Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (13 page)

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 Illuminists (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.

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.

The Mafia, Opus Dei, elite nuclear submariners, law partners
fronting for the Mob, Broadway superstars, shark fishermen, exorcists, small-town cliques, and the southern aristocracy: Each of our twelve novels has at least one secret society at its nucleus.

For definition’s sake, let’s call a secret society any group that for one reason or another has isolated itself from the rest of the world by creating a collection of rules, rites, sacraments, or covert behaviors that reinforces its separation from the larger population. The group is exclusive, usually powerful in some domain, with its own initiation rituals and its own sense of justice and duty, sometimes its own language, and even its own criminal code.

In the innermost circle of any social group, we expect to find an elite few who have been inducted into the private ceremonies, have mastered the conventions, dress, and behavior that mark them as elite members of their particular secret society, or else have paid some exorbitant membership dues that mere mortals could never manage. Gated communities within gated communities, with security guards and grimfaced sentinels at every stage.

Behind layers of sentries are characters like Don Corleone, or the pope’s henchmen, or a powerful law firm’s senior partners, or perhaps the elite commander of a nuclear submarine, or maybe even a master angler whose knowledge of the sea and the frightful creatures swimming in its depths gives him an unequaled authority, something close to the status of a savior.

While social class might overlap with these descriptors in certain ways, the kind of exclusivity we find portrayed in bestsellers is rarely a function of class status alone but is rather an earned seniority. Neither wealth, social standing, nor a privileged background is an important ingredient in
Don Corleone’s power. Indeed, his rise from poverty to a position of great influence is typical in bestsellers. The poor or the lower middle classes far outnumber their economic betters as the heroes in the megahits under review.

Although he doesn’t wear a coonskin hat, Quint, the veteran shark hunter in
Jaws
, is Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of the seas, complete with arcane techniques, specialized jargon, and inviolable shipboard rules.

His authority and mastery of his element are unquestionable. Quint’s the man you call when the biggest, baddest great white shark shows up on your shores over the Fourth of July holiday and threatens not only to eat your citizens, but to destroy the well-being of your entire tourist economy.

Because Quint has lost his first mate recently, a rare chance exists for an outsider to come aboard the
Orca
and audition for a spot as Quint’s acolyte. That task falls to Sheriff Martin Brody as agent for the community, and it is Brody who over the course of the novel is slowly inducted into the privileged secret society of shark hunters.

So Brody finds himself aboard the
Orca
, trying very hard not to think. He works shoulder to shoulder with Quint and is forced to learn the ropes quickly or risk expulsion—which
in practical terms means being pitched overboard into sharky waters.

Though the captain is a reluctant mentor, Brody never stops asking questions, determined to learn as much as he can, as fast as he can. At one point when Brody pushes Quint for a more detailed explanation, Quint brushes off his question with the finality of a master to his dunderheaded apprentice:

“Those are the rules.”

After the puny blue shark is brought alongside, Quint gives Brody an instructive demonstration, disemboweling the fish, letting its entrails spill into the water, then cutting the shark loose. In a spasm of instinct, the shark swims beside the boat, slurping up its own guts, and is promptly attacked by a school of smaller sharks.

One lesson after another. One question after another. The first day of the hunt melts into a second, with Quint softening under Brody’s respectful curiosity about the tradecraft of fishing. The two men don’t exactly bond, but Quint’s brusque insults lessen, at least those directed at Brody. However, there is little doubt that Hooper, the wealthy, intellectual marine biologist, is not going to win his membership card in Quint’s secret society anytime soon. He lacks the right stuff, the proper obeisance, and the down-home authenticity. His scholarly, book-acquired knowledge entitles him to absolutely nothing in Quint’s view. Experience is all that matters, and grinding it out day after day on the blood-soaked decks of the
Orca
is the only schooling that counts.

When the great white shark first explodes into view and opens its mighty jaws an arm’s length away, Brody is dumbstruck. While Hooper blathers on about its beauty and gigantic proportions, Quint goes quietly about his business, and
Brody, the fumbling amateur, remains paralyzed with fear. After the shark disappears into the depths, Quint mocks Brody’s shocked reaction:

“Gave you a bit of a start.”

“More’n a bit,” said Brody. He shook his head, as if to reassemble his thoughts and sort out his visions. “I’m still not sure I believe it.”

The master prods his apprentice, and the novice admits his ignorance. In the secret society of the
Orca
, this is proper behavior and will be rewarded.

Some secret societies, like the ones we find in
The Da Vinci Code
,
The Godfather
,
The Hunt for Red October
, or
The Exorcist
, are so obviously central to their novels’ purpose that they don’t require a lot of elaboration. Opus Dei, the Mafia, nuclear submariners, and Catholic exorcists each indulge in a hefty dose of hocus-pocus and abracadabras to give an aura of mystery to their activities. Exotic chants, rites, and prayers, a specialized lexicon, rules of authority and hierarchy, incense-drenched ancient ceremonies of worship, and formal acts of obedience all play roles.

Such is the case in the scene at the outset of
The Godfather
when Don Corleone, following traditional custom, opens his inner sanctum to a string of petitioners on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding. When one is stepping before the Don, there is a right way to ask for a favor and a wrong way. There is ring kissing and bowing and circumlocutions that require the supplicant to master his part of the script before he recites his request to the Godfather. Flunk the test and you’re history.

On board the
Orca
it works the same way, although Quint practices the plain vanilla version of induction ceremonies. There’s no mystique to shark fishing, no pomp and circumstance.
In fact, he harshly deromanticizes his own profession. Fishing for the largest and most dangerous fish anyone has ever seen is nothing but unpretentious work, on a par with the lowest forms of menial labor.

When Brody asks if the captain considers the fish his personal enemy, Quint scoffs:

“No. No more ’n a plumber who’s trying to unstick a drain.”

This blue-collar ethos repeats with regularity in bestsellers, as we’re seeing. We’re all just plumbers, these authors seem to say, just ordinary folks. Storytelling is nothing more or less worthy than clearing sludge from the pipes.

On what will be their final day of sharking, before boarding the
Orca
, Brody asks if Quint has found a replacement for Hooper, who was killed by the shark the day before. Quint’s solemn response has the tone of a sacred confirmation:

“You know this fish as well as any man, and more hands won’t make no difference now. Besides, it’s nobody else’s business.…”

Permission to come aboard is granted, and as Brody steps onto the
Orca
’s deck for the final fateful voyage, the local chapter of world-class shark hunters has increased its membership by one. In fact, Brody learns his lessons so well that it is he, not Quint, who survives the ordeal of the great white.

Quint makes a fatal error and steps inside a coil of rope lying on the deck, the other end of which is attached to the shark. Overboard he goes. The sheriff, who has dutifully paid his dues, lunges to save his mentor, but Quint is “pulled slowly down into the dark water” like a modern Ahab. Brody, in Ishmael’s role, can only watch in horror, then start his slow journey back to shore. You can almost hear the echo of Ishmael’s famous last line: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

In
The Bridges of Madison County
, Kincaid and Francesca form an adulterous secret society that stays hidden until both of them have passed away. The frame story that has Francesca Johnson’s children, Michael and Carolyn, discovering their mother’s notebooks after her death seems a trifle less clumsy when you consider it as the planned dissolution of a secret society—a time capsule meant to give Francesca’s children a glimpse into the private world their mother once experienced.

The two lovers took a vow of silence that was meant to protect the living, yet Francesca felt the need to pass the knowledge of her romantic swoon to her children, presumably hoping they would be inspired by her dalliance—inspired to recast their memory of Francesca as a noble soul who sacrificed her one true love to return to the duties of motherhood.

Taking the measure of what lessons the grown-up children absorbed is hard to do, since the novel ends with them just beginning to grasp the revelation. But clearly it’s not infidelity but faithfulness that’s at the heart of
Bridges
. A secret society of two made a painful pact and for decades devotedly maintained their pledge, an act of mutual self-sacrifice in which both parties abandoned the love of their lives so an ordinary American family could be preserved.

Sappy, perhaps, but for me and a few million others who consumed this sugary confection, there’s something quaintly poignant and even a little complicated about the secret society Francesca and Robert formed.

For one thing, it took a huge dose of old-fashioned willpower and self-discipline to make that decision, then to keep their love affair concealed and spend their remaining years in a state of emotional frugality, without ever abandoning their rapturous memories.

Then there’s Francesca’s decision to let her children in on the secret, an act that seems to be her way of releasing them from the lie that was her life and her marriage. This final act of revealing leaves us with a riddle that gives the novel a smoky aftertaste. Did Francesca and Robert do the right thing by giving up their love? Or did they deny themselves a greater joy, bullied into accepting the mundane and empty obligations of a conventional life? Was their sacrifice an emotional tragedy or a triumph?

In an age brimming with irony, the earnestness these two characters demonstrate can seem sentimental, but to fully appreciate these bestsellers a reader must accept that subtlety, intricacy, and ambiguity are not often the ingredients of popular novels. For the most part, these novels are thoroughly sincere and heartfelt. There’s no attempt to cast furtive signals to the reader, no evidence the language is trying to say anything more than exactly what it says. It is that simplicity of tone, that artlessness, that wins the hearts of so many readers, and it does so for the very reason that it is not exclusive. There is no attempt in the style or the storytelling method to favor readers in the know over normal folks. Anyone and everyone is freely admitted and on equal footing. No segregation allowed. No secret handshakes permitted.