This kind of shorthand, relying on the Hollywood parallel, has the virtue of suggesting that Robert Langdon’s fictional character is modeled on a confection that’s one part Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) and one part Indiana Jones (also played by Harrison Ford).
That is, Langdon fits the Harrison Ford action figure stereotype, the scholar-hero who, when the situation requires, peels off his corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches, snuffs out his pipe, and pops into action. He’s the bookish guy dumped into the snake pit of an adventure novel; his only real skill, aside from his dexterity with a bullwhip, is an unsettling tendency to recite long quotations from source material he apparently memorized in grad school. Oh, the curse of an eidetic memory.
Like Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan daily newspaper, our professor lives a dual life. First, he long ago made a maverick career choice, deciding to be permanently out of step with society by isolating himself in the ivory tower. Which means he’s geeky and stiff and in that sense is a first cousin to Jack Ryan, Jack being the author of naval histories. Spending way too much time with his nose in a book has made Robert Langdon a bit of a bumbler, always slightly flustered when someone produces a pistol and aims it his way.
When he’s forced to assume this action figure identity, again he plays the maverick role, for he’s lacking in physical prowess. He has no karate skills, isn’t a kung fu master or an ex–Navy SEAL, doesn’t even know how to field-strip an AK-47. As an action hero he just barely gets by, and that’s part of the charm of this hero subcategory. Part of its American aura. Not every American fictional hero is a gunslinger. Americans like to view themselves as humble and self-effacing, able to make do with what they have, using Yankee ingenuity and an occasional nuclear-powered submarine to compensate for what they lack in physical prowess. In fact, most of the heroes in our twelve novels are anything but tough customers.
Of the twelve protagonists, only three take another human life. Scarlett O’Hara shoots to death a Yankee soldier who’s invaded Tara, an act of self-defense. Jack Ryan is almost too nervous to fire back at the Soviet secret agent who is shooting at him and then apologizes to the dying man as he passes away. It’s only Michael Corleone who kills without remorse, shooting two men at point-blank range in retribution for an attempt on his father’s life. Johnny Smith tries to murder the evil Greg Stillson but muffs it. Still, he manages to push Stillson into an act of cowardice so public that it destroys his future political prospects. Even though extreme violence is commonplace in these twelve novels and the body count runs into the double digits (not counting the millions dead in the Civil War), our heroes and heroines are averse to using extreme force and are anything but adept at gunplay.
BOOKS AND MAVERICKS
Bookish types, both writers and readers, appear with such frequency in bestsellers that it is tempting to give them a chapter all their own. As any bookish person knows, authors and book readers are by nature oddballs, flaky loners who like to go off somewhere quiet and sit in a corner turning pages or swiping their finger across an e-book screen. In short, they’re a bit on the mavericky side.
In these twelve novels, Scarlett is atypical in this regard, for she is openly hostile to books, mocking some of her Atlanta lady friends as “subdued, churchgoing, Shakespeare-reading.” She came by this aversion to books naturally. Her father, Gerald, not only mocks Ashley Wilkes for his bookish, effeminate ways, but belittles the whole Wilkes clan for buying crates of books in German and French from the Yankee scoundrels. Then those crazy Wilkeses laze around reading when they should be out hunting and gambling like real men.
Scarlett O’Hara notwithstanding, almost every other novel on this list is filled with characters for whom books are of crucial importance.
In Peyton Place, for instance, Allison MacKenzie won’t quit reading. Books are her lifeblood, both a way to temporarily escape from her complicated life and a method for reimagining it. She is rebuked by her mother for caring too much about literature. Constance didn’t understand how a twelve-year-old girl could bury herself in books all the time while other girls her age were fixated on pretty frocks and lacy underwear.
Underwear versus books? Well, for most of us mavericks, the choice is clear. We’ll go commando before we’ll give up our books.
For all its overheated sexual display and attacks on social hypocrisy, Peyton Place is actually an old-fashioned Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young girl. A novel that takes us almost step by step through the literary education of Allison MacKenzie.
Speaking with an early boyfriend, Allison proudly stakes claim to the low road of literary aspirations. She wants to write a famous book like Anthony Adverse, a book that will make her a celebrity.
Allison won’t be denied and grows into a full-fledged journalist with the dream of one day becoming a writer of novels. She goes to New York to fulfill that dream and sets about the hard work of breaking in. As a generous gesture to all the would-be writers in her audience, Grace Metalious even diagrams a primitive form of literary networking.
After a series of crushing rejections from numerous literary agents, Allison marches off to the New York Public Library, where she studies current bestsellers. It is there she discovers on the dedication page of one of the commercial hits a declaration of thanks to the author’s agent, Bradley Holmes. Bingo.
Allison tracks down the agent, makes her case, and soon is sleeping with the guy, though eventually he doesn’t think he can sell her book.
Books, books, books. They’re everywhere in these bestsellers, a reminder of the strange and fanciful power of narrative and of the shared love that writers and readers have, the symbiotic relationship they enjoy.
Books and reading play a large role in Scout Finch’s world. She doesn’t remember learning to read, just as she doesn’t remember learning to breathe. Since Atticus is a lawyer and a devoted reader of books and newspapers, it was probably osmosis.
At one point, Atticus punishes Jem by requiring him to read Ivanhoe to the odious neighbor Mrs. Dubose. Scout and Jem do their duty, and though the old lady dozes off now and then, she never seems to lose track of their place in the story.
The punch line of this episode is that Mrs. Dubose was addicted to morphine, a habit she was determined to kick before she died. It was Jem’s reading of Ivanhoe that diverted her sufficiently from the withdrawal pains and made her last wish possible. Ah, the stimulating power of books.
In Valley of the Dolls, when Anne Welles briefly rejects the romantic heartthrob Lyon Burke, there’s only one way he can console himself. He flies off to London to write a book. And of course it becomes a smash hit.
Books are also of crucial importance to John Smith in The Dead Zone. He’s a reading teacher, after all, and when he wakes from his coma and learns he’s been fired from his teaching job, he soon finds work tutoring poor Chuck Chatsworth in reading. Chuck is a successful jock and “the apotheosis of the BMOC,” but his illiteracy reduces him to bending “grimly over his book like a machine gunner at a lonely outpost, shooting the words down one by one as they came at him.”
Since pedagogy is Johnny’s real gift, not that second sight stuff, in no time Chuck is reading Jude the Obscure. It’s an educational triumph and a reminder of what nearly mystical power some teachers can have.
Teachers and writers and professors and scholars and priests and lawyers march through nearly every one of these bestsellers. Men and women whose life’s work revolves around reading and interpreting books. Books, books, everywhere books.
The most famous and fabulous and fussy professor of them all, Robert Langdon, is a scholarly wordsmith, though you wouldn’t know it from his cultural allusions. A lot more book titles appear in the pages of The Bridges of Madison County or Peyton Place or Jaws or The Exorcist than issue from Robert Langdon’s lips. Although Langdon seems to have read and memorized every volume ever shelved in the Library of Congress, he’s more likely to drop Tom Cruise’s name or
refer to a Disney film than mention Jude the Obscure or Anthony Adverse.
At one point when Langdon enters a library, King’s College Research Institute, to solve the next step in his puzzle, he doesn’t blow the dust off some ancient tome and turn its desiccated pages but sits at a computer terminal and does some kind of Google search. That’s not to say that Langdon doesn’t love books. He does, he does. He writes them, after all. He just doesn’t refer to them much.
Robert Kincaid, on the other hand, quotes Yeats and Robert Penn Warren and is currently reading Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway’s safari journal that is full of literary commentary on Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Robert’s own true love, Francesca the farmer’s wife, “usually read in the kitchen—books from Winterset library and the book club she belonged to.… The television bored her.”
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.
Though in his seventies, [Dr. Taza] went every week to Palermo to pay his respects to the younger prostitutes of that city, the younger the better. Dr. Taza’s other vice was reading. He read everything and talked about what he read to his fellow townsmen, patients who were illiterate peasants, the estate shepherds, and this gave him a local reputation for foolishness. What did books have to do with them?
Hookers and books keep the old guy young. With vices like that, Dr. Taza could become an honorary maverick.
FEATURE #11
Fractured Families
[Literature] is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks.
—KENNETH BURKE,
PHILOSOPHY OF LITERARY FORM
In each of our twelve novels, a member of a broken family finds an ingenious way to transcend his or her crazy stress.
If 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FAMILY THERAPY
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 succes
s.” 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.
LIFE TRAUMAS
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:
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