Peyton Place (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England) by Grace Metalious
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Book Reviews of Peyton Place (Hardscrabble Books-Fiction of New England)
Book Review: great book
Summary: 5 Stars
What a great book!! The writing is fabulous!!! It's amazing what a "stir" it caused when it was first published years ago.Book Review: Oh, That Wicked Coquette, Indian Summer
Summary: 4 Stars
When I was a kid, "Peyton Place" was not a book; it was a phrase that meant either a town with a proper facade and a scandalous hidden life, or a trashy, shallow, titillating soap opera or movie -- any such soap opera, no matter its actual title.
A couple of years ago, though, I heard Emily Toth, Grace Metalious' biographer, on NPR. She spoke of Metalious, and "Peyton Place," with respect. Metalious, she said, had made a serious effort to address ethnicity, class, and incest. Since I'm a writer myself who has addressed these same issues, I decided that one day, I had to read "Peyton Place."
I picked up a copy and fell in love with the first page. It is a description of Indian Summer. This description is lush and beautiful and displays a love and sympathy for the natural world that can't be faked. I put the book down, resolving more firmly to read it someday.
We're having a beautiful autumn, and so I went back and picked up "Peyton Place," still a bit intimidated, expecting to find the trashy, titillating romance novel I expected it to be. I never encountered that book.
I didn't encounter a deathless classic that moved me deeply, either. What I did encounter was a very well written book that depicts a small New England town and its small-time characters with intimacy, familiarity, and unfailingly consistent, well-crafted prose.
A few features stood out. First, Metalious' familiar, unflinching, loving tone. Metalious' writerly touch is like the touch of a nurse. She is on the clock; she can't go too slow. She's done this before; she knows what she is doing. She touches spots you normally hide. Metalious knows the citizens of Peyton Place inside and out, how they present themselves in public, and what they think in their private thoughts. Some writers, this familiar with their characters, learn to hate them, and teach their readers to hate them, as well.
Not Metalious. Even as she describes men and women doing the most venal things imaginable, she conveys her patient love for these characters. She seems to love them just because they are hers. This love, and sense of possession and belonging, comes out most strongly in the book's climactic trial, when Peyton Place is overtly pardoned for its sins, and loved for its community.
Two, Metalious's style impressed me greatly. This book would be ideal for adult readers with poor literacy skills. Metalious never gives the impression of being less than intelligent and penetrating, and yet she uses very consistent short sentences, short vignettes, and easy vocabulary.
Here, this straightforward style is not off-putting, any more than it is in a fairy tale. One gets the sense that there is more here than meets the eye. These brief vignettes, or portraits of small town types, reminded me of "Spoon River Anthology." Third, Metalious escapes into nature.
(...)
For example, as in an urban legend, one very brief moment of sexual thrill - - a boy gets a glimpse of a girl's naked breast - - is followed immediately by his accidental death.
Some complaints with the book. I don't think it will stay with me; none of the characters moved me that much. At times the piling of one gossipy tale on top of another got to be a bit much. Did the high Protestant minister really have to have a secret, illicit craving for Papism?
I would have preferred that the author stuck with one thread a bit longer and allowed the characters to blossom a bit more under her touch. And, the book is misogynist; in a series of merciless characterizations, Dr. Swain and Tom Makris are simply too heroically male to be real, and the female characters tend to be silly nellies that just need a good slap and a good lay.
(...)
All in all, though, I do recommend this book. It's an easy read, and it really is not what pop culture might lead you to expect. It's better.
Book Review: Not Necessarily a Work of Art - but Well Worth a Read
Summary: 4 Stars
Published in 1956, Peyton Place launched into the bestselling list immediately, even though this was the first novel for writer Grace Metalious. Only a few books in history have sold more than 10 million copies, and Peyton Place reached that mark. If you compare it with 2 other books that sold huge before 1956 - God's Little Acre and Gone with the Wind - you can see the similarities. Epic tale, many generations, and lots of sex. Apparently we readers want to read about the sordid details of peoples lives.
In this case, the story involved incest, rape, murder, bastard children, abortion and much more - all in a tiny New Hampshire town with a population of 3,675. There are the rich folk who live on the best street in town. There are the poor folk who live in one-room shacks without plumbing or privacy. Every character you meet has a twisted history - drinking, gambling, womanizing, envy, sloth, greed.
You have to suspend your disbelief to think that a town of this size really has every single person there involved in some sort of bizarre activity. I live in a small town - I know that certainly there are secrets people have, and jealousies that trace back generations. Still, between people losing limbs, people falsely claiming war honors, religious leaders changing sides and much more, there's just a bit too much going on in a single town. Still, it's like reading murder mystery stories set in a small town like "Paradise, Massachusetts" where suddenly there's a murder a year when a new police chief moves in. You have to accept the situation to go with the story.
I've been in this area of New Hampshire - along the Connecticut River, looking across to Vermont, 3 hours south of the Canadian border. It definitely is a very peaceful, rolling hills, quiet area. I can hear the speech she lays out, imagine the characters quite easily. I love the descriptions of the trees, the snows, the spring rains. They are comforting and familiar. And even though the characters go through some exceptionally bizarre times, you do get the sense that life goes on and that after all, it's really not so bad.
As far as modern reviewers saying "This was shocking back in 1956, to cover these topics!" I need to point out that people said that EVERY time a book like this comes out. God's Little Acre came out in 1933. Talk about sex, incest and rape! Gone with the Wind, in 1936, wasn't a tame book. Then Valley of the Dolls came out in 1966 and once again "shocked readers". People just like to be shocked, and to read about sex, incest and other taboo topics. Certainly people did have sex in the 50s, and talk about it. Millions of people bought this book, and talked about it. Somehow we think that all previous generations are prudish :)
Still, if you get 10 million + readers to read a book because it has shocking taboo incest in it, maybe you can hold up a mirror along the way and get some small amount of self-examination in there while they race along glued to the peer-in-the-window details. Maybe a few people stopped to think about how they judge others, or appreciate their own lives a bit better. I just re-read Peyton Place over the past 4 hrs and look at that as time well spent. It really does make me think fondly of the quiet, rolling hills of New Hampshire, currently in the middle of lovely foliage season, and also think that, despite any troubles I might have in my life, I have it pretty good, all things considered. Not bad results from a "soap opera" read.
Book Review: Jackie Collins, eat your heart out!
Summary: 4 Stars
Peyton Place, a landmark of a book. Most people are familiar with at least the name and core concept of gossipy small town folks and their scandals, even if they aren't aware of the novel's existence.
The book covers roughly ten years in the life of an isolated, sleepy New England town from 1935 to 1945. There is no single central character. Instead, the book follows the intricate web between a large number of Peyton Place's residents and the back-biting, bad mouthing and general hypocrisy that runs rampant through the town.
The book is much better written than I was expecting. It is rich in incidental details, showing an intimate portrait of an isolated New England town in the late 1930's. Some of my favorite parts were throwaway details about ringing the bells for school or the old men sitting on the wooden benches in front of the court house. Peyton Place itself is probably the most prominent character in the book. Often Metalious uses quotes from unnamed characters to act as the `voice' of Peyton Place.
Regardless, the book is not literary fiction. Rather, it revels in titillating details. I noticed over the course of the book that the narrative tended to wallow in the more salacious bits. At first, shocking secrets are presented pretty matter-of-factly. I got the feeling that the author felt more and more comfortable with her narrative as she wrote, because while the soap opera-like twists were always pretty breathtaking, as the story wound on they were presented more and more sensationally. I have to admit, it really did make the book more fun to read. Who doesn't like tut-tutting over other folk's dirty laundry?
I do think that the book is a cut above Jackie Collins/Danielle Steele trash fiction though. While Metalious crammed Peyton Place with enough hot details to fill an issue of the National Enquirer, she was also very clear in pointing out the hypocrisy in the way that New England was presenting itself to the rest of the country back then. The book was clearly at least semi-autobiographical (as the character Allison MacKenzie seems to closely resemble the author) and you can see that as gleeful as the author was in dragging out scandal of the place, she clearly had some fondness for her roots.
Lots of bad stuff happens in Peyton Place, but it is not all bad. There are still picnics in the woods, drowsy Indian summer days and townspeople helping each other out.
Whatever reputation it earned when originally published, the book is some kind of classic now. Fifty-plus years later, the book still holds a reader's interest. It is unquestionably dated, but it is a novel portraying a particular time and place, so that is not a strike against it. The only reason I didn't rate this one at five stars is that some of the dialog is stilted (though some of it is fantastic) and I felt toward the end that the story was getting a little long in the tooth.
All these years after the original publication of Peyton Place I was still often shocked while reading. The novel really does go for the sensational. But like Jean Shepherd's purposely `anti-nostalgic' reminiscences or the movie Pleasantville, it also tries to make you see that maybe the 'good old days' weren't so good for those that lived them.
Book Review: Every place has a bit of "Peyton Place"
Summary: 4 Stars
I first read "Peyton Place" when it was still considered hot stuff and just re-read the book to see how it had held up. Nobody would read it today just for the sexual frankness, when any R-rated movie or bestselling novel can use much more graphic language. But I enjoyed the book; it may not be great literature but it was a good read and not mere trash. Although the book was banned in many places in the Fifties, the kind of everyday profanity Peyton Place's citizens use struck me as pretty genuine. The book runs from about 1937 to 1944. The central character is Allison McKenzie, but there are any number of characters whose consciousness the author easily slips into: Allison's emotionally distant mother Constance, the new school superintendent Tom Makris, the town doctor Matt Swain, Allison's poverty-stricken friend Selena Cross, dedicated teacher Elsie Thornton and many others. I think it's one of the virtues of this book that Metalious creates so many believable characters, both male and female, with such apparent ease and economy.
Peyton Place the town is a major character in the book, and everyone lives in fear of it, because it demands the appearance of perfection from all its citizens and thus condones hypocrisy and condemns human frailty. But Peyton Place isn't unique; it's a microcosm of a sexually repressive society. If someone describes your office as "a regular 'Peyton Place'," you can bet that harassment follows in the path of the hijinks. Big city or small town, there's a little "Peyton Place" in us all, even in these more liberated times.
I would recommend that readers save the introduction to the novel until after they have read it because it gives too much of the plot away.