Read Online Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall - Free Book Online
Authors: James W. Hall
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cultural nerve that was already raw.
HOT BUTTON #7
Evildoers
In the case of
Jaws
, there’s a civic tension at the crux of the story that is as old as our nation itself. Before he can close the beaches and protect the citizens of his fair town, Sheriff Brody must get the approval of an unsympathetic mayor and town council. The politicians who run the island don’t want to yell “Shark!” at the town’s most profitable time of the year. By pitting government-supported greed against populist forces and the general welfare of the common man,
Jaws
tapped into both the long-term American mistrust of political authority and its contemporary manifestation, which at that point in our history had reached hot-button proportions after years of cultural clashes over the Vietnam War and the recent resignation of Richard Nixon.
Given all that, it was no wonder that elected officials were seen by many as the greatest evildoers, right up there with sharks, men who had only the interests of the wealthy and powerful in mind when deciding policy. At the same time,almost as many readers were sympathetic to the opposite position, a belief that the conventional structures of power should hold firm against dangerous counterculture lawlessness.
The central conflict of the first third of
Jaws
fits that pattern perfectly by reenacting a moral sellout of its citizens by its political leaders, a conflict that split the nation back then and splits it still.
At the same time, from its very first scene the novel raised another topic that was about as hot-button as it got back in the dawning of the age of Aquarius, when one female member of a group of pot-smoking, orgy-loving Woodstock types has some liberated sex right out on a public beach, then goes swimming nude in the ocean, where that young lady gets exactly what she deserves. Eaten.
HOT BUTTON #8
News That Stays News
Ezra Pound, that modernist poet and literary kingmaker and political nut job, had a good one-liner for poetry that seems appropriate here. He called it “news that stays news.”
By that he meant something similar to what I’m saying about hot-button issues that stay hot. Good writing passes the spoilage test. It doesn’t smell after a year or two of being left out on the counter.
That’s the sort of writing that characterizes
The Dead Zone
, in which Stephen King snagged the attention of many contemporary readers by providing a very hip up-to-the-minute social history of the four-year span when Johnny Smith was missing in action, hospitalized in a supernaturalcoma. Poor Johnny missed a lot of stuff, but it was mostly the kind of news that grows a little rank after a week or two.
Nixon was reinaugurated. The American boys started coming home from Vietnam.… The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go.
A lot of this, King seems to suggest, is well worth sleeping through. The ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the coming and going of one political outrage after another. This news-crawl vision of current events is the background against which the monstrous rise of the Hitlerian Greg Stillson is set. Stillson is the news that stays news, a hot button that will always be hot. He’s an election year archetype, the second coming of the Antichrist, the rough beast whose hour has come round at last.
HOT BUTTON #9
Hush-Hush
Becoming President Ronald Reagan’s favorite book brought
The Hunt for Red October
out of the depths of obscurity. But for that missile of good fortune to lock on to its target and blow sales records to smithereens, this novel had to deliver a payload that folks beyond the D.C. Beltway cared about.
Clancy accomplished that by using such an abundance of technical detail and by being so fluent in military protocol and seafaring lingo that he created the illusion he might be privy to national Defense Department secrets. He seemed toknow stuff that was so hush-hush, so
HOT BUTTON #7
Evildoers
In the case of
Jaws
, there’s a civic tension at the crux of the story that is as old as our nation itself. Before he can close the beaches and protect the citizens of his fair town, Sheriff Brody must get the approval of an unsympathetic mayor and town council. The politicians who run the island don’t want to yell “Shark!” at the town’s most profitable time of the year. By pitting government-supported greed against populist forces and the general welfare of the common man,
Jaws
tapped into both the long-term American mistrust of political authority and its contemporary manifestation, which at that point in our history had reached hot-button proportions after years of cultural clashes over the Vietnam War and the recent resignation of Richard Nixon.
Given all that, it was no wonder that elected officials were seen by many as the greatest evildoers, right up there with sharks, men who had only the interests of the wealthy and powerful in mind when deciding policy. At the same time,almost as many readers were sympathetic to the opposite position, a belief that the conventional structures of power should hold firm against dangerous counterculture lawlessness.
The central conflict of the first third of
Jaws
fits that pattern perfectly by reenacting a moral sellout of its citizens by its political leaders, a conflict that split the nation back then and splits it still.
At the same time, from its very first scene the novel raised another topic that was about as hot-button as it got back in the dawning of the age of Aquarius, when one female member of a group of pot-smoking, orgy-loving Woodstock types has some liberated sex right out on a public beach, then goes swimming nude in the ocean, where that young lady gets exactly what she deserves. Eaten.
HOT BUTTON #8
News That Stays News
Ezra Pound, that modernist poet and literary kingmaker and political nut job, had a good one-liner for poetry that seems appropriate here. He called it “news that stays news.”
By that he meant something similar to what I’m saying about hot-button issues that stay hot. Good writing passes the spoilage test. It doesn’t smell after a year or two of being left out on the counter.
That’s the sort of writing that characterizes
The Dead Zone
, in which Stephen King snagged the attention of many contemporary readers by providing a very hip up-to-the-minute social history of the four-year span when Johnny Smith was missing in action, hospitalized in a supernaturalcoma. Poor Johnny missed a lot of stuff, but it was mostly the kind of news that grows a little rank after a week or two.
Nixon was reinaugurated. The American boys started coming home from Vietnam.… The second Arab-Israeli war came and went. The oil boycott came and went. Bruisingly high gasoline prices came and did not go.
A lot of this, King seems to suggest, is well worth sleeping through. The ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the coming and going of one political outrage after another. This news-crawl vision of current events is the background against which the monstrous rise of the Hitlerian Greg Stillson is set. Stillson is the news that stays news, a hot button that will always be hot. He’s an election year archetype, the second coming of the Antichrist, the rough beast whose hour has come round at last.
HOT BUTTON #9
Hush-Hush
Becoming President Ronald Reagan’s favorite book brought
The Hunt for Red October
out of the depths of obscurity. But for that missile of good fortune to lock on to its target and blow sales records to smithereens, this novel had to deliver a payload that folks beyond the D.C. Beltway cared about.
Clancy accomplished that by using such an abundance of technical detail and by being so fluent in military protocol and seafaring lingo that he created the illusion he might be privy to national Defense Department secrets. He seemed toknow stuff that was so hush-hush, so
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