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

by James W. Hall

  The Da Vinci Code takes its place at the head of a long list of popular novels that capitalize on the widespread suspicion that deceitful and universal powers are conspiring against them, a list that includes such diverse works as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to Dr. Strangelove and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

  Using a favorite target of conspiracy novels of the past, The Da Vinci Code marches deep into a minefield of politically incorrect and highly charged views about Roman Catholics. Though the folks who run Opus Dei’s website would have you believe that they are a “Catholic institution founded by Saint Josemaría Escrivá … [whose mission] is to spread the message that work and circumstances of everyday life are occasions for growing closer to God, for serving others, and for improving society,” Dan Brown paints a starkly different fictional portrait.

  Employing what sound like facts copied and pasted from newspaper accounts, in one short paragraph alone he associates Opus Dei with doping its new members so they will believe they’ve experienced religious ecstasy, then describes another new recruit who gives himself an almost fatal infection by beating himself with his cilice belt, and then provides a third example of the depravity of the organization, which conned the life savings from a young man, a scam that drove him to attempt suicide.

  Suddenly Corleone’s Mob seems warm and cuddly in comparison.

  Every inch of forward movement in the plot of The Da Vinci Code is propelled by one attempt after another to expose one shadowy secret society after the next. To break the code, to solve the puzzle, to penetrate the layers of high-tech security of the Depository Bank of Zurich, to use the key that fits the lock to open the safe that hides some titillating secret, to locate the keystone that explains the sign of the Rose, to interpret the “flash card catechism” of the Tarot, to follow the labyrinthine trail of clues to the wooden box that holds the …

  Oh well, it’s easy to see the narrative structure. A series of Chinese boxes. Open one, there’s another; open that one, it sends you running for your life in a new direction, chasing one permutation after another of the greatest secret of all time, forever pursued by an albino monk who is determined to keep the secrets hidden. This single device drives the story forward at breakneck speed and is the source of nearly every thrill and chill, all of it driven by a single dramatic goal: to expose the secret, the awesome fact that “the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene … the mother of the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ.”

  Apparently there must be a bit of the conspiracy theorist in all of us, or at least in the eighty million readers of The Da Vinci Code. To some critics of the novel, this plot device grows quickly tiresome, a kind of one-trick narrative pony in which paranoia has run amok. After a few hundred pages of this, they argue, we could easily find ourselves questioning the Girl Scouts and the Brownies and all those other institutions we so foolishly thought we could trust. They’re all devious and sinister, no doubt playing some part in the grand cabal that has infiltrated every corner of Western art and culture.

  Though in the end Langdon’s efforts manage to save his own skin and Sophie’s, we discover that the Holy Grail is more slippery than Robert led us to believe. Marie Chauvel, a minor character who appears near the end of the novel, puts it bluntly. Robert Langdon’s quest has been little more than an elaborate wild-goose chase: “The Holy Grail is simply a grand idea … a glorious unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today’s world of chaos, inspires us.”

  Well, okay, so the Holy Grail was not a golden chalice or some other fabulous artifact but merely an abstraction. Still, few would deny this was a pulse-quickening ride. A little like the roller coaster: Once you’re done, your stomach is hinky, your hair is mussed, but otherwise you’re back exactly where you began—in a world where elaborate confederacies continue their knavish skullduggery. A world where our last best hope rests on the broad shoulders of a dauntless interpreter of symbols, the ultimate defender of the proletariat, a man who has made it his mission to penetrate and expose secret societies.

  SMOKE-FILLED ROOMS

  American readers are drawn to novels that expose the inner workings of secret societies for a simple reason. They want to comprehend the silent forces that shape their destinies, to have a few “privileged glimpses” into the hidden boiler rooms that power our world. Furthermore, as a resolutely democratic people, we have a natural suspicion of institutions, public or private, that might in some way undermine our personal liberties. We’re distrustful of organizations that lack transparency, that perform their rituals behind closed doors.

  On a regular basis, bestsellers like these enforce our rights under the Freedom of Information Act—they kick open the door to the smoke-filled room and expose the scheming rascals and neutralize their power. Those novels that allow all comers access into exclusive and esoteric worlds get extra credit in the popular culture. Even more credit is given to those books like the ones on our list, which portray the triumph of a righteous individual over the often dehumanizing prejudices of a secret group.

  FEATURE #7

  Bumpkins Versus Slickers

  Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

  —JACK KEROUAC,

  ON THE ROAD

  In most bestsellers, there’s a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes, where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.

  Journeys of this type have mythic echoes as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the earliest-known narrative tales), a story in which the hero left the safety of the walled city to trek off to the edges of the world. This narrative structure, the hero’s journey, as it is sometimes called, was the basis of Joseph Campbell’s landmark work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In our contemporary era, the same structural underpinnings are at work in popular films from Star Wars to The Wizard of Oz, as Christopher Vogler so thoroughly describes in his practical guide for aspiring Hollywood screen writers, The Writer’s Journey.

  A character is called to adventure. After initially refusing the call, he is galvanized into action by some event and leaves the safety of his ordinary world, crossing the threshold into a foreign land. Relying on mentors, some of them with supernatural abilities, and tested by various enemies, he eventually reaches a perilous place that Vogler calls “the inmost cave.” There he faces some terrible ordeal but is finally able to summon sufficient inner resources to conquer his adversary. Afterward he begins the long trek back, which usually involves confronting a second ordeal before he can return home with the grail he has wrested from his antagonist. Think Dorothy, her three mentoring friends, the Wicked Witch’s dreadful prison cell, and those magical red shoes.

  That same mythic paradigm forms the bone structure underlying most popular fiction. Master storytellers have mastered its elements, either consciously or instinctively, and have found ways to create fresh permutations of an old, old story.

  The journey motifs we find in the bestselling novels under review here have strikingly similar plot elements, but in particular they share a common tendency to send their traveling heroes back and forth between the countryside and the city. A rube goes to Manhattan, or a city slicker finds himself on the farm. These “fish out of water” story lines recur in every book on our list.

  FISH OUT OF WATER

  Once the Civil War begins, Scarlett is forever out of her element, relying on her quick wits and nimble values and sex appeal to make constant adjustments to each new environment. Each of the other protagonists is equally dislocated. Sheriff Brody, who hates the water, must go far out into it. Same with Jack Ryan, the naval historian, who must take a chopper ride out to sea to hop aboard a submarine, growing more seasick all the way. John Smith wakes from his coma to find he’s missed his youth and is having one long out-of-body experience, a man who wil
l be forever alienated from even the most conventional reality. Then there is Michael Corleone, comfortably at peace in the sunny clover of Sicily but exiled back to the gritty city streets of New York.

  Each of these novels in some way explores the clash between city values and rural ones. Characters journey from teeming urban landscapes to the peaceful countryside, or vice versa, in what might be described as a restless yearning to find their true American home.

  COUNTRY GIRLS IN THE CITY

  We see this migratory pattern enacted in Peyton Place when Allison sets off from her provincial New England home to take on the challenges of New York just as her mother, Constance, did before her. Constance Standish, not exactly a feminist, had very clear goals for her long-ago journey.

  Because she was beautiful and stubborn and full of pride, at nineteen she decided to ditch the confines of Peyton Place, and against her mother’s loud protests she headed off to the Big Apple to find a job and marry a rich man. In no time she went to work for a gentleman named Allison MacKenzie, who was good-looking and ran a very successful fabric store. In less than a month they were sleeping together. Badda bing, badda boom.

  But when Constance learns that her lover, Allison, is a two-timer who is married and has two children living upstate, she flees back home to Peyton Place, pregnant with a daughter whom she names after the man who deceived her (for reasons that defy explanation).

  Published ten years later, Valley of the Dolls records a strikingly similar journey for Anne Wells, who rejects a stifling existence in Lawrenceville, Massachusetts, and sets off in search of love and success (that is, a husband) in that hotbed of deceit and double-dealing, New York City—the same den of iniquity that treated Constance Standish so cruelly.

  In an early episode, Anne Wells declares her independence from small-town life with the same fervor a “Go west, young man” might have used a century earlier when departing the suffocating eastern seaboard to set off for unexplored territories.

  She escapes the orderly life her mother and her mother’s mother had embraced. She dumps her fiancé, a solid boy she doesn’t love, and she absolutely refuses to live in the family’s New England home that was passed down for generations. Most of all, she says no to the smothering conventions of good behavior as they are defined by the small-town arbiters of propriety and decorum. She wants to be free, damn it.

  CITY BOYS IN THE COUNTRY

  Mitch McDeere makes the other half of this journey in The Firm when he rejects job offers from law firms in various American urban centers and abandons the highly competitive universe of Boston, which he has conquered handily, so he can test himself against the perils of the relatively slow-paced southern town of Memphis. Mitch has already completed the first half of this yin and yang cycle by departing from his rural roots to head off to Boston in the first place. If he hadn’t worked hard and won his way to Harvard, who knows what would have become of him? He might have wound up in prison like his brother or working in the Waffle House in Panama City Beach like his mother.

  The conflict between urban and rural American values informs The Bridges of Madison County as well when the man-of-the-world, Yeats-quoting Robert Kincaid shows up in the provincial backcountry of rural Iowa. The luster of his urban ennui is part of what makes him seem so glamorous to the isolated and vulnerable farmer’s wife he romances.

  Francesca is susceptible to his charms in some measure because she was once somewhat worldly herself, a free spirit with lofty expectations when she set off on that youthful journey from her birthplace in Naples, Italy, to join Richard Johnson on his farm in Iowa.

  For Francesca, the sweet promise of America turns into the aching dullness of Iowa. So when worldly Robert Kincaid sweeps into town while her dreary husband is off at the state fair, Francesca is primed and ready to lower her moral guard.

  But Robert Kincaid is no simple city slicker. He’s way slicker than that. He’s so damn sophisticated and worldly wise, poor Francesca doesn’t have a prayer.

  Here was a guy who exited military service in 1945 and put his job with National Geographic on hold while he went tooling down the coast of California on his motorcycle, running it to Big Sur, where he made love on a beach with a musician from Carmel. Hitting all the hippie stations of the cross.

  By the age of fifty-two, our boy has done a couple of tours around the world and visited all the exotic places whose photos he’d once hung on his boyhood walls. The Raffles Bar in Singapore, a riverboat trip up the Amazon, and a camel ride in the desert of Rajasthan.

  Robert Kincaid’s rootlessness is a manifestation of a familiar type, the peripatetic American. As we are often reminded, our westward-ho pioneer ancestors were the sons and daughters of the hardy souls who braved the Atlantic to find a new home. It’s as though we’ve been bioengineering our culture for the last three centuries, selecting for a wandering gene.

  But for every incurable rover, there seems to be another American who decided, by golly, he’d had enough rambling and unsaddled his team of oxen and staked his claim to a piece of soil and just stayed put. The clash between these two prototypes is a recurring theme in our popular fiction as well as a favorite topic in nonfiction examinations of American culture.

  In the 1970s, an era of mass migration to the suburbs and job relocations and general social waywardness, Vance Packard’s A Nation of Strangers became a nonfiction bestseller by warning that the growing American rootlessness was resulting in “a society coming apart at the seams.” The anomie that Packard described, of disintegrating communities and a growing sense of personal anonymity, is part of the backdrop against which Robert and Francesca play out their fairy-tale romance.

  After the two lovers have shared a final kiss and said their good-byes, they bump into each other again one last time, where else but on the road. Francesca’s husband is back from his trip, and he’s driving Francesca from the isolated farm into town, and who should randomly appear in his pickup truck but wandering Robert. For a moment as they wait in traffic, separated by only thirty feet, Francesca imagines throwing open the door and running to Robert’s truck and driving away with him. But no, she stays put, “frozen by her responsibilities.”

  And so Robert James Waller has given us one of our favorite cakes and let us eat it, too. We’ve vicariously enjoyed a hot and heavy fling between a wandering man and a housebound wife, then we’ve been purified of any guilt by Francesca’s virtuous self-denial.

  THE FALSE LABELS WE BELIEVE IN

  At times, we Americans glamorize city life and demonize the heartland. But when it suits our purposes, we’re happy to flip those labels to the complete opposite. There seems to be no middle way for us.

  During every national election cycle, the heartland takes on a familiar mythic identity in the media. The clichés and stereotypes begin to roll out with a predictable drumbeat: Rural America is suddenly populated with “hardworking,” “blue-collar,” “real” people who value decency and honesty and “kitchen table” issues a whole lot more than city dwellers do, especially those urbanites living near the coasts, who are derided as self-involved elitists out of touch with mainstream values. City life is hopelessly fast-paced and materialistic and shallow, a frenetic, never-ending worship of Mammon, while country living is unhurried and more in touch with the godly virtues of neighborliness and generosity and family devotion, a wide-open space where firearms are proudly hung above the mantel and Old Glory waves in every yard.

  Red state vs. blue state. Working-class vs. corporate elite. Virtuous vs. decadent. The Bible-trusting ordinary folks who still believe in the pioneer spirit and refuse to be tamed or corrupted by all those godless messages being broadcast from within the corrupt citadels of metropolitan culture.

  In The American Myth of Success, Richard Weiss gives Horatio Alger a good deal of credit for popularizing these stereotypical views:

  Alger’s settings are most often in the New York of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and his accurate descriptions of it
s streets, hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants made his books valuable as guides to those unfamiliar with the city. But his attitude toward the city he described so well was one of hostility. While the city was a place of opportunity, it also was a place of unspeakable corruption and moral turpitude. Virtue resided in the country. If the country boy could survive the city swindlers ready to prey on his innocence, his chances of success were greater than those of his city-bred peers. This was because he was usually stronger morally and had “been brought up to work, and work more earnestly than city boys.” Country boys might come to the city to gain wealth, but city boys could well go to the country for moral regeneration.

  While we all know these labels are bogus, they are so ingrained in our sense of national identity that we reflexively embrace them even as we discount their accuracy. This ambivalence toward rural and city values recurs in American bestsellers with such frequency, it’s clear that vast numbers of readers are also fascinated by these competing views of national identity.

  ALL OVER THE MAP

  Despite all its apparent dangers and vices, again and again urban life is portrayed as the mythic proving ground for popular fiction characters, a place that challenges the likes of Anne Welles and Allison MacKenzie and Mitch McDeere and Scarlett O’Hara. Some survive, some flourish, some (like Atticus Finch) are enlightened by the experience and take that enlightenment home to the country.

  When you add it up, our bestseller writers are all over the map when it comes to their use of urban or rural settings. Here’s the rundown: