Peyton Place Book

What a very lurid sleazy shocking sordid unsavoury distasteful delicious potpourri of popular parricidal perversion this was, to be sure. Highlights of the story include

Suicide
Incest
Murder
Underage sex
Cat strangling
Breast exposing in moving automobile leading to fatal crash
Hideous fairground accident
And much more

Spoilerish remarks may now follow.

SOME REPRESENTATIVE QUOTES


Mr Card was on his knees on the ground, his face hidden in Mrs Card's flesh, and Mrs Card was lying very still, with her legs spread a little, and a smile on her face that showed her teeth.

- This is Norman peeping through a hedge and observing the canoodlings of a married couple

When Norman could stand it no longer, he jumped at the cat and fastened his hands round its throat

- This is Norman's reaction to observing the canoodlings. Sad to say, the cat dies.

Be nice to me honey…be good to me. It ain't like I was your real pa.

This is the main scumbag of the novel speaking to his stepdaughter. The publishers made Grace change the character into a stepfather.

Blood gushed up in a fountain and bathed her face.

- This is the consequence of trying to rape her when she's all grown up and can crack his skull with a poker.

"Ginny", he would demand in a terrible voice, "did you ever do it with my father?"

- This is a guy uncertain about the faithfulness of his dear wife.

I've got the hardest breasts you ever played with.

-This is the girl in the car just before she exposes one of the breasts causing the driver to crash.

I also know that in addition to a child being physically ready for sex at fifteen or sixteen his mind has been educated and conditioned to sex and he feels a tremendous basic drive for sex

- This is the massively boned (see below) impossibly handsome new high school principal speaking, telling the mother of a 16 year old to take a chill pill. This was before the abovementioned auto accident.

I thought I was dying and it was the loveliest feeling in the world.
- This is me reading Peyton Place. No, haha not really.

GREAT AMERICAN TRASH

After Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Lols and Harold Robbins' The Carpetshaggers I thought well, why not, let's do it : Peyton Place, the 1956 trash classic to complete the trilogy.

This novel shocked American people so badly they all had to read it, and it quickly beat Gone with the Wind and became the biggest selling novel of all time in the USA. It was later beaten by To Kill a Mockingbird and The Godfather.

Grace Metalious is no Henry James, but that might not be a bad thing. Henry never wrote

Thomas Makris was a massively boned man with muscles that seemed to quiver every time he moved

or

Anyone, she declared to herself, would be impressed with a man that size, with his almost revolting good looks and that smile that belongs in a bedroom.

or

His lips were full without being loose and the line of his chin was pleasantly pronounced.

So this is a novel where you can encounter massively boned men. And when women lose their temper, this can happen :

"I won't have it!" she cried, stamping her foot and flinging her cigarette into the empty fireplace. "I simply will not stand for it!"

Constance's teeth chattered with an anger such as she had never known.

And when a man with normal bones gets mad at his wayward son, this happens :

Harmon threw his newspaper down on the floor and pounded the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. … "I'm not going to sweat blood at the mill to send him to college if this is the way he's going to behave," said Harmon.

But then Grace rescues that scene with this sly comment

Harmon Carter did not sweat blood at the Cumberland Mills. He was a bookkeeper in the office, and the only time he ever broke out in a mild perspiration was when one of the young secretaries there bent over his desk to ask him a question.

Because Grace has a terrible tragic tale to tell there isn't as much of that kind of wit as I would have liked

There's no doubt this novel has the right targets in view - sexual hypocrisy, male privilege, small town politics, the viciousness of neighbours, the moral squalor of poverty. I confess I hated Grace making herself a character in the book - all the stuff about wanting to be a writer then going to New York then failing to write a novel was eurrgh my brain my brain. I wish writers didn't always think we want to read about writers when everyone knows writers are the dullest of all dull people and all have the same problems and live in the same grotty apartments. So there was that.
And also, yes, these days Peyton Place is more like a walk on the mild side. But in context this was a monster and …. Just…. is still worth reading. It's probably clinging on with its fingernails.

And one thing you can say about trash- what with girls falling in machinery and cat strangling and secret abortions and huge boned men it's almost never boring. And you can't say that for Henry James.