Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers
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Johnny wasn’t that way. He had a heart of gold before the coma, and when he wakes, Sarah decides she must get back in touch. She finds him unchanged by his ordeal, and the pent-up, unresolved sexual tension between them erupts. What follows is a sensuous fulfillment of all that was long deferred. For the two young people, sex is not an opening of a door to the future, but a closing of the door to the past.
Sinking into her was like sinking into an old dream that had never been quite forgotten.
“Oh, Johnny, my dear …” Her voice in rising excitement. Her hips moving in a quickening tempo. Her voice was far away. The touch of her hair was like fire on his shoulder and chest. He plunged his face deeply into it, losing himself in the dark-blonde darkness.
This sexual moment cauterizes their wounded hearts and allows each of them to let go of their romantic past. Sarah returns to Walt, and when we see her again at the end of the novel, she’s had another child and seems reconciled to her marriage. Johnny goes on to use his energies and his psychic powers to help capture a sexual predator, the Castle Rock Strangler, and then moves on to his great act of world-saving self-sacrifice.
For both characters, the sexual moment between them was a watershed event, reminding them of what they’d lost and what they might have had if fate had been kinder. Johnny says as much in a letter to Sarah that she reads after his death: “But I wanted you to know that I think of you, Sarah. For me there really hasn’t been anyone else, and that night was the best night for us.…”
Here, as with the other bestsellers on my list, this single sex scene is decisive, and without it events and characters would have moved in markedly different directions.
Jaws repeats the pattern with raunchy zest. In the novelistic version, the story opens with a sex scene between a nameless woman and a drunken man. He falls backward onto the beach and pulls her onto him, and they claw at each other’s clothes. When they’ve satisfied themselves, the woman is still ready for a swim, but her date has already drifted off to sleep.
She walks naked into the Atlantic and paddles offshore, where the great white “smells her” and proceeds to take her apart limb by limb.
Given the novel’s focus on the shark’s highly developed sense of smell, one might reasonably ask if the shark would have located that swimmer had she not just had sex on the beach. The suggestion is unavoidable: The shark becomes an avenging angel, punishing the dissolute behavior happening back on shore. A kind of nasty Puritan backlash against counterculture types with their dope-smoking, self-indulgent lack of moral discipline. It’s entirely possible that shark would’ve passed right by Amity if there hadn’t been such a strong scent of decadence in the water.
The opening scene of the movie version avoids that question but raises another. A drunken college kid picks up a willing girl at a beach bonfire where dope is smoked, guitars are strummed, and necking is widespread. In the film, the drunken guy simply falls into a heap at the shoreline still clothed, while his would-be lover strips naked and walks into the waves, then swims out into the ocean as if flaunting her sexual freedom. In this case, one could ask if the self-sufficient woman who abandons her man in a drunken daze is being punished for the sin of independence.
Presumably Steven Spielberg made this alteration, having his shark target a liberated woman rather than a decadent one, because a feminist victim might arouse trendier emotions than a woman who was simply licentious.
Either way, it’s a hell of a sexy way to open. Coupling the shark’s violent rampage with the naked fumblings of two lovers puts into motion an erotic undercurrent that moves through the entire novel.
The only other true sex scene in Jaws involves a tête-à-tête between Brody’s wife, Ellen, and Hooper, the visiting shark expert. Ellen’s motivation for straying has more to do with a need to affirm her sexuality and her upper-class background than with a romantic attraction to Hooper.
Ellen gets her wish and spends a few steamy hours engaged in a hotel romp with Hooper. The experience redefines her in ways she hadn’t expected. Hooper, it turns out, is about as sexy as an android on autopilot.
His teeth were still clenched, his eyes still fixed on the wall, and he continued to pump madly.… After a while, she had tapped him on the back and said softly, “Hey, I’m here too.”
Hooper must’ve learned his mating habits from the fish he studies—so spasmodic, so inhuman, so violent.
It would be a stretch to claim that Sarah and Ellen are “liberated” by their adulterous affairs. But both women do return to their marriages with a gratitude and calm that is noticeably similar. One could make the case that such a pattern might be simply a wishful fantasy that male bestseller authors promote about infidelity—that strong and wayward women will eventually see the light and return to the marriage bed with new commitment. Wishful fantasy or not, these two twentieth-century married women wind up sharing a similar toughness and resolve to renew their commitment to a traditional marriage.
CHEATING
John Grisham puts a tempting island girl in Mitch McDeere’s path while he’s off on a business trip to the Cayman Islands. On the deserted beach in the tropical darkness, this dark-haired beauty shucks off her bikini top and hands it to Mitch and wades into the sea. (Doesn’t she know there are sharks out there?)
Mitch debates it for a sentence or two, then strips and wades out after her. They consummate their encounter back on the sand, with Mitch chanting to himself that no one will ever know.
Not so quick. The woman was a setup, part of the firm’s master plan to keep their legal associates in line. Pictures were taken of Mitch and the island beauty, and the firm’s enforcer shows them to Mitch with a threat. Play along, buy your new, flashier car, your bigger house, just like the other lawyers at the firm. But don’t try to be heroic. Or these pictures will destroy your marriage.
Although it’s an errant husband this time instead of a straying wife, the formula holds, for Mitch’s infidelity eventually helps to renew the marriage. His relationship with Abby is under serious strain from Mitch’s workaholic schedule. Abby chafes in the role of model wife and homemaker. She’s increasingly lonely and frustrated, a young wife who has made one too many candlelit dinners that her husband failed to attend. For a marriage under so much stress, Mitch’s one-night stand could be the final straw.
Like Sarah Bracknell’s infidelity in The Dead Zone and Ellen Brody’s motel fling in Jaws, Mitch’s beach shenanigans become a watershed moment in his marriage. He never actually confesses, but he certainly sweats bullets when one evening he comes home to find Abby with a mailing envelope marked “Photographs” lying at the foot of the bed. It takes a few moments before Mitch realizes the mailer was empty—just a sadistic reminder from his adversaries that they have the power to expose his unfaithfulness.
After this crisis, the marriage takes a turn. Though we never see Mitch acknowledging his deceit, his guilt seems to tip the balance of power between him and Abby and gives him a new appreciation for his marriage. And though Abby is unaware of the cause of this change, she energetically embraces her new role as Mitch’s co-conspirator. If they’re not exactly equal partners, it’s awfully close.
Holed up in a shabby apartment, copying incriminating evidence on Bendini, Lambert & Locke, Abby sheds her passivity and blossoms into a strong, decisive woman. One evening when Mitch arrives at the door of the rented apartment where Abby’s working, it’s like old times back in that law school flat—this time with Abby as the initiator of sex and behaving every bit like Mitch’s coequal. Abby pulls open the door and throws herself on Mitch. The sex scene that follows is more heated and more satisfying than any before or after. It’s a watershed moment between these two. Sex that seals the deal and establishes the terms of their new, more equal partnership.
The couple eventually pull off their scheme and escape to a safe Caribbean sanctuary, well beyond the reach of the Mob or the FBI or financial worries. However, the aftereffects of Mitch’s hanky-panky linger.
He fumbles for a moment, then lies and says no, he hasn’t.
One could certainly argue that Mitch’s dishonesty might eventually undermine the authenticity of the McDeeres’ more balanced relations. But even with that caveat, it’s clear that the Abby we see in the final scene is a stronger woman than we’ve seen before. With a new assertiveness in full flower, she is given the novel’s last words. Calling the shots in a way that would have been unthinkable a hundred pages earlier. A newly independent woman determined to have her own version of a traditional family.
“Then drink up, sailor. Let’s get drunk and make a baby.”
SEXUAL AWAKENING
At the head of the class of adultery bestsellers is The Bridges of Madison County. Though Francesca’s marriage to her boring farmer husband is not rejuvenated or strengthened in any way that we can see by the long hours of extramarital sex with Robert Kincaid, she certainly stores away sufficient memories of erotic satisfaction to console her for the rest of her days. And without a doubt, she’s changed as radically by the brief affair as Allison or Scarlett or Abby or Sarah or Ellen Brody.
Indeed, the language of the one long and detailed sex scene suggests that Robert Kincaid’s transformative powers are virtually supernatural. He takes “possession of her, in all of her dimensions.” He seems “shamanlike” as he whispers in her ear … kissing her between his words. The man’s a talker all right, almost hypnotic in his seductive powers.
This erotic possession could be seen as a much kinder, gentler version of the one described in The Exorcist when prepubescent Regan MacNeil, invaded by Satan, masturbates with a crucifix and spews vile sexual come-ons to the celibate Father Karras.
Though Francesca describes in flattering terms the otherworldly power Robert exerts over her, one can’t help but question whose point of view is being stated when he “ran his tongue along her neck, licking her as some fine leopard might do in long grass out on the veldt.”
The guy’s an animal, the graceful kind who dominates with soft power.
The love affair transfigures Francesca. Her womanliness is awakened, her life is given a meaning and dimensionality it was lacking before. In a parting letter to her children, Francesca sums it up succinctly:
“In four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole.”
Of course, some would argue that Francesca’s epiphany is nothing more than the sexist fantasy of a self-indulgent male author—behold what magical powers a man can bestow on a woman if she would just peel off that dress and lie back.
If Bridges were the only novel on our list of bestsellers that depicted the transformative power of sex, such a critique might carry more weight. But the pattern recurs with such regularity in bestsellers, whether written by men or women, that we must ask the larger question: Why does a single sexual episode play such a pivotal role in so many hugely successful American novels?
Well, it might have something to do with our intense and deeply rooted national ambivalence about sex and adultery. Our libraries are filled with works that many consider classics in which two opposing moral forces are at war: America’s prudishness vs. its rebellious and rule-breaking spirit.
At the dawn of American literary history, we find a well-known precursor to the moral story line of so many bestsellers. Remember Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth and Hester Prynne and her out-of-wedlock daughter, Pearl, from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter? In her Puritan settlement, Hester’s promiscuity, which is made apparent by the birth of Pearl, is punished by a prison term. Upon Hester’s release from jail, with Pearl in her arms, she is required to wear a red letter A emblazoned on her chest. Shunned by her God-fearing neighbors, Hester is the target of universal contempt, but somehow through it all she manages to retain a humble and forgiving demeanor.
Dimmesdale, the young, eloquent “cheating minister” who is Hester’s secret lover, is the one who is truly tormented by guilt. As the story unfolds, little by little Hester wins back the respect of the townsfolk through acts of charity and kindness until finally this profligate woman is on the verge of being readmitted into mainstream society. But wait, there’s a complication. Hester and Dimmesdale want more than forgiveness—they want to live together as man and wife.
Despite the danger, the lovers can’t be kept apart. In a forest meeting, the two decide to flee to Europe, where they will be free to live openly with their child. Transformed by this decision, Dimmesdale gives a passionate sermon before his congregation that makes the identical case Atticus Finch will make again almost two centuries later. A paean to empathy in which Dimmesdale extols those “sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind … that his chest vibrate[s] in unison with theirs.”
In 1850 when Hawthorne’s novel was published, reactions ranged from deep suspicion to outright scorn. Many believed Hester’s promiscuity was treated far too sympathetically by the author. And, of course, those self-righteous critics were absolutely correct. Hawthorne’s moral outrage was clearly leveled at the repressive society that ostracized Hester rather than at her adulterous misbehavior.
So it was from the beginning in American letters that sin and religious beliefs and moral righteousness were a central part of the discussion when it came to literary criticism. To many American readers, if not most, novels that were not morally uplifting were considered devious and corrupt.
However, Hawthorne saw it otherwise, and in that way he had written a novel that greatly resembles the twelve we’re examining. From Hawthorne’s time forward, the notion that a single sexual act, even if it’s an act of adultery, can have a redemptive power has been a central pattern in American fiction.
At the very least, we can say that Americans are deeply conflicted about sex, and that powerful ambivalence is what we’re seeing in these highly successful books.
RELIGIOUS SEX
In the beginning, Dan Brown created The Da Vinci Code, and it was good, and everybody liked it because it was about sex. No, scratch that. It was about religion. Well, no, make that religion and sex. Oh, okay, it was about religion, sex, and feminine power, and the long and sordid history of male suppression of women.
Here’s a spoiler, so those two or three people who’ve not yet read The Da Vinci Code should skip the following paragraph.
Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene. And lo, she became heavy with child, and the celibate priests, fearing the loss of their power, declared women to be unclean and hid Mary’s pregnancy. A few righteous insurgents spirited away her child to some secret place, and forever after, the sinister wing of the Catholic Church went to great lengths in their pursuit of Christ’s heirs and used every resource at their disposal, including murder, to keep Christ’s sexiness hidden from humanity for a couple of millennia until Robert Langdon yanked back the curtains and exposed the truth.
So there’s the capper—the big secret. Two thousand years ago, Jesus had sex. Women are not unclean after all. They’re actually goddesses. Especially Sophie Neveu, who apparently is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ himself.
It should be clear by now that Mr. Brown was making use of a narrative pattern we’ve seen a few times before: one sex scene that changes everything.
In fact, this particular sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a moment that of course is never actually presented dramatically but which readers are invited to imagine for themselves, is the driving force in this novel, the cornerstone on which is built the elaborate structure of a worldwide, multicentury conspiracy. It’s the event that sets in motion the murder spree of an albino monk, and it’s the cause of all the deadly machinations of Opus Dei that send our sturdy hero, Robert, and
his plucky sidekick, Sophie, running for their lives through one long, treacherous maze.
That long-ago sexual incident is the equivalent of the love affair and marriage that fuel Ramius’s desertion to America (The Hunt for Red October). It’s the terrible sexual hypocrisy and double-dealing that are at the core of Peyton Place and Mockingbird. It’s the dance of sexual exploitation that drives Gone with the Wind and Valley of the Dolls. It’s the shark that punishes women who have sexually liberated themselves in Jaws. It’s the devil that impregnates the blossoming young daughter of a proudly independent woman (The Exorcist). Again and again we see permutations of this pattern in our twelve megahits, as though bestselling novelists were channeling the biblical story of Eden: Once the snake has done its sneaky job, a new world dawns.
AMERICAN SEX
Five centuries after Boccaccio’s Decameron first appeared, featuring sweaty sexcapades between Italian nuns and monks in convents, the book was seized and destroyed by American authorities. James Joyce’s Ulysses suffered a similar fate, as did Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was not available from a U.S. publisher until almost thirty years after it first appeared in a French edition. And numerous literary luminaries including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner wrote novels deemed by many to be grossly improper, if not downright degenerate. While those novels were not banned outright, they were certainly the object of strong moral disapproval from many quarters.
Which is to say that it’s important to remind ourselves that puritanism is alive and well in mainstream America and that many of us, despite a private devotion to the multibillion-dollar business of pornography, are still just a short distance removed from our book-burning ancestors.
It was in 1873 that Anthony Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization determined to regulate the morality of the public. So successful was Comstock in making his case, he eventually engineered the passage of the Comstock Act in the United States Congress, making it illegal to deliver or transport “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Or for that matter any information relating to birth control.