For my sins, I have just read " The Bridges of Madison County." For sins yet uncommitted (and some, I hope, still unimagined), I have also just read " Border Music."
As the chart above this column demonstrates, " The Bridges" has been on national best seller lists for 129 weeks. Warner Books, its publisher, reports it has produced 5,293,000 copies in 61 printings, and an additional 3,128,300 copies of Robert James Waller's second novel, " Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend." " Border Music" has just turned up, with 1.1 million in print. Perhaps, like " The Joy of Cooking" and the Holy Writ, it will be with us for all eternity.
Why?
Humankind is nourished by literary art and courage. The finest fruits of governance as well as culture grow from such nourishment. So such questions as this matter.
Aside from all that, I am an enthusiastic supporter of escape literature. Rollicking good reads with no purpose beyond diversion are still a great deal healthier, I protest from direct experience, than sitting slack-lipped and drooling in front of a television set, to malign but one of the alternatives.
Now comes Mr. Waller, the mass phenom. A giant of pop lit.
If you have read and found pleasure in one or more of his books ' and a number of my respected friends tell me they have ' you may very well dismiss outright the basis of my inquiry here. You may say the Snob Mob just doesn't understand. Or won't.
And if you read back over the various reviews and commentaries I have just scanned, you very well might conclude that that the Snob Mob has something to hide. You might deduce they have reason to evade some mysterious but legitimate power or artful potency that Waller brings to his word processor.
If you drew those conclusions, you'd be able to put together some interesting circumstantial evidence. Clearly, among the Snob Mob, if you choose to call America's prevailing Literary Influentials that, there is a kind of theory that Waller's work is symptomatic of a dread disease: a sort of Shanghai Flu of the intellect.
They could be taken to fear that if that plague proliferates unchecked, the mortalities could rage like the influenza epidemic of 1919. Coffins would stack high, row on row, overwhelming the grave-diggers, and among them might be those of many a Literary Influential.
Take, for example, the redoubtable romantic Michiko Kakutani of the daily New York Times. The first paragraph of her Jan. 27 review of " Border Music" includes this descant: " Waller has fed his hackneyed romance recipe back into the computer and come up with his worst book yet, a truly atrocious ballad . . . that gives new meaning to the words sappy, sexist, mannered and cliche."
Then she turns nasty.
She is in good company. Or, at least, with other professional critics she is in virtually unanimity.
Yet the book buyers of America have spoken, 9,521,300 strong, a grand national chorus chanting that there is excitement in this work. The earth witnesses few truths more powerful than the voice of the market. Can it be wrong? Really, really wrong? How could that be?
Here's my sense of it:
" The Bridges" is the story of a pathological narcissist, a lowbrow who has spent his life celebrating the avoidance of getting close to anybody, who seems to have ripped a handful of pages out of " Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" from which he spouts bits from time to time in no particular context. He meets an emotional cripple who has apparently spent her entire ostensibly adult life also dodging intimacy, though rather than celebrating that, she has whimpered.
These two pathetics spend four days not very convincingly rolling in the hay, and then dutifully separate, never to speak again.
It all adds up to a titanic celebration of the avoidance of human closeness. It is a book about how real life can be escaped altogether and how that flight can be sentimentalized. Everybody talks in Hallmark captions. That, finally, is all there is to the book. Ms. Kakutani notwithstanding, " Border Music" is a trifle more lively than " The Bridges," but insignificantly different.
So why so popular? What's going on here?
Amid suburbanization and mall-ification and touch-me-not dancing and cyberspace flirtation and AIDS awareness and all sorts of other, interrelated contemporary phenomena, Americans are becoming increasingly incapable of and resistant to intense personal involvements in any form. Americans are dropping out of everything from the concept of marriage to bowling leagues to voting in elections. They are living in ever-greater isolation while staring at television tubes, or at the blemishes in the ceiling.
Hugely popular literature is always about what people deeply want. Waller's success, I believe, is a declaration by a mass mainstream of Americans that they yearn for comfort in the fact that they are totally incapable of sustained intimacy, or even of really interesting fantasies.
Is Waller's impact the revenge of Woodstock? The living ghost of Haight-Ashbury? Is this the inevitable maturation of the insistence that the consummate human aspiration is the instant, universal, indiscriminate and flimsy imitation of intimacy?
I suspect it is. And the implications of that terrify me.