Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (18 page)

It is Merrin, the elderly exorcist, who speaks the lines that are the takeaway religious stance the novel promotes:

Merrin dies before the exorcism is complete, and Father Karras must step in to battle on. In a scene that is withheld
from us, Karras is ultimately victorious, the devil is purged, and the girl is saved, though Karras sacrifices his own life to the cause. As he lies dying on the sidewalk outside the MacNeil house, Karras receives final absolution. Since he is unable to speak to the priest administering the last rites, it is debatable whether Karras accepts this formal blessing willingly or not.

In any case, it is Chris MacNeil who has the last words on faith and religion in this novel that has been fixated on both. She says to Karras that despite everything she’s witnessed, she’s still a nonbeliever. But on the other hand, she has come to believe that the devil is very real. Very, very real.

Is it Karras’s final acceptance of God’s mercy and power or Chris’s rejection of the same that stands as the novel’s coda? Whichever view appears overriding in a reader’s mind probably depends on the predispositions that reader brought to the novel. The remarkable fact is, however, that the secular position is given the last word, and in the supernatural bookkeeping of
The Exorcist
, it costs two priests to take down a single manifestation of the devil. That is what is known these days as an unsustainable economy.

When Kay Adams Corleone at last learns the true nature of her husband’s criminal enterprise, her first reaction is to seek out a priest for instruction to become a Catholic. In the final lines of this bloody novel full of brutal revenge killings and murderous power plays, Kay goes to church.

She kneels in supplication, bows her head, folds her hands
over the rail, and “with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe,” she says prayers for the eternal soul of Michael Corleone.

That her deeply willed desire to believe is actual belief is dubious. Certainly Mario Puzo’s muted skepticism pervades this moment. After Michael Corleone has piled up four hundred pages of mortal sins, it seems unlikely that his soul can be saved by his wife, a new and wavering convert. Michael is, after all, the Godfather—a secular God if there ever was one.

In
Jaws
, the shark is considered by many in the town to be “an act of God,” and its eventual destruction requires the deaths of several sacrificial lambs. Hooper, the shark expert called in to aid the seaside community, is awestruck by the fish, while Quint, the old salt who has been hired to kill it, begs to differ. Hooper believes the shark is a thing of beauty that shows the awesome power of nature and therefore confirms the existence of God.

Horseshit, is Quint’s reply.

Later, Quint and Sheriff Brody discuss the religious implications of the shark’s appearance, Brody mentioning the woman back in town who believes the shark is some kind of divine retribution.

But Quint, who puts no stock in religion, replies that the shark’s appearance is simply “bad luck.”

In the last lines of the novel, Brody survives the great white’s final assault and watches as Quint is yanked overboard and drawn down into the sea in a posture that evokes the crucifixion, “arms out to the sides, head thrown back.…” A secular version of Jesus Christ, dying for the secular sins of others.

If the shark is truly God’s way of reminding the townsfolk of His awesome power, then it damn well worked. But for
Quint, who stands as the larger-than-life voice of the common man, the alternative vision is one of randomness and accident—an existential universe in which God’s will plays no part whatsoever. It is Quint, like Scout and Chris MacNeil, who voices the commonsense skepticism that undergirds the moral position of each of these books.

Common sense, not religious conviction, is also a major tenet of Scarlett O’Hara’s worldview. At the graveside ceremony when her father, Gerald, is laid to rest, the religiously formal Ashley Wilkes intones a few solemn clichés, then is followed by Will, a simple farmer who speaks off-the-cuff about the death of Mr. O’Hara.

Throughout the novel, Scarlett’s religious beliefs are childish and shallow, characterized less by faith and devotion than by a ruthless pragmatism. For Scarlett, religion is nothing more than a bargaining chip. She has always made promises to God in exchange for some return on her investment. Since God had been such an unreliable business partner, “to her way of thinking, she felt that she owed Him nothing at all.…”

Indeed, for a character so deeply loved by so many readers, Scarlett O’Hara is surprisingly blasphemous. Like Allison
MacKenzie and Father Karras, she’s lost faith. Scarlett refuses to believe in a God who won’t respond to the million other prayers sent to Him daily on behalf of the Confederacy.

She’s forsaken church and no longer prays. Her spiritual outlook is secularist, pure and simple. A humanistic view that is rooted in a commoner’s common sense rather than in the rituals and liturgical ceremonies of the ecumenical elite.

Scarlett’s skeptical views are echoed by those of John Smith in
The Dead Zone
. Johnny’s paranormal abilities have given him a vision of a disastrous future if Greg Stillson is elected president of the United States. Oh, and by the way, remember, Greg Stillson got his start as a con man selling, of all things, Bibles.

Debating whether to go ahead with his plans to assassinate Stillson, John anguishes over God’s failure to do the job first. He wonders why God would allow such an evil man as Greg Stillson to flourish. Why has God left it to Johnny to do His dirty work?

Even Jack Ryan, an otherwise play-it-by-the-book hero, squirms uncomfortably when asked by a Russian sub captain if he believes in God. Ryan fumbles a bit, then says sure, yeah, he believes in God, “because if you don’t, what’s the point of life? That would mean Sartre and Camus and all those characters were right—all is chaos, life has no meaning. I refuse to believe that.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of religious faith. Ryan believes in God only because to do otherwise would be to support Camus “and all those characters.” Meaning, I suppose, the French.

Could there be a more secular novel about religion than
The Da Vinci Code
?

Secularism is one thing, but seeming to charge the Catholic Church with serial murder is a whole different animal. Is it any wonder that Vatican officials were outraged over the novel’s assertions or that dozens of books sprang up to challenge fictional anti-Catholic claims that were taken seriously by many readers?

The narrative dynamics of
The Da Vinci Code
are clear. The protagonist, Robert Langdon, is a man of science, while his antagonists are men of the cloth. The conflict at the crux of the novel is a clash between science and faith, between academics and clerics, between reason and mysticism. Or between secularism and religion.

Consider the way Robert Langdon, the high priest of rationality, explains away religious belief to his love interest/student Sophie. He feels sure that he could provide hard evidence that contradicted the holy stories of every religious belief system, from Islam to Buddhism. He suggests that he could even demonstrate that Christ’s virgin birth was just a
metaphor, not a literal fact as so many devout believers assume. But Langdon has decided to let the poor fools stay deluded, for he believes that religious allegory (the lies that religion tells, like Christ actually walking on actual water) is a useful coping mechanism for millions of religious folks. Why spoil their fun?

As spokesman for puzzle solvers everywhere, Robert Langdon is the ultimate secularist. Everything can be explained. All mysteries, all supernatural phenomena, all religious faith, can be dissected and reduced to their component parts. For Robert, there is no rapture beyond logic and reason.

It’s striking that millions of readers, many of them presumably devout believers in one religion or another, could be so swept up by a novel whose central character devotes so much of his time not only debunking Christian symbolism but challenging the very idea of religious belief.

No doubt part of the extraordinary appeal of this work of fiction derives from its handling of religious matters in so direct a fashion. Whether those readers share Langdon’s view that “every faith in the world is based on fabrication” or not, they were clearly energized and possibly even flattered by seeing organized religion take center stage and its iconography and art elucidated in fresh and surprising ways.

A
lthough Horatio Alger’s novels, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, didn’t invent the “rags to riches” story line (folkloric versions like “Cinderella” were around for centuries), Alger’s stories certainly helped to crystallize the vocabulary of a central part of what we’ve come to call “the American Dream.”

Writing what today might be termed “young adult novels”
such as
Ragged Dick
and
Adrift in the City; or, Oliver Conrad’s Plucky Fight
, Alger introduced into the national consciousness an image of down-and-out ragamuffins who, through sweat and labor, determination, and a hard-nosed sense of justice, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and achieved some measure of wealth and social success. The heroes of these tales were most often orphaned boys with abundant street smarts who weren’t afraid of a fistfight as a last resort against the advances of a bully.

There is the air of the fairy tale about Alger’s novels. But the foremost achievement of Alger’s work was to develop a clear and vivid narrative that dramatized one of our most treasured national myths: that even the poorest and most disenfranchised among us can achieve prosperity, material wealth, and personal freedom.

While we yearn to believe in these optimistic principles, at the same time Americans seem to take a grim satisfaction in watching the opposite pattern unfold. We love with equal fervor to watch our national myths foiled, to see their limits, their frailty, sometimes even their emptiness.

These are the nightmare stories: a pious, God-fearing community that is racked by hypocrisy and double-dealing and crimes against morality (
Peyton Place
); the smart, talented, attractive young women who journey off to the big city seeking fame and fortune (and husbands), only to find the tragic hollowness and unimaginable perils of that dream (
Valley of the Dolls
); the ordinary all-American young man who lives
by a Boy Scout’s modest and hardworking creed but falls victim to unthinkable horrors (
The Dead Zone
).

What about John Smith’s doppelgänger, the sharp, obsessively studious boy from the shabby trailer park who makes his way to Harvard Law School, then lands his dream job in America’s heartland (
The Firm
)? Ah, yes. Mitch McDeere will meet the dark side of the American Dream as well and make a fatal Faustian bargain, taking a low-interest loan and shiny new BMW in exchange for his own soul, his marriage, and possibly his life.

In Mitch’s case, his belief in the American Dream remains unshakable even after his discovering that very dream has betrayed him and put everything he loves at risk. He takes a breath, summons his courage, and gives it one more college try, proceeding to outwit the Mob, the FBI, and his lethal legal brethren, then sailing off into the sunset of everlasting retirement.

And there’s Bonasera, an outraged father who at the outset of
The Godfather
pleads for Don Corleone’s help in getting revenge on the boys who beat and tried to rape his daughter. The boys were released by the courts, and now Bonasera comes to the Godfather for the justice he had trusted the legal system of his adopted country to deliver. “America has been good to me. I wanted to be a good citizen. I wanted my child to be American.”

Don Corleone dismisses poor Bonasera for making the mistake of putting his faith in America, not in the Godfather.
Later, during a meeting of all the Mafia heads from around the country, Don Corleone makes a statesmanlike speech about what he feels is a belief that binds these criminals together, a belief in the American Dream.

By refusing to be puppets manipulated by the power elite, Don Corleone and his fellow Mafia leaders have laid the foundation for future generations of Corleones. Their children have found better lives. They are scientists and musicians and professors, and no doubt the next generation will “become the new
pezzonovanti
” (the new big shots, or ruling class). And who knows about the Don’s grandchildren. Maybe there is a future governor among them, even a president. For “nothing’s impossible here in America.”