What’s It Like Reading ‘Peyton Place’ Today? - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/books/review/whats-it-like...

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SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW What’s It Like Reading ‘Peyton Place’ Today?

MARCH 4, 2014

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Thomas Mallon and Anna Holmes discuss what it’s like reading “Peyton Place” today, 50 years after the death of its author, Grace Metalious. By Thomas Mallon In the parlance of the time, people purchased the novel “for one thing only,” and they didn’t care about its mind. Grace Metalious’s first novel has survived for so long as a steamy meme — “Locked in the bathroom with ‘Peyton Place’!” sings one character recalling his adolescence in “A Chorus Line” — that at this remove it’s hard to see the book for the phenomenon. When I recently opened up a copy, I discovered that its 15th print run, issued a year after initial publication, was still dappled with typos, an indication of how fast and heedlessly 1950s readers had needed to get to third base with this text. “Peyton Place” was the local bookshop’s bad girl, the paper- and-print equivalent of its own Betty Anderson. In the parlance of the time, people purchased it “for one thing only,” and they didn’t care about its mind. Today’s reader will get a number of surprises. For all its association with the Eisenhower era, about two-thirds of “Peyton Place” is set in the 1930s; the rest takes place during World War II. The book is as much about poverty as sex, its story driven by the economic disparity between the local gentry on Chestnut Street and the folks living in tar-paper shacks on the edges of town. The sex is often sad and desperate, forced or incomplete, approached with a Dreiserian naturalism rather than any simple effort to titillate. The town doctor tells of “a young boy with the worst case of dehydration I ever saw. It came from getting too many enemas that he didn’t need. Sex, with a capital S-E-X.”

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Metalious’s writing is mostly undemanding, but it’s also, often . . . not bad. Compared with Jacqueline Susann, her 1960s successor, she reads like Willa Cather. “Peyton Place” is at its best when the author gives us portraits of women with a moment to themselves, reflective, solitary stretches in which we glimpse Mary Kelley, a hospital nurse who secretively assists with an abortion; Elsie Thornton, a spinster schoolteacher; and Nellie Cross, an abused wife who presents herself in a Molly Bloom-like monologue just before committing suicide. At peak moments the book rises to low-level John O’Hara (yes, that’s a compliment). Consider Metalious’s shrewd rendering of how a lawyer in town unwisely fell for his future wife when he saw her singing in church: “Charles Partridge had caught his breath and believed that the girl looked like an angel. In this he was mistaken. It was neither rapture nor exultation which shone from Marion. She had much of this same look whenever she lay in a tub of hot water, or whenever she ate something she particularly liked.” Unlike the sexual automatons of romance novels and beach books, some of Metalious’s characters are actually, by E. M. Forster’s old definition, round. Constance MacKenzie, the dress-shop owner hiding the secret of her daughter’s illegitimacy, is sympathetic and pretentious; brittle and basically well intentioned: interesting, in a word. The book is scarcely feminist — its wisest speeches are given to Dr. Swain and Tomas Makris, the new school principal — but its real hero is Selena Cross, a girl who kills the stepfather who raped her. Metalious’s own experience of New England had included all kinds of want and unhappiness. She knew what she wished to say about gossip and shame and small-town telephone party lines, and she could say it deftly: “That evening, the true story about Betty Anderson was served, along with the meat and potatoes, at every supper table in Peyton Place.” Writing in the Book Review on Sept. 23, 1956, Carlos Baker, the Princeton professor and Hemingway scholar, called Metalious “a pretty fair writer for a first novelist,” but his review was headlined “Small Town Peep Show,” and it advised the author to “turn her emancipated talents to less lurid purposes.” He was telling Metalious what she probably already knew: that a girl who wrote about sex could get herself a reputation — and not the literary one that, in at least some small measure, she deserved. Thomas Mallon’s eight novels include “Henry and Clara,” “Bandbox,” “Fellow Travelers” and “Watergate,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He

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has also published nonfiction about plagiarism (“Stolen Words”), diaries (“A Book of One’s Own”), letters (“Yours Ever”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Mrs. Paine’s Garage”), as well as two books of essays (“Rockets and Rodeos” and “In Fact”). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and taught for a number of years at Vassar College. His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style. He has been literary editor of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2012 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently professor of English at George Washington University. ◆ ◆ ◆ By Anna Holmes The town’s chorus of women comes in for a special sort of sadistic dispensation — all of them are made to pay. The experience of reading “Peyton Place” today? Often entertaining, yet frequently frustrating. Not because it’s badly written: The book, widely regarded as an indictment of the self-satisfaction and spiritual bankruptcy beneath the bucolic veneer of small-town America, is fast-paced and sharply plotted. But because the subjects that so scandalized readers back in the mid-1950s — incest, abortion, murder, graphic sex, alcoholism, rape, domestic violence and suicide, to name just a few — are invoked so casually, almost glibly. In fact, sometimes it seems as if Metalious, a housewife and mother who wrote the novel when she was in her early 30s, wasn’t so much trying to make a point about American hypocrisy and ugliness as she was demonstrating fealty to a checklist of topics she had deemed most likely to shock and awe. (The strategy worked. By Day 10 of its publication in September 1956, “Peyton Place” had sold some 60,000 copies. A film was released in 1957, followed by a television show that ran from 1964 to 1969.) To be fair, Metalious’s animating anger against her chosen targets — homogeneity, bigotry, sexism, hypocrisy, self-interested libertarianism, income inequality, male dominion — is understandable, even admirable at times. Take her treatment of race. Although there are no actual people of color in the fictional

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town of a few thousand, some of whose residents have no compunction about using the word “nigger,” it turns out that Peyton Place owes not only its name but its very existence to an escaped slave. This man, Samuel Peyton, somehow made his way to France, amassed a fortune in shipping and returned to the United States to live out his days in a castle he had imported from the British Isles. It’s an interesting trick, this origin story, a comment on the ignorance of the book’s characters and, I suspect, a provocation against the often mythologized and sanitized creation myth of the United States itself. Metalious’s gender politics, however, leave much to be desired. Suffice it to say that the author was either incapable or unwilling to critique the very real violence of patriarchy — physical, psychic and otherwise — without making a simultaneous and cartoonish mockery of femininity. Although the men of “Peyton Place” are by no means immune to the withering disapproval of the author’s poison pen — they beat, they cheat, they rob, they lie — the town’s chorus of women comes in for a special sort of sadistic dispensation. There’s the sexually frustrated, cat-loving spinster; the long-suffering working-class simpleton; the conniving Lady Macbeth; the teenage tramp; the adulterous wife; the hysterical and controlling Queen Jocasta. All of them are here, and all of them are made to pay. Of course, perhaps this — the male commission of crimes that disproportionately target women — was Metalious’s point. Maybe she felt that tarnishing the patina of the picture-perfect New England of the American imagination required the bruised faces and broken bodies of the fairer sex. Maybe she didn’t know how to indict what Carlos Baker’s review in these pages called “the false fronts and bourgeois pretensions of allegedly respectable communities” without resorting to characterizations of women that reduced them to hoary clichés. Maybe she honestly believed that a scene meant to demonstrate the sexual awakening of one of her characters required that this woman, the fair-haired Constance MacKenzie, be forced into submission by a violent, swarthy suitor, Tomas Makris, who “slapped her a stunning blow across the mouth” before he made her feel “the first red gush of shamed pleasure.” Constance eventually marries Tomas, and they live happily ever after. Maybe Metalious thought this stuff was romantic and liberating. I would call it anything but. Anna Holmes has written for numerous publications, including The

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Washington Post, Salon, Harper’s, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker online. A 2012 recipient of the Mirror Award for Commentary, presented by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Journalism, she is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s Web site she created in 2007.

A version of this article appears in print on March 9, 2014, on page BR31 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Bookends.

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