Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers (22 page)

All four of these men become mavericks, but not by choice. Maverickhood is thrust upon them. They are forced almost against their will to act beyond the conventional patterns of behavior they’ve always embraced.

They are forced to be heroic and must summon their special skills, from second sight in Johnny’s case, to the grim combat skills Michael Corleone mastered while fighting for his country’s survival, to the cunning legal expertise Mitch employs to incriminate those who seek to destroy him. Jack Ryan’s knowledge base also comes in handy, and he’s recruited to handle negotiations that are far beyond his comfort zone of military duties.

Each man simply wanted the ordinary satisfactions of the culture. They had intended to fit in. But circumstances forced their hand and gave them a test they dared not fail.

As a Dartmouth grad and war hero, Michael Corleone doesn’t have the street cred of his brothers, Sonny and Fredo, or even the orphan the Don adopted, Tom Hagen, all of whom stayed home in the Mafia trenches and made their bones in the usual ways. Michael’s desire to fit into conventional American life makes him a bit of a maverick as far as Mafia men are concerned.

When the Don gets whacked and is almost killed, Michael struggles to retain his outsider status. However, his Corleone genes ignite when a punch in the jaw from a cop seems to
wake him from his civilian daze. He gives up his conscientious objector status and joins the fray.

In time, Michael will learn more about the roots of this organization he’s taken over. He’ll discover its own maverick history. How when his Sicilian ancestors were repressed by cruel rulers (“landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church”), the common folks had learned that “society was their enemy, so when they sought redress for their wrongs they went to the rebel underground.”

Michael, the war hero, the Ivy League boy, who will always be something of an outsider, takes control of a band of antisocial types who have lawlessness at their marrow. A maverick leading mavericks.

As Robert Kincaid comes rumbling across the bridges of Madison County in his pleasantly dented pickup truck, he’s wearing the all-American maverick costume of “faded Levi’s, well-used Red Wing field boots, a khaki shirt, and orange suspenders. On his wide leather belt was fastened a Swiss Army knife in its own case.”

In case his individualism isn’t nailed down firmly enough by those orange suspenders, Robert provides further evidence in this recollection from his younger days. “When other kids were singing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat,’ he was learning the melody and English words to a French cabaret song.”

Though his IQ was off the charts, Robert rejected all that intellectual crap and spent his time reading “all the adventure and travel books in the local library and kept to himself otherwise, spending days along the river that ran through the
edge of town, ignoring proms and football games and other things that bored him. He fished and swam and walked and lay in long grass listening to distant voices he fancied only he could hear. ‘There are wizards out there,’ he used to say to himself. ‘If you’re quiet and open enough to hear them, they’re out there.’ ”

Oh, they’re out there all right. Huck heard them long ago. And John Smith hears them, too.

For Robert, being a maverick is conveniently conflated with being a seducer of married women. Though he experiences a moment of hesitation, considering “the propriety drummed in by centuries of culture, the hard rules of civilized man,” those conventional restraints dissolve when he starts to wonder how her hair would feel and how her body would fit beneath his.

Later on, after Robert and Francesca have spent a few ecstatic hours between the sheets, Robert lets her know just what kind of maverick she’s gotten mixed up with. He refers to himself “as one of the last cowboys” and goes on to explain how society’s normal conventions don’t apply to him. All its rules and regulations and social conventions and laws are way too “organized” for Robert. Hierarchies of authority? Fie on them. Long-range budgets? Pooh. A world of “wrinkled suits and stick-on name tags”? No thanks, not for this cowboy.

At moments such as these, when he claims he’s exempt from morality and has an inalienable right to sleep with married women, Robert Kincaid seems like such a smugly narcissistic blowhard, my bet is the Honorable Samuel Maverick would be tempted to rise from his lethargy, fire up his branding iron, and put his mark on this guy just to show him what being a real cowboy is all about.

And what of Professor Robert Langdon? Well, considering he’s on nearly every page of
The Da Vinci Code
, it’s a bit surprising how little we know about his personal life, or even his appearance. In
The Da Vinci Code
, the most detailed physical description of him is that he resembles “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed.”

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.

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.”