Spiritual Gin

By J. D. Reed

BESTSELLERS

by John Sutherland

Routledge & Kegan Paul; 268 pages;

$18.95

George Eliot dismissed the popular novels of her day as "spiritual gin." She may have been right. Since 1895, when U.S. fiction was first listed by "demand," bestsellers have turned many into bookaholics. Of the 2,000 new novels per year in the multibillion-dollar American and British markets, a large number are deliberately and cynically aimed at the top of the charts. Only about 40 will achieve the distinction "bestselling" (at least 100,000 hard cover, 1 million paperback). But those 40 can speak volumes about their readers. The process is a phenomenon worthy of examination by serious psychologists--and by lively analysts like John Sutherland. In Bestsellers, Sutherland, of University College, London, offers an entertaining anc sometimes disquieting look at the hit novels of the 1970s. As he sees it, a good read is often the sign of a disturbed society.

From the 1969 publication of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, the '70s top seller with more than 13 million copies, to 1979's The Exorcist (12 million) by William Peter Blatty, the decade's No. 2 novel, Sutherland dissects the psychosocial meaning behind the sales figures. He finds a seething mass of anxieties, guilts and aggressions. In Peter Benchley's Jaws (9.5 million), the movement is away from the wonder of nature and toward a delight in the Darwinian struggle to the death. It allows contemporary man to relieve his environmental guilt and to focus primitive bloodlust fantasies on a very dumb animal.

As in other bestsellers of "disaster" --earthquakes, towering infernos, nuclear meltdowns and floods--Jaws also comforts. Ordinary people, like the reader, can rise above events as the patina, of civilization vanishes. The "old ways" are reaffirmed, and morality becomes as uncomplicated as gaffing a shark, dousing a blaze or landing a crippled airliner.

Such "frighteners" as The Omen (5 million) and The Exorcist appeal to parents because within their lurid covers demonic children can be walloped without Freudian complications. Unless bestsellers satisfy such persistent craving, says Sutherland, they can have no staying power. The epics of women's liberation, following successes like Fear of Flying and The Women's Room, arrived when the placards had moved on and the shouting had diminished. Hence their quick disappearance from the lists.

Sutherland sees the Harold Robbins romans `a clef--The Carpetbaggers, The Pirate--as a tribute "the tourist class pays the jet set," endowing the moneyed elite with supernatural sexual and political powers. In the day of interlocking superpowers and computerized strategies, "Nazi resurgent" novels-- The Eagle Has Landed, Marathon Man--provide a strangely tranquilizing effect: history, readers believe, cannot be as unexceptional as the scholars say. "They" don't dare tell us the truth: a single act of murder, a new weapon, a perfectly timed hijacking are all that it takes to alter the world's course. Thus the Nazi bureaucrat becomes the Wagnerian fiend surviving into the '80s, far less banal and somehow less important than the truth.

Unlike Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle, bestsellers that affected their times, the fiction chartbusters of the '70s seem tame indeed. Their mission, and their success, lies in anesthetizing the audience until it has only enough energy to do one thing: turn the page. Sutherland notes that the top ten novels of the '70s sold twice as many copies as the top ten of the 1960s. In this thirsty epoch, more readers than ever seem to need their psychic spirits. --By J.D. Reed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.