Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall

families and the Corleones at war with the civilized law-abiding world.
    Part of the novel’s appeal is that it provides us with an exhaustive diagram of the power structure of a vast and widespreadcriminal organization that reaches into nearly every corner of American society. That we learn little of Michael Corleone’s psychodynamics or spend practically no time at all inside the Don’s mind seems a small price to pay for such a thorough tour of this network of killers and thieves.
    And what of
Jaws
and that great white shark that rises from the sea like … a supersilent, supersecret nuclear-powered submarine? It is not some puny fish, no, but the ultimate shark, the shark to beat all sharks, coming from earthshaking depths. It rattles the entire island town of Amity, from lowly fishermen to the haughty mayor, and the ripples of its passing spread well beyond the tiny town it’s taken such an interest in. A shark with scope.
    Then there is
The Exorcist
. Is it possible to find an antagonist of any greater scale than Satan himself? Not likely. It is Satan’s voice and Satan’s sickening smell and Satan’s horrifying possession of a young girl-child that calls forth the full weight of Christianity to exorcise it. Good versus Evil with head-spinning terror.
    Peyton Place is not simply a small New England town. It is
every
small American town with its secrets, its hypocrisies, its abortions, its incest, its teen sex, its pulsing, heaving, sweaty sexual violence. Peyton Place is America, the polite, mannered façade pulled back to reveal the squirming reality below. Like
To Kill a Mockingbird
, the book is a broad examination of the corrupt mores and class warfare that Americans would rather not admit to. In that sense, it is far more than a lurid exposé of the naughty private lives of the citizens of a small New England town. It attempts to chronicle the principal social issues of the postwar era—primarily the repression and exploitation of women and the impoverished—and seeks to record their brave attempts at emancipation.
    In
The Firm
, John Grisham doesn’t just take us on a ride through the inner workings of a small southern law firm. He sends a top Harvard Law School grad, Mitch McDeere, to work for a firm so shady, so murderous, so utterly corrupt, that a man no less grand than the director of the FBI shows up in an isolated public park to recruit Mitch to exorcise this malignant multinational business from American life. As one FBI agent puts it to Mitch:
    “You can build a case from the inside that will collapse the firm and break up one of the largest crime families in the country.”
    Big, bigger, biggest.
    When Jacqueline Susann creates an early incarnation of
Sex and the City
, she plops her three young working gals into two of the biggest American cities, New York and Los Angeles, sending them off to mingle with the most glamorous celebrities and showbiz personalities of all time. We are dazzled by movie stars, Broadway celebrities, the most influential entertainment power brokers, and debauchery on the grandest of scales.
    In
The Dead Zone
, Stephen King sets John Smith’s story against a backdrop of political upheaval, the sixties and early seventies. Woodstock, Watergate, Kent State. John misses four years of that tumultuous period while in a coma and wakes to find the Vietnam War ended and Nixon hounded from office. Putting the novel in political context is crucial to the foreground story, for after John wakes from his Rip van Winkle snooze, he must decide whether or not to put his precognitive abilities to use in a scheme to assassinate Greg Stillson, a megalomaniacal politician with his eyes on the White House. By this point in the novel, John’s “second sight” hasbeen widely publicized and his exploits have become the stuff of national news.
    In the smaller foreground story, set against this sweeping backdrop, John Smith realizes with growing dread that he must execute Stillson, because