wielding Marquis de Sade, to name just a few. Even the earliest English novels were juicy: Indecent sexual romps like
Tom Jones
,
Fanny Hill
, and
Tristram Shandy
delighted in
bawdily mocking the pomposity of the upper classes, a tendency that still lingers in the form today.

America, however, is a different story. Even in the supposedly enlightened twentieth century, a large portion of the straitlaced populace howled in protest over that dry account of sexuality, Masters and Johnson’s 1966 tome,
Human Sexual Response
. Suffice it to say, those wails naturally had the effect of turning it into a notorious sensation and bestseller, all for the terrible sin of debunking some misconceptions about matters like female orgasm and lubrication.

Americans didn’t invent censorship, but we’ve certainly worked long and hard on its behalf. There’s a lengthy list of books that were once condemned as morally objectionable but which have now become literary standards.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
,
Native Son
,
The Grapes of Wrath
, and
The Catcher in the Rye
, for instance, have all made that journey from notorious to respectable, though there remains a small ongoing effort to ban even some of those books in certain pockets of America.

In the swinging sixties, sexuality swaggered across the national literary stage and confirmed forever, in the minds of many, a connection between elite cultural values and depravity. Back when college kids were growing their hair long, burning their bras and draft cards, and making real and literary forays into prurience, dirty books were everywhere. Nearly all of us of a certain age can make a list of books we privately feasted on during those wanton years: Terry Southern’s
Candy
, Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
, Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
, Gore Vidal’s
Myra Breckinridge
, Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
, John Updike’s
Rabbit, Run
.

Published a decade prior to Woodstock and the sexual revolution,
Peyton Place
certainly helped pave the way for
more sexual candor in fiction. In its day the novel was considered so raunchy, so luridly extreme, that it was banned outright in a few districts here and there and lambasted from pulpits across the country, though it was largely available in the depraved urban centers. To some,
Peyton Place
’s acceptance into the mainstream signaled that the pornification of American literature was under way.

These days, of course, what writer wouldn’t want his or her book banned? Notoriety would be at the top of any publicist’s wish list. However, of the twelve books we’ve been considering, only
Peyton Place
had that rare distinction. Famously disreputable, the novel became a guilty pleasure for millions of Americans who no doubt stashed it away in underwear drawers and on closet shelves and confirmed their worst suspicions about what their neighbors were doing behind closed doors.

Though
To Kill a Mockingbird
has now and then raised the hackles of a few moral arbiters and book-banning nutcases, it’s never drawn much serious fire from hard-core moralists. Which is also true for the other books on our list of twelve. In fact, what’s unique about the way sexuality is handled in these blockbusters is that the descriptive language is relatively euphemistic and chaste, PG-rated and for the most part less explicit than many modern Disney films.

The sexual language may be toned down to broaden the books’ mainstream appeal, but copulation, both violent and extreme, still plays a crucial role in the outcomes of all these stories. So while Americans may give lip service, as it were, to a more virtuous sensibility, somewhere in our national consciousness we know that one good roll in the hay can change everything.

Hey, Adam. Come on, just have a little taste of this juicy morsel.

T
hese twelve very different bestsellers share a great many common features. They’re fast, emotionally charged. They’re full of familiar character types. They’re fun to read—the opposite of work. Irresistible, unputdownable, brimming with schmaltz.