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

John has seen in one of his precognitive visions of the future that Stillson plays a crucial role in promoting evil. Stillson is about to become a Hitler or bin Laden, and John Smith is the world’s only hope to prevent a certain Armageddon.
    The stakes are high. They couldn’t be higher.
FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
    While Americans can stake no claim to the epic form, or to novels with panoramic sweep, we do have a national predisposition for expansiveness in general and a weakness for boastful, sprawling Whitmanesque stories. I am large, Whitman liked to say, referring to America. I contain multitudes.
    It seems that when book buyers decide to spend the price of a restaurant meal for a work of fiction, most want their stories to be more than just a plate of tapas. They want to gorge on big, bustling, manifest destiny, shining city on a hill, sloppy Joe calories. We want our books to measure up to our own supersized sense of what matters most.
    So it is that Scarlett and Mitch McDeere and Jack Ryan and Scout and their brethren are unmistakably American in the vastness of their aspirations and their outsized bravery in the face of enormous tasks and dangers. Though these characters are defined far more by their social class and their families and extended families and by their jobs than by the innerworkings of their psyches, what they may lack in emotional dimensionality they make up for in scale.
    Just as I expected before I read any of these novels, their pages are populated with apparent stereotypes—the self-absorbed, superficial southern belle, the young lawyer on the make, the stalwart, stuffy CIA analyst, the guileless small-town girl who loses her innocence. So how is it that each of these characters blindsided me with such force that they made me question my cocky assumptions that psychological complexity was the sine qua non of literary achievement?
    My students and I came to believe that the answer lies partly in the wide scope of bestsellers. Because these characters perform against the vast backdrops of American politics and social upheaval, and because their personal destinies, their wishes, and their dreams are inextricably fused with the largest and most crucial concerns of the nation, Scarlett and Mitch and Jack and Scout and the others cannot help but stir us. They are ordinary American folks from humble roots who have answered some resounding call and risen beyond their limitations to impossible heights. If their battles had been smaller, less important, less connected to the national pulse, frankly, most of us wouldn’t have given a damn.

FEATURE #4
The Golden Country
    For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate [with] his capacity for wonder.
    — F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,
THE GREAT GATSBY
    America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity, is one of the key motifs in all our twelve bestsellers
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    I t’s hard to top Fitzgerald when it comes to rhapsodizing about the New World, but here’s Thomas Morton in 1622, a more or less typical colonial settler, enthusing about the lush wilderness of America: “I do not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be parallel’d … so many goodly groves of trees; dainty fine round rising hillucks … sweet crystal fountains, and cleare running streams.”
    Nearly four hundred years after Morton stepped ashore, fictional portrayals of the natural world still have immense power to stir our American hearts. And it seems that bestselling authors have absorbed this lesson well.
    As my students and I were beginning to compare bestsellers from past eras, this feature was one of the first we spotted—images of a lost Eden. We came to refer to this recurring phenomenon as the Golden Country, a phrase we lifted from George Orwell’s