Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (23 page)

In
The Godfather
, Mario Puzo has some fun with writers, those “shmucks with an Underwood,” as they used to be called in Hollywood. The singer Johnny Fontane tells an anecdote about a novelist who became a celebrity in the literary world and arrived in Hollywood expecting to be treated with fanfare. The author was set up with a well-endowed starlet
and was eating dinner with her at the Brown Derby when the girl spotted some second-rate movie comic who wiggled a finger at her across the dining room. Without a word, she dumped the hotshot writer, leaving him with a new understanding of the Hollywood pecking order.

So busy shooting up the place, most of the characters in this novel don’t have much spare time to read. But there’s one man, Dr. Taza, Michael Corleone’s landlord during his stay in the old country, who knows the value of a book.

Hookers and books keep the old guy young. With vices like that, Dr. Taza could become an honorary maverick.

I
f you Google “every family is dysfunctional,” you’ll get around 144,000 results in .2 second. Compare that with Googling “every family is healthy,” where a meager 8 hits appear. And in 5 of those 8 cases, the word
not
precedes
every
.

Okay, so that isn’t exactly what you’d call scientific proof. Still, it supports the conventional wisdom that a lot of us have a lot of experience with fractured families.

Families under economic stress, families at emotional war, families splitting apart, families with a missing parent, families dealing with disease, death, infidelity, job stress, or outright
life-threatening danger. You name it. Badly destabilized families are featured in each of our twelve bestsellers.

1. Scarlett O’Hara loses a daughter, three husbands, and both parents. Fails to win the heart of the man she thinks she loves while losing the man she realizes belatedly she might have loved.
   
2. Scout and Jem Finch have no mother, nor does Mayella Ewell, whose phony rape claim sets off a tragic cascade of events. Boo Radley lost his mother before he was imprisoned by his father in his own house.
   
3. Allison MacKenzie, the star of
   Peyton Place
   , is illegitimate and fatherless, while her best friend, Selena Cross, is also fatherless as well as a victim of sexual abuse from her stepfather.
   
4. Anne Wells in
   Valley of the Dolls
   is also missing a father, and her mother is a suffocating bore. Neely has no parents. Jennifer has no father, and her mother goads her to exploit her body for cash.
   
5. Michael Corleone loses the love of his life in a bomb blast, but otherwise his family stays relatively intact until the Don is badly injured in an assassination attempt; then Michael’s brothers begin to die until the family threatens to implode.
   
6. Regan MacNeil, who is possessed by the devil, is first dispossessed by her own father, who divorces her mother and forgets to call on Regan’s birthday. Two fathers (priests) are required to save her.
   
7. While Police Chief Brody defends the beaches of Amity from a terrorizing shark, his wife is straying
   into the tricky currents of an affair with a visiting shark expert.
   
8. After four years in a coma, John Smith wakes to find his mother has become a hopeless religious lunatic; shortly thereafter, the zealous lady has a stroke and dies. The young woman John intended to wed marries another man instead but has a brief fling with Johnny anyway. Greg Stillson, Johnny’s antagonist, is also fatherless.
   
9. Ramius deceives his shipboard family and hijacks the
   Red October
   and heads off to America because his wife died needlessly, a victim of the incompetent Soviet medical system.
   
10. Mitch McDeere is also fatherless and estranged from his mother, while the new law firm that adopts him as a son turns out to be lethally dysfunctional.
    
11. Robert Kincaid is divorced and has a hankering for vulnerable married women. Francesca Johnson is unfaithful to her husband and never fully recovers from her love affair with Robert.
    
12. Sophie Neveu’s parents are both dead, and she’s estranged from her only relative, her grandfather, who dies in the first scene. She may be a distant relative of Jesus Christ, a family connection that nearly costs her her life.
    

So there you go. Twelve of the most successful novels in American publishing history and not a traditional, fully functioning family among them, yet all our heroes and heroines find ways to make peace with their extreme losses.

While entertainment is one of popular fiction’s obvious jobs, its other enduring function has been to educate readers, to provide, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, “equipment for living.” As we’ve seen, this responsibility takes many forms, from presenting factual information to critiquing religious practice. As important as any other educational function that the popular novel provides is its emphasis on the emotional struggles characters experience within the family structure.

Long before Dr. Phil and Oprah and a host of media therapists invited TV viewers into daily family therapy sessions, mass culture looked to popular novels for good counsel and insight into affairs of the heart.

Increasingly in the last few decades that good counsel has been sorely needed. From 1936, when
Gone with the Wind
was published, to 2003, when
The Da Vinci Code
appeared, stresses on the American family skyrocketed. Sociologists, our dependable cultural explainers, see many reasons for this: the ever-increasing divorce rate, unrealistic marital expectations, a rapid expansion of women entering the workforce, shifting gender roles, and the appearance of no-fault divorce, to name a few.

Then for the fun of it, add to the list such large external forces as the Great Depression, two world wars, and two regional wars that killed thousands, maimed thousands more, and psychologically damaged many who served, while keeping married partners separated for long periods of time. All further strained family bonds. Throw in a rising tolerance of promiscuity and the growing sense that multiple marriages
was the new normal, and what you have is a family structure that is redefining itself at warp speed.

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, the number of unmarried couples cohabitating grew by a factor of seven to a figure that today reaches more than five million couples. Forty percent of babies born in 2007 came from unmarried parents. Such statistics send shivers through conservative pundits and political theorists like William Bennett, a staunch defender of the familial status quo, who no doubt speaks for millions of Americans when he claims (in
The Broken Hearth
) that “the nuclear family, defined as a monogamous married couple living with their children, is vital to civilization’s success.” Bennett goes on to claim that the “dissolution of the family is the fundamental crisis of our time.”

“Dissolution” is a somewhat dire description of what some would say is simply a modernization of the family structure or a set of changes that reflect other transformations in modern culture.

Nevertheless, few would argue with the assertion that the traditional family model is in a state of flux. With such rapid transformations, where do individuals go for perspective? Aside from the low-cost alternatives like Oprah and her fellow empathizers, some go where they’ve always gone, to their closest friends. But we all know what that advice is worth. Many go to church and speak to the wise men there. For others who can afford it and overcome the stigma, there’s always psychiatry.

But it’s safe to say that many Americans looking for a vicarious connection with another troubled soul could do worse than snuggle up with Scarlett O’Hara or Francesca Johnson, Mitch McDeere or John Smith.

In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe studied the medical records of more than five thousand patients in an attempt to determine if stressful events caused illnesses. Eventually the good doctors listed forty-three life traumas, each with a “stress score.” The study came to be known as the Holmes and Rahe stress scale.

While the focus of this chapter is on the stresses and conflicts within families, the Holmes and Rahe stress scale makes a handy checklist of dramatic situations that might find their way into the narrative of almost any novel and certainly would keep the familial pot boiling:

No doubt about it, Scarlett tops the list for stress events. And a few stressors not even on the list surely rank high on her inventory. The nuisance of the Civil War, for one, all those cannonballs exploding in the Atlanta streets. And there’s that dashing young man Ashley Wilkes, who doesn’t fancy her as much as she fancies him.

What are Scarlett’s psychological coping strategies? How does our heroine manage the ever-mounting pressures thrown at her for nearly a thousand pages? What psychological lessons does she have to pass on to the mass audience hungry for insight? Well, fiddle-dee-dee, Scarlett suggests y’all should just think about all that tomorrow.

Actually, for much of the novel Scarlett is shielded from the harsher realities by her caring mother, her willful but indulgent father, her protective mammy, and her selfless sister-in-law, Melanie. This portrait of a successfully functioning family might have been Scarlett’s model if the war hadn’t interrupted things so abruptly and brought an end to her childhood before she’d fully matured.

After losing her mother’s emotional counsel, then her father’s blunt and accurate appraisals of human nature, Scarlett is basically on her own. Still a girl, but suddenly a wife, then just as suddenly a widow. Nothing to guide her but her adolescent fantasies and her will to survive at any cost.

Those survival instincts lead Scarlett to consider any husband besides Ashley as nothing but a necessary bother—strictly a means to an end. That end is not the nurturing warmth of family or any kind of domestic bliss. Husbands are not for love or even sexual satisfaction, and, oh my, they certainly aren’t for having babies. For Scarlett, husbands are all about money and the physical security they bring. Tenderness and affection are merely weapons in her arsenal used to bring down her man.

Scarlett’s notion of family relationships is just as cynical, a fact made clear when we witness her stealing her sister’s fiancé because he can provide the goods and services she wants. And how does Scarlett respond to her sister’s outrage and pain? She blows it off with a fiddle-dee-dee.

However, she continues to maintain one emotional soft spot: Scarlett’s cynical view of marriage alternates with a delusional romantic vision of her ideal mate, Ashley Wilkes. This same vacillation between romanticism and cynicism is also a defining characteristic of the heroines of
Valley of the Dolls
and
Peyton Place
. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the heroines of those novels hold out hope that a fairy-tale version of true love awaits them and marriage to the right man will one day heal all their wounds and disappointments.