Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers

by James W. Hall

  As with Michael Corleone, Ramius, Allison MacKenzie, Scarlett O’Hara, and most of our other protagonists, Sophie Neveu’s Golden Country is a natural setting that churns with erotic energy, and when the innocence is lost, it is never quite regained. Late in the novel, when Sophie learns the true nature of the strange rite her grandfather was participating in, an exercise that’s religious rather than sexual, she can’t let go of her revulsion.

  Even Robert Langdon, who tries to set her straight, realizes it’s not so easy to explain away the scene she witnessed: “Admittedly, the concept of sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first.” Well, yeah. Once an apple that juicy is bitten into, there’s just no cleaning the taste from one’s mouth.

  It would be false to claim that images of the Golden Country or lost Edens are unique to bestsellers. But what I can say for sure is that without exception, every single novel in this sampling prominently features a lost Eden, and that image plays a pivotal role, changing the dynamics of characterization, as in Mitch McDeere’s and Michael Corleone’s cases. Or as we see in Peyton Place and Gone with the Wind and Jaws, the portrayal of an idyllic natural setting is a cornerstone of the thematic power of the entire novel.

  FEATURE #5

  Nothing but the Facts, Ma’am

  Franklin himself … was practical, industrious, inquiring, convivial, and middle-brow philosophical. [He] celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits, the improvement of self and society.

  —WALTER ISAACSON,

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: AN AMERICAN LIFE

  An abundance of facts and information, including everything from etiquette to the nuts-and-bolts layout of a submarine, fills these twelve books. The didactic function is as old as the novel form itself and continues to be a chief attraction in bestselling novels.

  Ben Franklin, that uncommonly ingenious common man—kite flier, printer, bookseller, inventor of the bifocal lens and the flexible urinary catheter, namer of the Gulf Stream, and creator of the first American subscription library—will stand forever as a representative of at least two fundamental virtues of the American character: practicality and self-improvement.

  At the age of twenty, Franklin made a to-do list, much like the one Jay Gatsby devised, an inventory of personal goals that captured the spirit of his countrymen at that time and for the centuries thereafter. Number six on his list was this promise to himself:

  “INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”

  Franklin was a busy reader and a student of the early English novel. Though he claimed the book that influenced him most was Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good by the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, historians claim Franklin was also well instructed by a book that Mather would have considered hard-core porn. Lustful Ben managed to be one of the first Americans to own a copy of John Cleland’s scandalous novel Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book that contained explicit erotic descriptions and that might well be regarded as an eighteenth-century sex manual. The man just wanted to learn.

  Novel readers always have.

  Indeed, part of the wide appeal of the earliest novels was based on their function as instruction manuals. Of course, it’s also true that the first novel readers in eighteenth-century England were attracted to Pamela and Moll Flanders in some part to satisfy their voyeuristic yearnings. They were titillated by being privy to the secret lives of these two common women, one a young country girl who is hired as a servant in the manor house and the other a London prostitute, both of whom are placed in dire distress.

  Certainly part of the appeal of these first novels is that early readers were able to identify with literary characters of their own social class portrayed in realistic detail. A kind of raunchy tabloid sensibility pervaded many of those early narratives that were stuffed to overflowing with carnal escapades. Low-tech reality TV.

  But at least as important to most early novel readers was their desire to be informed. To learn about the larger world, particularly the secrets to social advancement. How was a farm girl who’d been hired as a maidservant in the manor house supposed to behave? How was she to fend off the master’s lewd advances and still maintain her virtue without losing her job?

  Samuel Richardson’s English novel Pamela was in fact an early road map to the successful management of sexual harassment. Pamela’s defense of her virtue was eventually rewarded when she married the master whom she’d formerly had to shove away. But the “virtue rewarded” moral was no doubt of minor importance to most readers compared with the thrill of witnessing the shocking realities that occurred behind the heavy locked doors of the upper class.

  (The desire that a great many Americans have to master the rules of polite society propelled Emily Post’s Etiquette onto the bestseller list in 1922, where it remained for a year and a half. It is now in its seventeenth edition.)

  Learning the codes of behavior, the appropriate dress and salutations, the standard markers that determined one’s class, and the ritualistic intricacies of courtship was to be Jane Austen’s focus nearly a century after Pamela. Because her “novels of manners” were often seen as “husband-hunting stories,” they were disparaged as an inferior literary subgenre. Such scorn finds new targets in our supposedly more enlightened era, when labels like “romance novel,” “women’s fiction,” or “chick lit” are considered by many to be vicious put-downs.

  But the fact is, the terrain that Jane Austen was working is not much different from that of Mario Puzo or Tom Clancy or John Grisham. The social arrangements, class distinctions, and codes of behavior aboard a nuclear-powered submarine or within the ranks of the Cosa Nostra or within a top-tier law firm are the central topics of these male-dominated novels. Just as the group dynamics within the town of Peyton Place or Maycomb, Alabama, are of critical importance in Grace Metalious’s novel and Harper Lee’s.

  NUTS AND BOLTS

  The other form of information that bestsellers frequently contain is the sort of factualism that today we associate with nonfiction—the kinds of nuts-and-bolts data like Clancy’s detailed renderings of submarines or Dan Brown’s encyclopedic cataloging of architectural, religious, and cultural factoids. We readers have come to expect two or three large scoops of factual information even in our detective stories, our thrillers, our adventure novels, and our science fiction. Few (if any) bestsellers fail to supply this service.

  Telling a rousing story is in the job description, and making it seem real, seducing the reader into suspending disbelief: All of these were the novelist’s tradecraft from day one.

  There’s no absolute way to prove the causal connection between high dosages of information and high sales, but in the years my classes combed through bestsellers, this feature was by far the most widespread and consistent.

  THE DISH

  Inside information, the scoop, the dish, gossip, the lowdown, the straight dope: This is the juicy side of information. Readers love to be taken somewhere they’ve never been before by an authority on that unexplored alien subculture.

  One of the appeals of Grisham’s The Firm was that it gave the reader the unvarnished story of the inner workings of high-powered law firms seeking glamorous Harvard Law School grads, complete with snapshots of the interview process and the bidding wars. We even learn the dollar amounts for billing hours, spicy details of an entire profession that until then had been the exclusive domain of writers such as Erle Stanley Gardner, whose interest was courtroom drama, not the down-and-dirty dollar figures that hotshot lawyers command or detailed descriptions of the flashy houses and cars that are paid for by crushing hours of work. Clearly, part of the fascination that drew many readers to The Firm came from this tell-all aspect. Slide the curtain aside, show us the play-by-play details of what’s going on back there.

  In Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s raison d’être is to expose the behind-the-scenes double-dealing of showbiz. Do you want to know some practical strategies for how to succeed as a y
oung ambitious babe in Manhattan or hear stories about the couches you’ll have to stretch out on to break into the movie business? You want to know about the pitfalls, the payoffs, the seductions, the heartbreaks, the Lotharios, the Demerol, the Seconal? Hey, girlie, you want to know how to fend off the lord of the manor house and still keep your job? Well, read this book.

  It’s not a big step from Pamela to Valley of the Dolls. Virtue is rewarded (by marriage to the boss) and licentiousness is punished. Jennifer, the resident bimbette in Valley of the Dolls, puts her worldview into this shameless axiom: “She stroked the beaver coat—one night with Robby. That’s what a great body was for, to get things you wanted.”

  A few chapters later, poor beaver-coated Jennifer is punished for her lack of virtue when she OD’s on “dolls.” True to narcissistic form, she leaves behind a narcissistic suicide note to Anne, the good girl of the novel:

  Anne—No embalmer could make me up as well as I do myself. Thank God for the dolls. Sorry I couldn’t stick around for your wedding. I love you. Jen

  The three young women of Valley of the Dolls give us a backstage pass to the petty and soulless world of American show business. The trio of innocents either die, become hopelessly addicted to downers, or turn terminally cynical toward the possibilities of love. It’s a tragic tale, cautionary in tone. But as with Pamela or Moll Flanders, the moralizing aspects of the novel are no doubt of less interest to most readers than the roller-coaster ride through stardom and addiction, drying out in sanitariums, and back to the bright lights of the stage. Local color, facts, education.

  STUFFED WITH FACTS

  When you open the covers of The Da Vinci Code, an avalanche of Post-it notes spills out, as well as file cards and a clutter of short essays. Jottings about the Louvre, riffs on goddesses and feminism and the male and female symbols, the Hebrew alphabet, Mary Magdalene, Opus Dei, the Priory of Sion, the Depository Bank of Zurich, lambskin velum, and cryptics of every sort.

  That a dozen books seeking to rebut some of Mr. Brown’s claims have appeared in the years since The Da Vinci Code was first published suggests that it is the information as much as the characters or the plot that drove the success of this novel. Whether it is fact or hokum that “the Church burned at the stake five million women” or that Jesus was married and had a child is irrelevant to the immense popularity of the novel. These assertions are only a couple of the hundreds that critics seize on to try to overturn Mr. Brown’s credibility. But fact is one thing, truth quite another. Readers everywhere have found the novel’s compelling and entertaining premise to be sufficiently convincing to waive their rights to disbelief.

  And Clancy? What is true for Dan Brown’s astonishingly jam-packed novel is even more true for The Hunt for Red October—more than anyone ever wanted to know about submarines and the alphabet soup of governmental agencies and this protocol and that procedure and this bolt and that nut. I’d wager that there is more pure data on a single page of The Hunt for Red October than in many entire novels by Faulkner or Hemingway.

  PURPOSEFUL PLEASURE

  Fact-based fiction has broad appeal because it is simple, hearty fare. No highly refined palate required. Anyone can buy a ticket. Information is the red meat that sticks to the ribs. It satisfies a craving in nearly anyone who turns to a book in search of purposeful pleasure. By giving the story amplitude, a sense of nutritional value, information satisfies a basic need in most readers. All of which suggests that in large measure, people read to improve themselves or further their education. And like the early fans of Defoe and Richardson, they read in order to peer inside secret places not open to them otherwise—the daunting and mysterious manor house where innocent young Pamela goes to work.

  Whether his or her taste is refined or not, the mass reader has always yearned to see beyond the shut door, be it the top floor of the Vatican or twenty leagues beneath the sea.

  Margaret Mitchell’s exhaustive rendering of the details of an antebellum household and the social intricacies of party planning for an evening ball rivals in its comprehensive detail Tom Clancy’s blueprint walk-through of a nuclear sub and his loving descriptions of an array of military hardware.

  When an interviewer from Contemporary Authors questioned Clancy about the amount of research labor his books display, he dismissed the notion offhandedly: “The most time I have spent researching any of my books was three weeks and that was for Patriot Games.”

  That must have been one hell of a speed-reading cram session.

  A GOOD BOOK VERSUS THE GOOD BOOK

  Surely the American tendency to honor the collection of facts and information is due in part to the ingrained pragmatism of our culture—a desire to improve ourselves in Gatsbyesque fashion by accumulating ever more practical knowledge in case we ever want to practice a little Yankee ingenuity.

  And don’t discount the importance of the Protestant work ethic in shaping our ideas about what a book should be. From the time of the Pilgrims until today, for many Americans the only good book is the Good Book. For a large segment of the reading public, any book without a heaping of useful information would be considered even more suspect.

  It is clear that readers of our most popular novels hunger for more than vivid characters, a rousing story, realism of detail, or psychological subtleties. They want to be instructed and informed, to emerge from the novel with a wider understanding of some grand or esoteric subject matter. It is clear that bestselling novelists understand the hunger in their audience and are willing and able to supply heavy doses of information in highly entertaining packages.

  FEATURE #6

  Secret Societies

  As opposite as George Bush and John Kerry may seem to be, they do share a common secret—one they’ve shared for decades, and one they will not share with the electorate. The secret: details of their membership in Skull and Bones, the elite Yale University society whose members include some of the most powerful men of the twentieth century.

  —60 MINUTES, CBS NEWS

  All twelve of these bestsellers expose the inner workings of at least one secret society.

  Readers of popular fiction can be forgiven for thinking that Dan Brown discovered the subject of secret societies. But while he’s certainly mined the topic exhaustively, he’s not the first American bestseller writer to use a secret society as a cornerstone of his narrative, nor is he alone in tapping into the paranoid sensibility that seems a staple of American culture.

  In that immensely popular TV show of the fifties The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) and his best buddy, the inestimable sewer worker Ed Norton (Art Carney), were active members of the International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons, whose lodge members employed code words and hailed fellow members by flipping the tails on their coonskin caps and greeting one another as “brothers under the pelt.”

  Getting laughs in the fifties was as easy as flicking a furry extremity in the face of those snooty Rotarians or Freemasons or DeMolay or whoever was the object of their satire. Audiences got the message. Secret societies were uppity and goofy, and whatever power was conferred by membership in such groups was self-delusional.

  However, during the same years that The Honeymooners was mocking secret societies, Joe McCarthy, senator from Wisconsin, rose to national prominence by exploiting Americans’ anxieties about them, by claiming to have the names of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers who had infiltrated the innermost levels of the federal government. For years, McCarthy held public hearings in which he grilled citizens from every walk of life about their loyalty to their country. And while McCarthy was giving anticommunism a bad reputation, Mickey Spillane was selling millions of books like I, the Jury, which tapped into that same streak of paranoia that seems to run deep in our national sensibility. Killing fictional Commies made Spillane very rich.

  Conspiracy theorists have been alive and well in America since at least 1798, when a group of New England reverends alerted their congregations to a plot by Illuminis
ts (a gaggle of European intellectuals), who were said to be hell-bent on extinguishing the Christian religion and bringing down government control.

  Pitting Them against Us seems to be one of the surefire strategies to incite an audience. From Father Charles Coughlin to the John Birch Society to the KKK to the radio and television shock jocks of today, we have seen the muscle-flexing power of groups that feed on hatred and prejudice and flourish by identifying other groups as a threat to our way of life.

  Perhaps because we are a nation of immigrants, where there’s always a reliable and steady stream of Others to stoke our tendencies toward suspicion and mistrust, it is inevitable that secret societies would play a prominent role in our popular culture.

  PRIVILEGED GLIMPSES

  In a celebrated passage from the opening of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway claims he’s emotionally exhausted after being immersed in the melodrama of his friends’ lives, and he’s decided he wants “no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” After months of exposure to the confessions and excruciating tragedies of Jay Gatsby and Tom and Daisy Buchanan, he’s fatally fatigued and desires nothing more than to resign his membership in their elite circle.

  For many readers, this demurral only whets the appetite for the story to come. Most of us yearn for a few of those “privileged glimpses” into the guarded fortresses, the inner sanctum of the holiest of holies, the penthouse, the boardroom, the Oval Office. Bestselling novels mine this craving by regularly sliding aside the curtains and exposing the secrets of a wide assortment of secret societies.