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

harvested. It’s as close to pure, unadulterated Eden as one can find in the area around Peyton Place. Allison goes there to commune with nature and to bask in its calming effects. However, only twenty-five pages after this moment when we first see her bathing in the golden ecstatic glow of her secret garden, Allison leads her tough-minded friend, Selena, to her spot, and at that moment everything changes.
    Selena refuses to walk out into the woods with Allison.And Allison calls her mean and hateful for rejecting her “secret place.” Taking a perverse pleasure in deflating her innocence, Selena reveals to Allison that this is where boys bring girls at night to make out. It’s been happening forever at this exact spot.
    Naïve Allison has unwittingly chosen lovers’ lane as her Golden Country. And not just any lovers’ lane, but lovers’ lane in Peyton Place, a town of sexual extravagance and all manner of smutty behavior. The poor girl has chosen for her personal holiest of holies the most profane spot in a profane town.
    In its irony and dark realism, this scene is a paradigm for the entire novel. Sooner or later, nearly every character will go through a shift of awareness similar to Allison’s. In the course of the story, whatever illusions they once held are eventually stripped away.
    In fact, Allison returns to her secret place later in the novel and shares a first kiss with a boy named Norman Page. Norman discusses what he’s learned about sex from reading a book on the subject. His bookishness, however, doesn’t stir Allison’s blood, and his gentle kisses fail to arouse her. Their foreplay in the heart of Allison’s Golden Country comes to nothing.
    The payoff for this unfulfilled sexual moment is decisive, however, and reshapes the trajectory of Allison’s life. She decides she wants a man whose passion isn’t book-learned but springs from some natural sensuality that is as wild and unrestrained as the wilderness that backdrops her first kiss. Much of what she becomes as an adult can be traced to a few crucial scenes that take place here.
    In the final pages of the novel, after being cruelly deceived by a lover and learning of her own illegitimate birth, aftercoming to grips with Peyton Place’s sordid history of suicides and abortions and incestuous rapes, Allison returns to her Golden Place for solace. It doesn’t have all the magic it once had, but it has enough. She sits and reflects for a long time, fondling a flower, rediscovering a portion of the profound comfort she felt as a child.
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY
    For the islanders in
Jaws
, paradise is an isolated sanctuary that they rent out to interlopers for part of each year. Their economy depends on the annual migration of tourists. But before the throngs arrive, we get a glimpse of the island in its natural state.
    Soft winds ripple the sea, a crispness fills the air at night, after long sunny days that warm the sandy beach. It’s all so calm and beautiful.
    Shortly thereafter, a skinny-dipper’s mutilated body washes ashore, and that’s the end of paradise. The good sheriff Martin Brody wants to go public with the truth, that a killer shark is on the prowl. But the mayor fears economic catastrophe if the vacationers who are the lifeblood of the community are scared away. In effect, the mayor wants to perpetrate a hoax—to make believe that Eden is still Eden, that the finned snake has not appeared.
    For those like Brody, the natural world of Amity, the beach, the ocean, the sunny summer days, and the shark itself have religious heft. On the other hand, the mayor and his allies view nature as a commodity whose only purpose is to be merchandised. As is so often the case in America, one man’s Golden Country is another man’s Golden Opportunity.
    Just as commerce contaminates Mitch and Abby’s Shangri-la and lustful teenagers invade Allison MacKenzie’s secret place, tourists from the city will intrude on this sanctuary and put the