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

stretches far beyond its rural setting.
    In the isolated backwoods of Maycomb, Alabama, the large moral and political issues of the Depression era sifted into the courtroom and the front parlor, the public schools and the church sanctuary. Like Scarlett, Scout Finch roams the social spectrum. She journeys to places no ordinary character could take us, from First Purchase African M.E. Church, to the living room of the pious upper-crust church ladies who are supporting missionaries in distant lands, and on to the angry streets where a lynch mob gathers to murder Atticus Finch’s black client. Scout sees it all and takes us on a tour of the nooks and crannies of Maycomb. Luckily for us, she is an astute observer of the sociological structure of her hometown.
    The Crawfords mind their own business, a third of the Merriweathers are morbid, the Delafields are all born liars, the entire Buford clan have that same strange walk. Scout can reel off every detail of the caste system in Maycomb effortlessly.
    Scout truly scouts the entire social gamut from top to bottom and back again in this brief but expansive story. Though the city limits of Maycomb may be cramped and the population small, the sweep of Scout’s gaze is unbounded, stretching outward toward the nation that resonates beyond the borders of her small town.
BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST
    The Da Vinci Code
challenges the core values of institutions no less vast than the Catholic Church and Western art, to name only two, yet lest we forget the grandness of scale the novel is operating on, we are given repeated reminders in the form of superlatives of every kind. You want big? I’ll give you big. Here are nine examples, but there’s virtually one on every page.
“the world’s most famous paintings …”
“the longest building in Europe …”
“the most famous mathematical progressions in history …”
“the most famous piece of art in the world …”
“one of the world’s most documented inside jokes …”
“the most sought-after treasure in human history …”
“one of the most enduring mysteries of all time …”
“the most famous fresco of all time …”
“one of history’s greatest secrets …”
    Superlatives abound. Greatest this, biggest that. Most famous this, earthshaking that. Another elbow in the ribs and another. Get it? Get it? This is important! This is big! Really, really huge!
    Surely most readers glide past these passages without a blink, so swept up in the constant puzzle solving and didactic passion for all things related to Catholicism, symbolism, goddesses,Western art, and Parisian and London travel guide info. In fact, in the case of
The Da Vinci Code
, such trumpet-blaring announcements of the importance of the story are unnecessary, because the scale of the story, the grandeur of its subject, and the momentous nature of its revelations would have easily carried the day.
SUPERPOWERS
    Tom Clancy puts Jack Ryan on the largest geopolitical stage going: two superpowers using their highest-tech toys to play saber-rattling games somewhere in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The Americans are trying desperately to locate a Russian nuclear submarine so quiet, so undetectable by conventional technology, it could shift the military balance of power once and for all.
    Though we know little about Jack Ryan’s inner life, he’s smart and well schooled in military matters, and though he’s reluctant to do so, he bravely answers his country’s call and uses his good old American common sense and his military savvy to avert World War III. How can we not care about such a man? And why do we really need to know more about the mechanics of his state of mind to be fully engaged with his bold and enterprising deeds?
    Mario Puzo gives us not just a story about a Mafia family, but a story about the Mafia. Like
Gone with the Wind
,
The Exorcist
,
Jaws
, and
The Hunt for Red October
, it’s a war story. One Mafia family at war against other Mafia