Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (7 page)

Rarely does a month go by in our national discourse that we aren’t treated again to a tooth-and-nail wrangle over the Confederate flag or the role that slavery played in the war between the blue and the gray or some other iteration of that long-ago conflict. The subject still raises hackles because all the sympathies and antipathies that divided us as a nation back then divide us still, though usually in more subtle and less violent forms.

Hate Her and Love Her

It wasn’t just the glorification of the Old South and its racial politics that made
Gone with the Wind
controversial. Scarlett’s ruthless, money-grubbing resourcefulness during and after the war also gave the novel a hot-button hook.

Published in 1936, the novel reenacts a story that was painfully familiar and fresh in the minds of readers of that era who had just witnessed their own version of financial collapse.
Scarlett’s scrambling, hustling survival skills were vividly recognizable to a generation who’d so recently had to resort to every manner of improvisation simply to subsist.

Her calculating, survive-at-any-cost morality and slippery situational ethics were perfectly suited for the time this novel appeared. To many, Scarlett’s cutthroat lust for cash and power and the freedom they brought was an embodiment of all that was wrong with capitalism, while to others she was a symbol of all that’s right. To many it was both at once.

And for a woman to dominate her male counterparts in both the boardroom and the bedroom also made many bristle.

As the film critic Molly Haskell says about Scarlett, “You hate her and you love her, a heroine of ambiguous morality who is revolutionary … in that she refuses to be chastened, brought to heel.…”

These issues, of course, are still with us and still have the power to boil our blood.

Gray Flannel Hot Pants

Peyton Place
caused a lot more blood to boil. In particular, midcentury New Englanders were outraged and offended that their folksy cover had been blown and their steamy bedrooms laid bare. In the conservative age of Eisenhower and
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
, this gaudy novel of drunks and incest and sexually permissive single moms and Peeping Toms and masturbation and teenage petting and illegal abortions set hearts atremble.

“Everybody knew that the South was degenerate,” Merle
Miller asserted in the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, but they were unprepared for
Peyton Place
, which according to Merle presented the view “that Puritan New England has all the southern vices and a few others that not even William Faulkner had come across.”

These days it’s harder to profitably press the hot button of sex because that button has just about been worn out from overuse. But in 1956, Grace Metalious, who pressed it hard and often, managed to create an incendiary blend of several of America’s favorite hot-button issues, sex and race and class and the emancipation of women.

Whistling at a White Woman

Five years before
To Kill a Mockingbird
was published, in a state adjacent to the one where Scout grew up, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan named Emmett Till was visiting his extended family when he made the fatal mistake of whistling at a white woman. He was beaten and murdered and his body thrown in a river. The trial that followed was a farce. An all-white jury acquitted the two white men charged with Till’s murder. The case caused widespread and heated debate and helped fuel the fledgling civil rights movement.

At about the same time, in Montgomery, Alabama, where the fictional Atticus Finch went to study law, a very real black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat and move to the “colored section” at the rear. Martin Luther King was rising to prominence about the same time and played a significant role in leading the ensuing boycott of the Montgomery bus system.

To anyone living and breathing and reading novels in 1960, there was no doubt which headlines Harper Lee was ripping. Headlines much like those we still find in our newspapers a half century later.

Sexploitation

The same could be said six years later, when
Valley of the Dolls
, Jacqueline Susann’s roman à clef sexploitation novel, was published. Following in the tradition of Harold Robbins, whose
Carpetbaggers
was once described by a reviewer as “a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex,” Susann’s novel was groundbreaking, at least in gender terms.
Peyton Place
had paved the way for an American woman to write bluntly about sex, but no woman had yet graphically depicted the erotic lives of the rich and famous in fictional form.

Was Helen Lawson, the over-the-hill diva, actually based on Ethel Merman? Did Ethel Merman, the Hollywood star, have a hot and sweaty lesbian affair with Jackie Susann back in the day when Jackie was a wannabe actress? Was Neely O’Hara’s fictional persona really Judy Garland, or maybe Betty Hutton, who did in fact have a contentious understudy relationship with Merman (as Neely did with Lawson)? Following this?

Well, they were certainly following it in 1966, when the novel was published. This was all salacious gossip column material. Toss in issues that were trendy at the time like alcoholism and pill popping, then hint at other big names like Marilyn Monroe and JFK and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and you have a prescription for tabloid sensationalism.

If
Valley of the Dolls
seems more dated than the other novels on our list, it might be due to an overdependence on the topical issues of its day. After a few years passed, and those newspapers yellowed, and Ethel Merman was replaced and replaced again by new generations of divas, the elements that sustain a novel’s long-term survival simply were not present in the same abundance as we find them in the other bestsellers. That’s because Susann tilted the hot-button equation a bit too far toward the faddish, gossipy side and didn’t fully take into consideration the long-term simmering cultural implications of her own material.

New Vein

Frank Sinatra had a return engagement three years later in
The Godfather
, this time portrayed as the character Johnny Fontane. The Kennedy family also takes a turn. To many readers, it was obvious the Kennedy estate in Hyannis Port was Puzo’s model for the Corleone compound, which helped further the suggestion that these two powerful families with shady backgrounds were echoes of each other. But the novel’s notoriety didn’t grow out of gossipmongering. It was a hit because it struck a new vein in a very old mine.

The exploration of the shadowy, illicit side of American moral life has been with us since Hawthorne outed Puritan hanky-panky. The new vein discovered in that old mine was, of course, the first appearance of the
famiglia mafiosa
.

These days when we are all so fully versed on folks like the Sopranos and their ilk, it’s hard to imagine a time pre-
Godfather
, even though it existed for most of recorded history.
What Puzo did was give us the photo negative of the American success story. The dark doppelgänger to the bootstraps myth.

By conjuring up long-standing legends about the Kennedy clan and other prominent American families, Puzo pressed another hot button that was then and still is a subject that spikes the blood pressure of many Americans: the story of an immigrant father so determined to see his family prosper in their adopted land that he resorts to any tactics necessary, including extortion, robbery, bootlegging, political bribery, and violence.

Maharishi

The Exorcist
tackles an altogether different cultural flashpoint of the late sixties, the clash between traditional religious faith and the rising tide of secular humanism and swamis and maharishis and all manner of religious kooks. Representing the new agers, we have Sharon Spencer, the pretty blonde in her twenties who tutors Regan and acts as Chris MacNeil’s social secretary and who is experimenting with self-hypnosis, transcendental meditation, and Buddhist chanting, all the while filling the upstairs of the MacNeil house with the hippie-dippy reek of incense and the dronings of some Far Eastern mantra.

Chris is a proud atheist and single working mom and Hollywood star, a job that brings her into contact with the likes of Burke Dennings, a film director who was once studying to be a priest himself but has swung about as far the other way as one can swing. He’s a drunk and disbeliever who calls the
priesthood a bunch of “fucking plunderers.” Throw in a Jesuit priest who no longer believes in God’s existence and you have to ask yourself, Is it any wonder that Satan picked this brownstone to make a house call? These are exactly the kinds of nonbelievers Beelzebub prefers, folks whose religious laziness needs a ruthless test.

At a time when death-of-God theology was featured on the cover of
Time
magazine, this novel, which challenged the beliefs of nonbelievers, hit a cultural nerve that was already raw.

Evildoers

In the case of
Jaws
, there’s a civic tension at the crux of the story that is as old as our nation itself. Before he can close the beaches and protect the citizens of his fair town, Sheriff Brody must get the approval of an unsympathetic mayor and town council. The politicians who run the island don’t want to yell “Shark!” at the town’s most profitable time of the year. By pitting government-supported greed against populist forces and the general welfare of the common man,
Jaws
tapped into both the long-term American mistrust of political authority and its contemporary manifestation, which at that point in our history had reached hot-button proportions after years of cultural clashes over the Vietnam War and the recent resignation of Richard Nixon.

Given all that, it was no wonder that elected officials were seen by many as the greatest evildoers, right up there with sharks, men who had only the interests of the wealthy and powerful in mind when deciding policy. At the same time,
almost as many readers were sympathetic to the opposite position, a belief that the conventional structures of power should hold firm against dangerous counterculture lawlessness.

The central conflict of the first third of
Jaws
fits that pattern perfectly by reenacting a moral sellout of its citizens by its political leaders, a conflict that split the nation back then and splits it still.

At the same time, from its very first scene the novel raised another topic that was about as hot-button as it got back in the dawning of the age of Aquarius, when one female member of a group of pot-smoking, orgy-loving Woodstock types has some liberated sex right out on a public beach, then goes swimming nude in the ocean, where that young lady gets exactly what she deserves. Eaten.

News That Stays News

Ezra Pound, that modernist poet and literary kingmaker and political nut job, had a good one-liner for poetry that seems appropriate here. He called it “news that stays news.”

By that he meant something similar to what I’m saying about hot-button issues that stay hot. Good writing passes the spoilage test. It doesn’t smell after a year or two of being left out on the counter.

That’s the sort of writing that characterizes
The Dead Zone
, in which Stephen King snagged the attention of many contemporary readers by providing a very hip up-to-the-minute social history of the four-year span when Johnny Smith was missing in action, hospitalized in a supernatural
coma. Poor Johnny missed a lot of stuff, but it was mostly the kind of news that grows a little rank after a week or two.

A lot of this, King seems to suggest, is well worth sleeping through. The ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the coming and going of one political outrage after another. This news-crawl vision of current events is the background against which the monstrous rise of the Hitlerian Greg Stillson is set. Stillson is the news that stays news, a hot button that will always be hot. He’s an election year archetype, the second coming of the Antichrist, the rough beast whose hour has come round at last.

Hush-Hush

Becoming President Ronald Reagan’s favorite book brought
The Hunt for Red October
out of the depths of obscurity. But for that missile of good fortune to lock on to its target and blow sales records to smithereens, this novel had to deliver a payload that folks beyond the D.C. Beltway cared about.

Clancy accomplished that by using such an abundance of technical detail and by being so fluent in military protocol and seafaring lingo that he created the illusion he might be privy to national Defense Department secrets. He seemed to
know stuff that was so hush-hush, so explosive, so supersensitive, it was easy to believe the actual reason the POTUS summoned Clancy to the White House was to have him debriefed by the CIA.

Published in that Orwellian year of 1984, the novel rode the last crests of cold war paranoia. Perestroika and glasnost were just up ahead, but our periscopes couldn’t yet make them out. So the country was armed and dangerous and nervous as hell, and a book like this submarine novel that reflected well on our native resourcefulness, our blue-collar ingenuity, our military hardware, and our grace under a hundred fathoms was the right story at the right time with the right ingredients that appealed to the right wing of the American reading public.

Greed Is Good

Sellouts like Mitch McDeere were all the rage in the decade of greed known as the eighties, when he and his fellow yuppies made down payments on their luxury cars and minimansions from their first week’s paychecks and started looking for a better class of cocaine dealer. With his fresh law degree and his glamorous young wife, he was a perfect model for the latest incarnation of the me generation.