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

by James W. Hall

  Roberta inherits the Doc’s loot and promptly marries Harmon. Bingo, they’ve just won the American Dream grand prize. Before long they produce a son, Ted, and they buy a far nicer house than they could have afforded on Harmon’s accountant salary. But wait—the last laugh may be on them.

  Ted, their pride and joy, falls hard for Selena Cross. Unfortunately, Selena is the town slut who lives in one of those tar-paper shacks over on the wrong side of the tracks. She’s damaged goods, the stepdaughter of a drunk. Selena is never, ever going to have a sniff of the American Dream. And it is Selena who becomes an unpleasant reminder to Roberta and Harmon Carter of their own shabby social backgrounds and their scamming of Doc Quimby.

  Ted graduates from the university, planning to return to Peyton Place and marry Selena and build a house on a hill, with lots of windows. He’s going to be a lawyer and save Selena from her hard-luck destiny. The two of them will rewrite the perverted script Ted’s parents read from. They’ll act out a true Horatio Alger narrative.

  In the end, young Ted Carter decides that love is not all it’s cracked up to be, as so often is the case in this harsh rendering of American family values. The night before he’s to take Selena’s hand, he begins to hear his parents’ hard-eyed practicality whispering in his head. After a sentence or two of debating the subject with himself, Ted decides it would be best if he dumped his fiancée. And in a blink, she’s gone from his heart.

  There must be something in the water in Peyton Place, some potent truth serum that forces characters to admit that the glittery promise of America is a damnable lie. Maybe the town was cursed from the beginning. After all, the place was named for Samuel Peyton, a black slave who escaped his master and ran off to France, married a white French lady, and returned to America during the Civil War to flaunt the wealth and refinement he’d scored abroad.

  The folks around those backwoods where Samuel and his white wife settled didn’t take kindly to that biracial union or the general uppitiness of Peyton. Even though Samuel had fulfilled the American Dream by making a fortune in Europe, enough money to buy a medieval castle and import it stone for stone to be rebuilt along the river in this valley that became known as Peyton Place.

  Ostracized by the locals, he and his wife eventually retreated inside their castle walls and became the Mr. and Mrs. Boo Radley of New England. What was that black man thinking? That this was America, land of the free? Did he really fall for that old claptrap that if a man simply worked hard and made good, he could overcome the darkness of his skin? Well, we showed him!

  Samuel Peyton’s warped fairy tale is the inspiration for the novel Allison MacKenzie is trying to write. By the last few chapters, Allison has freed herself from the small-town pettiness and gone to the big city to live out her dreams of fame and fortune. She’s broken into the book business, finding a job with a literary agent, and she’s happily banging out her novel. She’s not the least bit shy about staking her claim to the low road of bestsellerdom.

  In fact, the novel she’s working on sounds an awful lot like Peyton Place. Her agent, Brad Holmes, loves the book, though he may be a little biased since he’s sleeping with the author. When Allison pitches her novel to David Noyes, a young up-and-comer who writes big books of “social significance,” David lets his snobbery out of the closet and mocks Allison for wanting to write for such shallow motivations as fame and money. But she stands firm. Not everyone can be a brilliant boy genius, the next big thing in literature. She’s content to stay on the low road of commercial fiction, writing the best book she can, even if there are those like David who consider the results trashy. The scene between them comes as close as any in these twelve novels to making a case for the inherent integrity of bestsellers.

  THE YIN AND YANG OF THE

  AMERICAN DREAM

  Allison MacKenzie should have held out for a writer-boyfriend like Stephen King. Now there’s a man who knows a thing or two about fame and money and more than a little about the American Dream and its twisted fun-house mirror image.

  The Dead Zone gives us a story of two converging characters who represent the yin and yang of the American Dream. One is the all-American, hardworking, though otherwise unexceptional John Smith, whose accidental fall on an ice-covered pond sets off a serious attack of paranormal powers. Johnny never wanted anything more than to marry Sarah, his sweetheart, teach school, raise a family, and enjoy the modest fruits of his very conventional labor. Now look at what he’s got to deal with. The power to change the world.

  On a collision course with John Smith is Greg Stillson, who begins his career as a door-to-door Bible salesman working the rural circuit. The first time we meet him he’s knocking on a farmhouse door when a guard dog advances on him with its ears back. Stillson makes short work of the dog, shooting it, then finishing it off with a series of savage kicks.

  After he’s dispatched the poor beast and is sitting comfortably in his car, he coldly dismisses the incident and the dog blood on his shoes, musing instead on his dreams for the future.

  It won’t be long before Greg Stillson has left Bible selling far behind and is using his con man’s skills to work his way up the political ladder.

  Along the way, Stillson’s ascent to power in the political circles of New Hampshire catches John Smith’s notice. By late in the novel, John has become something of an amateur political scientist and is fond of attending rallies so he can shake the hands of candidates, because making this skin-to-skin contact allows him to use his precognitive skills to see which of them will make good leaders.

  Before John can confirm anything definite about Stillson by meeting the man flesh to flesh, he’s decided he doesn’t like Stillson’s policies one bit. In fact, some of them seem downright scary to Johnny. Under Stillson’s leadership, the library budget has been cut (a major sin in any book lover’s world). During the same period of Stillson’s reign, the police have gotten a 40 percent increase in their budget, which includes new cruisers and riot gear and military weapons. Stillson shuts the teen rec center, imposes a curfew for kids under sixteen, and cuts welfare by a third.

  Gradually, a dreadful question takes root in John Smith’s mind: “If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?”

  Whether Stillson, this dog-killing, neocon crackpot, is actually as dangerous and evil as Hitler is beside the point. John Smith thinks he is, and his prescience has been proved right enough times to virtually guarantee the truth of his suspicions. If Johnny can’t find a way to foil Stillson’s steady rise, chances are good Greg Stillson will become the next president of the United States, and Johnny sees Apocalypse written all over that.

  The linked destinies of these two men is a fitting metaphor for the way the American Dream and the American Nightmare intertwine in most of the bestsellers under review. John Smith sacrifices his own life to spare the world the cataclysm of Stillson’s presidency. The good boy neutralizes the bad.

  It’s worth noting that had the story been rendered from a political angle slightly different from Stephen King’s, Stillson’s version could easily sound like a tragic telling of the American Dream: Stillson, a fatherless youth who rose from poverty through hard work and devotion to public service, was on the verge of staking claim to the highest office in the land when he was brought down by an underachieving kook who believed he was a psychic.

  That these two versions of the American Dream story are so easily interchangeable is testament to the ambivalence that bestseller writers and readers of bestsellers seem to feel toward the subject.

  On the one hand, this American belief in the “rags to riches” possibilities of our nation is an honorable and compelling pillar of our national identity. On the other hand, there are those who regularly exploit these worthy dreams of the people of America with false rhetoric and thereby manage to swindle their way to a higher station than they truly deserve. From Mark Twain to Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis and Stephen King, bestseller writers have served a dual pu
rpose in this regard: to tap into the wellspring of belief that so many Americans share, reinvigorate the righteous optimism and promise of their nation, while at the same time issuing a bitter “Humbug!” against the shysters and frauds who prey on this very sincerity.

  THE GOLDEN PROMISE OF AMERICA

  The last word on the American Dream must go to Tom Clancy, whose hero, Jack Ryan, in The Hunt for Red October rescues the world from certain thermonuclear war by using the golden promise of America to close the deal with a Soviet defector.

  Were it not for Clancy’s novel, we’d not have a single representative on the list of bestsellers that actually makes a wholehearted case for Horatio Alger’s version of the American story. With Reaganesque audacity, Clancy paints the Soviet Union as a drab and evil empire, one whose bankrupt socialism, so full of fraud and incompetence, almost leads to World War III.

  Marko Ramius, a heralded submarine commander, loses his wife, Natalia, in a series of bungled medical procedures that are described in Clancy’s usual painstaking detail. Thanks to a widespread shortage of the French pharmaceutical-grade antibiotic ordinarily distributed to Soviet clinics, a batch of vials filled with distilled water had been surreptitiously substituted and administered, which put Natalia into a coma and eventually caused her death.

  Faithless, bereaved, and enraged, Ramius puts together an audacious plan to abscond to the United States, where presumably such medical errors do not occur and where one’s faith can be restored.

  What propels Ramius across the cold and gloomy depths of the Atlantic is partly revulsion toward a failed political system and partly the overpowering allure of the American Dream.

  By the time Jack Ryan has managed to bond with Ramius, the American continent, glowing with bright promise, is only a few hours distant. With nervous excitement, Lieutenant Kamarov, one of Ramius’s fellow defectors, wants to know if the Soviet crewmen will be subjected to “political education” when they come ashore. Ryan laughs and explains to the lieutenant that someone will eventually take a couple of hours to explain how America works. Afterward he’ll be free to criticize the nation like every other citizen. Then Ryan admits he’s never lived in a country that wasn’t free, so maybe he doesn’t appreciate his homeland as much as he should.

  Surely the implication of Ryan’s admission is that many of Clancy’s readers might also be guilty of taking for granted the freedoms they enjoy. In that sense, The Hunt for Red October is offered as an entertaining political education, a reminder to the mass reader that such freedoms are safeguarded by the likes of stalwarts like Jack Ryan. No wonder it was one of President Reagan’s favorite stories.

  As the submarine full of Soviet traitors cruises ever closer to the promised land of America, they are treated to a video of Spielberg’s ET. When the movie is finished, the assembled Communists have been brought to tears, proclaiming that the film is magnificent. One of them wants to know if all American children are so brave and free.

  Ryan, honest to a fault, explains that the movie was shot in California, where parents are a bit permissive and kids a little more liberated than they are in other parts of the country. But still, he points out, on the whole American kids are a lot more independent than Soviet kids.

  The Clancy version of political education continues as the defectors reach dry land. Since diplomatic conventions require these arriving Soviet sailors to be returned to their motherland unless they make a last-minute decision to defect, their military escorts give the sailors a little capitalistic brainwashing: the American Dream guided tour.

  The men are welcomed aboard a VIP transport plane, given cigarettes and liquor, taken up to twenty thousand feet, and wooed by a running commentary on all the glorious abundance below. Their guide points out the vast middle-class neighborhoods where ordinary folks with ordinary jobs live.

  Welcome to the shining city on the hill. Welcome to our vast and jam-packed cornucopias of materialism. Give ’em a look at Wal-Mart and Costco and they’ll defect every time.

  When Ryan happens to mention American supermarkets, one of the Soviet officers demands he explain what such a thing is. It’s a building as big as a soccer field, Ryan tells them, full of fresh fruit and vegetables and every kind of food imaginable.

  Fresh fruit in winter? The Soviets can’t believe it. Oh, yes, Ryan tells them. Hell, America even pays their farmers not to grow things. That’s how lush, abundant, and overflowing with goodies our country is. And the sales pitch goes on:

  If you have money, you can buy nearly anything you want. The average family in America makes something like twenty thousand dollars a year, I guess.

  Twenty thousand a year in 1985, when this novel was published, must have seemed an amazing sum to a Soviet defector. It might still. But surely the American Dream is something more than this, something more noble and slightly less tacky than the dollar figure of an average worker’s yearly income.

  By the final pages of the novel, Captain Ramius is on the last leg of his seafaring journey, riding aboard a tug toward the American shore, still questioning whether he made the right choice in abandoning his Soviet homeland. And Jack Ryan, flag-waver to the end, starts in again with his mantra, the hymn that all of us sing to ourselves from time to time when we are trying to remind ourselves what makes our American citizenship so unique and so dear.

  As they approach the harbor entrance, their tug slows to a crawl. Ramius wants to know why they’ve cut back their engines, and Commander Bart Mancuso replies that the pilot has to be careful of civilian traffic, like some guy in a sailboat with the same rights as the big vessels steaming into port. A sailboat so small that it wouldn’t even show up on radar.

  “It’s a free country, Captain,” Ryan said softly. “It will take you some time to understand what free really means.”

  Sometimes the dream of social mobility that so inspired and energized Horatio Alger, and is such a cornerstone of American bestsellers, has little to do with the movement to a higher income level. At times it can simply refer to the freedom to move from one place to another unhindered by the almighty ships of state.

  FEATURE #10

  A Dozen Mavericks

  The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.

  —R. W. B. LEWIS,

  THE AMERICAN ADAM

  The heroes and heroines of our twelve bestsellers are all rebels, loners, misfits, or mavericks. They don’t fit in worth a damn, and that’s one of the reasons we love them so much.

  At the close of the novel that bears his name, Huck Finn realizes, dadgum it, he can’t let himself get tangled up in the apron strings of the spinster aunt who wants to be his guardian. During his rafting journey down the Mississippi, he’s learned too much about the conformity, hypocrisy, and double-dealing of respectable folks like Aunt Sally to ever feel comfortable living among them again, and in the final lines of that American classic, Huck makes his declaration of independence:

  “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

  As literary critic Northrop Frye once noted, the recurring hero of many American novels is “placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.”

  In other words, he’s a maverick.

  James Garner played this familiar role in a 1960s television series set in the Old West. He was a gambler and reluctant gunslinger and a tumbling tumbleweed without destination or much sense of loyalty.
In Top Gun, Tom Cruise, playing a fighter jet pilot, uses the same handle as his nickname. Or take our recent national election in which both the presidential candidate and his running mate, each of them citizens of the New West, adopted maverick as their brand.

  In our popular culture and folklore, this term has a venerated status. Indeed, the word itself owns a colorful American pedigree. It derives from the surname of one Samuel Maverick (1803–1870), a Texas lawyer and ranch owner whose name entered our lexicon because he refused to brand his cattle. He took this radical position not in defiance of the customs of the time, but because he found the labors of ranching to be too damn much trouble.

  So there you go. The word we’ve come to identify with rebels, bohemians, trailblazers, dissenters, loners, nonconformists, extremists, malcontents, independents, insurgents, eccentrics, oddballs, free spirits, outsiders, hermits, recluses, strangers, outcasts, pariahs, and exiles originates from a lawyer who was so indifferent toward his ranching duties that he couldn’t be bothered to burn his insignia into the hides of his herd. An act of laziness as much as rebellion.

  Surely even after all these years, a molecule or two of Samuel’s indolence lingers in the word maverick, reminding us that there can sometimes be a razor-thin difference between a maverick and a slacker.

  Our old friend Henry David Thoreau will do for one quintessentially American example. Thoreau turned his back on civilization and experimented with a Spartan existence for a couple of years beside Walden Pond in what he claimed was an act of mutiny against the puritanical dogmas of his time. Yet all that journal writing and introspection in the drowsy Concord forest certainly has a tinge of indolence.