I recently finished reading Peyton Place, the 1956 novel by Grace Metalious. What a fabulous piece of Americana I have unearthed. When published, the book claimed a spot on the New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks, but it seems to have slowly lost its popularity, notoriety, and novelty over time. It only crossed my path because I have an unhealthy obsession with all things New England. But the passage of nearly six decades has in no way diminished the magnitude of Metalious’ work. It is transportive, seedy, salacious, perceptive, and – the dirtiest of all dirty words in a tight-lipped, closed-shuttered small town - revelatory.
By today’s standards, the topics discussed in Peyton Place are benignly commonplace, but in the unforgiving social climate of the 1950s, such things were not spoken of openly. Peyton Place lifts the lid on everything – rape, murder, incest, suicide, bastard children, repressed sexualtiy, death and dismemberment, the guarding and surrendering of virginity. Shades of Freud from the first page to the last.
While the writing itself is wanting for Nabokovian lyricism (though there are a few poetic moments: “The snow against her small-paned bedroom window made a tiny sound, like sugar sprinkled over the surface of hot coffee, and it piled itself up quietly, beautifully, so that it was hard to look at it and think of danger.”), it’s the tightly woven plot of Peyton Place that makes it a masterpiece of American literature. Its soap-operatic opening of closed doors satisfies a certain human need for voyeurism, and the author paints for us a fully omniscient and uninhibited portrait of mid-twentieth-century New England. She takes us through the back seats of convertibles where lusty teenagers hungrily paw at each other; into “the shacks,” where poverty and alcohol coalesce with disastrous consequences; to the darkest recesses of marriage and its unspeakable secrets; and into the lonely, complicated, bittersweet adolescence of the endearing main character, Allison MacKenzie.
Throughout the book, Metalious draws numerous parallels between the tiny New Hampshire town and bustling New York City, surmising that the sins and judgments of each are identical. In this regard, Peyton Place is an exploration of the human condition, in which the struggle to balance one’s conscience with one’s desires is universal. The characters live in fear of one another, never daring to stand out lest they subject themselves to the scrutiny of their all-seeing neighbors. Today, sixty years later, we can still see the hand of this invisible but powerful institution of public opinion in our daily lives, and I think that many Americans live in their own versions of small, stifling, well-intentioned Peyton Place. For that reason, Metalious’ work is both timeless and relatable, a fascinating study in the comforts of conformity, the perils of ipseity, and the relentless tension between the two.
