Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (19 page)

When the Don’s son Michael reveals the true nature of the “family business” to Kay Adams, his white bread Protestant fiancée, he echoes nearly word for word his father’s views on the American Dream.

He wants his kids to be raised under Kay Adams’s influence, for them to grow up all-American kids. And he too holds out hope that one of them, or maybe someone in the next generation of his family, will become president of the United States. Why not? Michael learned in a history course at Dartmouth that some of our most revered presidents were raised by fathers “who were lucky they didn’t get hanged.”

If any single creed serves as the foundation for our national sense of self, it’s the promise of social mobility. That hard work and fair play will be rewarded. Anyone can become a
star, and conversely, it’s all too possible for stardom to turn into a hellish fall from grace (
Valley of the Dolls
).

Even an eight-year-old girl in a tiny racist town can change the course of human events, as Scout does when she thwarts a lynching. Even a small-town cop who is deathly afraid of the water can go out to sea and help destroy a great white shark that is terrorizing his precinct. And even Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled girl-child with few worldly skills beyond coquetry, uses those skills to full advantage, managing with ruthless determination to flourish as an entrepreneur, then save Tara from the Yankee invaders and the carpetbaggers.

Rhett Butler warns Scarlett that a woman has only two choices: She can either make money and be unladylike and be ostracized by polite society, or she can be poor and well mannered and have lots of friends. Fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett says about all that ladylike reputation stuff. She goes on to make her Atlanta lumber mill into a cash machine that supports the rebuilding of her first and only true love, Tara. She’s a capitalist wizard, using her heaving bosom and come-hither eyes to win husband after husband, each one lifting her to a higher income bracket.

That’s not to say Scarlett doesn’t get her hands dirty in a salute to the American virtue of hard work. After the war, back at Tara, she picks cotton, raises vegetables, and masters every skill the “darkies” used to handle. She replicates her own father’s immigrant narrative, starting with nothing, forced to stoop and scratch and eventually rebuild her lost empire through the sweat of her brow and a crafty use of her feminine charms.

At one point, so desperate to raise three hundred dollars to pay the Yankee taxes that threaten to steal Tara away from
her, she decides she must attempt to seduce Rhett Butler, who is being held in an Atlanta prison. Without a gown or fitting frock to wear on this crucial mission of enticement, she pulls down the velvet drapes in Tara’s dining room and fashions a fetching dress that she just knows will assist her scheme. Rhett is fooled for a moment or two, until he takes her hands in his and sees how roughened they are from the manual labor she’s been doing back at Tara. He scoffs at her silly attempts to actually toil her way to prosperity. She’s better than that, Rhett believes, more shrewd. He counsels her simply to use her feminine wiles as he uses his masculine ones to gain what advantage she can.

Rhett’s rejection doesn’t thwart her. Moments after leaving the jail, Scarlett is still wearing the drapery dress when she bumps into Frank Kennedy, a successful store owner. Ah-ha. A quick pivot, and she’s got a new potential husband within her sights. The one minor inconvenience with lassoing Kennedy is that he’s the fiancé of her own sister Sue Ellen. But Scarlett brushes that aside and goes neatly from one man to the next, stealing her sister’s beau, latching on to yet another man who can write a check on her behalf.

Scarlett is a whirlwind of cunning and free enterprise craftiness. Maybe her old way of life has been destroyed and the Confederacy defeated, but Scarlett is destined to turn America’s greatest nightmare into her own version of the American Dream.

The power of individuals to change their own destiny, to rise or fall on the basis of their skills, their smarts, their craftiness,
is at the core of each of these novels. No matter how insuperable the problem may be (finding a tiny needle like the
Red October
in the huge haystack of the Atlantic Ocean), a modest, unassuming, straight-talking, down-to-earth ordinary man with a little ingenuity and determination can save the day—or in Jack Ryan’s case, the world.

As I’ve noted, the novel from its very beginning has been unabashedly democratic. Any reader, no matter his or her race, creed, social class, or previous educational training, is invited to enter freely. And the writers of bestsellers seem abundantly aware of their duty to keep all comers entertained with stories of success, the triumph of social mobility, or its evil twin, the cautionary tale of disaster.

For it’s clear that in these bestsellers there is a right way and a wrong way to attain the American Dream. Take Hollywood mogul Jack Woltz, a man Don Corleone wants a small favor from. Woltz is a self-made man just like Vito Corleone, but there’s something un-American about his makeover.

When he turned fifty, Woltz began to take speech lessons, hired an English valet to teach him how to dress, and employed an English butler to instruct him on social rules. He became a collector of paintings and sculpture and a patron of the arts. All this would be enough to put Woltz on the Don’s blacklist, but what really seals his fate is turning down the Don’s business deal, an act of disrespect that leads to Woltz waking up in bed next to the decapitated head of his prized horse Khartoum.

By comparing Woltz’s hoity-toity vision of the American Dream with Don Corleone’s rise from poverty, we get a vivid contrast between the false version of the dream and the authentic one.

To escape Mafia violence in his homeland, young Vito Corleone was sent off to America at the age of twelve to live with friends. As a youngster in his adopted land, he labors in a grocery store and after a few years marries a sixteen-year-old Sicilian girl and settles down in a Tenth Avenue tenement.

But Vito Corleone is destined for greater things. He will lift himself up from destitution and hardship through the use of intelligence and icy courage. After murdering a neighborhood tyrant named Fanucci, who was reputed to be a member of an offshoot of the Mafia, Vito settles into the olive oil business. Largely because of the respect (and fear) he’s earned through removing Fanucci’s ruthless rule in the neighborhood, his business flourishes, and Vito begins to employ a certain leverage to make it flourish faster. His business plan sounds like a dark parody of a Wharton School MBA course.

Vito Corleone spent years building up his business until Genco Pura was the bestselling imported oil in the whole country. He undercut his business rivals in price, he strong-armed store owners to buy less of his competitors’ brands, and once his rivals were in a weakened position, he tried to buy them out. Since his olive oil was not in any way superior to the others on the market, it was the Don’s own reputation as a “man of respect” that gave him a stranglehold on the imported olive oil industry. The fact that he had a reputation as a cold-blooded murderer certainly didn’t hurt his rise.

Part of
The Godfather
’s immense popularity is no doubt due to its sly straddling of these two positions. On the one hand, the novel portrays a group of cutthroat criminals who use whatever bloody means necessary to succeed; on the other hand, the book could as easily be described as a tribute to the prototypical immigrant family, whose traditional American moral virtues (the Don refuses to deal drugs, for instance) and
loyalty to friends and family allow them to overcome great obstacles and escape a life of poverty.

The dark side of the American Dream is an equal and opposite force in nearly all of these megabestsellers. In
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Tom Robinson, the black man who is falsely accused of rape, is found guilty of the crime, though it is clear to everyone in the courtroom down to the youngest child (our girl Scout) that he is innocent. Justice is not even close to being just. While Atticus might take some solace in the fact that the jury took an especially long time to hash out their guilty verdict, that small step toward judicial fairness is small indeed and might seem more like a sad rationalization of bigotry than a hopeful view of social progress.

Similarly, cynicism toward the American Dream of success drips off every page of
Peyton Place
. Like the story of Roberta and Harmon Carter, a married couple with one son who live on a street that was considered the “second best” in Peyton Place. They could easily afford to live on the best street or even build a twenty-room castle if they weren’t concerned about appearing ostentatious. Drawing attention to themselves is a little dangerous because these two conned their way to their improved social class status.

When they were young, Harmon Carter and Roberta Welch were an item. But it was clear to Harmon that his job as an accountant at the local mill was not exactly the fast track to the American Dream. So he planted a sinister seed in Roberta’s mind by giving her constant reminders of the likely trajectory of their economic life together.

It’ll be paycheck to paycheck, he tells her, the grim life of an office worker. She deserves more than that, he assures her. Roberta should have furs and diamonds and the most fashionable clothes. But none of those wonderful material possessions will ever come her way with him stuck in a dead-end job.

Though Roberta claims she loves Harmon and always will, whether they are rich or poor, clever Harmon will have none of that, and he turns her argument around, saying if she loves him that much, then that deep love will not desert her while she’s married to Old Doc Quimby, the rich man whose house she cleans.

Roberta caves, and the scheming devils put their plan in motion. Of course, poor Old Doc falls for Roberta’s seduction, and all of Peyton Place has a good long snicker. The Doc gradually realizes what a fool he’s been, and a couple of weeks before the first anniversary of his marriage to Roberta Welch, Doc Quimby presses his revolver to his temple and kills himself.

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.