Les secrets des best-sellers
Sarah Weinman
[…]
But in his new book, Hit Lit, mystery writer James W. Hall makes a case that the biggest hits from the past hundred years share 12 features.
Almost every one of the best-sellers engaged with the hot-button social issue of its time — race (Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird), sex (Valley of the Dolls) or politics (The Hunt for Red October) — expressing, in Hall’s words, “some larger, deep-seated and unresolved conflict in the national consciousness.” Again and again, the books feature fractured families and protagonists who are outsiders. “What’s true for Scarlett [O’Hara] is also true for Allison MacKenzie and Jack Ryan and Mitch McDeere and Professor Robert Langdon,” he writes. And the American Dream (or Dream Deferred or Dream Perverted) looms large as a motif; it is variously exalted or depicted as corrupt (Peyton Place), even nightmarish (The Dead Zone, Jaws). Secret societies abound (The Godfather, The Firm and, of course, The Da Vinci Code), which Hall interprets as speaking to the American “suspicion of institutions, public and private, that might in some way undermine our personal liberties.” […]