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

bestseller
Nineteen Eighty-four
.
    The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country.
    In a time of perpetual war, with the thought police and Big Brother constantly spying, Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel, escapes frequently to this wistful, sexy fantasyland to reestablish his connection to a lost natural world he only vaguely recalls. It is a place of languid streams and verdant fields and swaying elm trees with leaves stirring “in dense masses like women’s hair.”
    What relief Winston feels from the pressures of his robotic routines is fleeting. Yet for the reader, the lyrical glow of these fragments stands out sharply against the no-frills prose Orwell uses throughout the novel to portray the drab and oppressive futuristic society.
    American writers typically portray Eden with a bit more ambivalence than the Englishman Orwell. Take the famous portrait of American paradise in
Walden
, Thoreau’s celebrated treatise on living in the wild. Utopian, yes. Edenic, yes. But
Walden
is at least as much a pragmatic how-to manual asit is an inspirational document. Thoreau was an American writer through and through, as interested in the utilitarian methods of surviving in the wilderness as he was in the rhapsodic descriptions of natural beauty. And so it is with the presentation of nature in American bestsellers, where we find Edens that for all their restorative beauty are both ephemeral and dangerous landscapes that must be mastered.
AMERICA, THE OLD WORLD
AND THE NEW
    American readers have a powerful hankering for stories grounded in the earth itself. Surely part of this hunger is connected to one of our central national myths—America as the new Eden. A land of second chances, fresh beginnings in the virginal wilderness.
    By and large, our Puritan forebears were rapturous about the abundance and beauty of God’s handiwork that greeted them in the New World. They saw in the pristine forests an earthly paradise with all its pleasures and temptations. Later generations of Americans, both religious and secular, have seen our awe-inspiring mountain ranges and woodlands and great canyons as national monuments, roughly equivalent to the great cathedrals of Europe. Sure, we may not have Notre Dame or Chartres, but just look at those Rockies.
    The American wilderness forged our pioneer spirit and helped stamp us with an enduring rough-and-tumble sensibility that distinguishes us from our fussy cousins across the Atlantic. For Americans, nature is not just some sublime and misty mountain peak awash in a romantic glow, it is also the bronco that needs breaking, the rocky, stump-filled pasturethat must be cleared if we are to plant our crops and survive, or that mountain range that must be conquered so our westward progress can continue. It is the dense forest where savages hide, where grizzlies, rattlesnakes, and other decidedly unfriendly creatures lurk.
    Such is the dangerous Eden that Michael Corleone stumbles into in
The Godfather
. After murdering an American police captain, the Godfather’s youngest son, Michael, flees to Sicily to lie low until the legal fuss blows over back home. It is a decidedly utilitarian and unromantic man who arrives in Sicily, an American pragmatist through and through.
    But during his idyllic interlude he encounters a primal young woman named Apollonia, and Michael is immediately struck by an emotional thunderbolt: “This was an overwhelming desire for possession, this was an unerasable printing of the girl’s face on the brain.…”
    After a brief courtship, the two are married and Michael spends a few blissful pages under the spell of Apollonia’s sensual aura as well as the lush primitivism of Sicily. One morning, Michael awakes and in a passage exceedingly unique in
The Godfather
for its poetic imagery, he seems more mellow,