****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
WHAT a fabulous book, and why couldn't it be longer? I gobbled it up this afternoon and evening, as soon as it was delivered in the mail. There is so much to say about the cultural influence of Peyton Place and Grace Metalious' life -- well covered in Emily Toth's excellent 1981 and so far only extant biography, yes, but here is updated information from Ardis Cameron on the 1947 Barbara Roberts case (whom Toth, to my and perhaps other readers' puzzlement, covers with the pseudonym of "Jane Glenn", so that for years I thought that WAS the victim's real name).It's so absolutely true that the novel had a dark, despairing interior which the silly, squeaky-clean movie version of course came nowhere near capturing, and for once an old fart like myself can say that I was too young to have ever seen the 1960's TV series, but I'd always heard it was even worse than the movie. I wonder, I just wonder what it would be like to actually do a film version which is really true to the book, setting it in the 1930's, and WWII-and-postwar 1940's -- to really have it as sordid and shabby with tragic class struggles and grim sexual cruelty as Grace Metalious' novel portrayed. They can even throw in the sleazy aspects of the sequel novel, Return to Peyton Place, but how interesting it would be to have 1940's period authenticity (just like in the 1996 version of Lolita, which makes the story one of heartrendingly sad and tragic abuse belying the bucolic settings, instead of snickering trash like the 1962 version). I don't understand why no film company, especially an indie one, would want to undertake this project, and highlight the proto-feminist undertone of the story, which Metalious probably didn't even realize she was doing. I'd heard that for some time there was going to be a film biography of Grace Metalious, and THAT would be very interesting.There is some disparity of agreement of whether or not Metalious' publisher had a ghostwriter pull together the sequel novel, because Grace was by then severely alcoholic and the book, such as it was, proved to be a mess, yet she was able to follow it with two readable, in fact fairly well written, books: The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden, although both novels sorely lacked the pungency of the first Peyton Place. One wonders what Grace Metalious could have been capable of had she lived, been able to temper or even recover from her drinking trouble, and sailed into the 1970's with novels of possibly equal merit (as far as popular fiction is concerned,but let's face it, we can't be literary snobs here; this book's appearance in the mid-1950's blew everyone out of the water.) If critics grumble that Sinclair Lewis did pretty much the same thing in the 1920's, just remember that getting the story from a woman's point of view isn't the same as having a woman actually write it, and rather than scraping against or hinting at scandal, she bravely dove into a roman a clef which exposed the very worst of a small community's rancid hypocrisy and exploitation of the poor and helpless. Whether or not it was quasi-autobiographical really doesn't matter some 60 years later. She showed people the ghastliness of their lives which none of the existing blue laws or churchgoing or smug acceptance of everyone "knowing their place" could successfully quash, no matter how many town elders and librarians fought to keep the novel out of circulation and from being sold in bookstores. Yes, of course since the 1900's there'd been plenty of novels showing how wormy and vile supposedly pastoral small towns can be -- Bellemann, Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, et. al. -- but having a woman write it, with females as acting protagonists instead of ornaments, was a revelation in its time. And really, I am disappointed this remarkable effort by Cameron wasn't longer -- it truly should have been; there is much to expound upon to expand it.
