Peyton Place - the Explosive Best Seller of a Respectable New England Town

Growing up, I can remember hearing my mom and some of her friends mention or talk about Peyton Place.  The only thing I ever really knew about it was that it was a soap opera and that Ryan O'Neal starred in it when he was young.  I never paid much attention, although I was admit I was surprised when I found out the television show was based on a movie of the same name.  It was not until many, many, MANY years later that I discovered that not only was the television show based on the film, but the film was based on a novel by Grace Metalious.  Well, wouldn't you know it, a couple of years ago while on vacation, I happened across the novel, Peyton Place, as well as its sequel, Return to Peyton Place, in a thrift store.  Being curious, I picked them up, and finally got around to reading the original story this month.  

"...Peyton Place, the best-seller about small town U.S.A. which has been damned and banned--and hailed as 'one of the most extraordinary literary discoveries of recent years'" reads the blurb on the back of the book.  The copy I purchased is a Dell Publishing Company edition, first published in September 1957, the year after its original release.  Now, with a blurb like that, I was curious about what could possibly be so controversial about a book written in the 1950s that would have caused it to be banned.  I mean, after all, they made it into a feature film in 1957 and eventually into a television series that ran for five years (1964-69).  Thus, I went into the book expecting it to be a typical romantic, soap-opera style drama with perhaps some unfaithful spouses or maybe even an abortion or two that would be considered scandalous at the time.  Boy, was I in for a shocking surprise!

Although written in the mid-1950s, the story actually takes place in 1939 through the mid-1940s.  There are a number of characters in the book, so it's hard to pinpoint exactly who the main character is supposed to be, but if I had to guess, I would say that Allison MacKenzie, a middle-schooler getting ready to make the move into high school as the book opens, is the protagonist of the story, although the author definitely delves into the lives of many other characters in the town of Peyton Place.  

Metalious opens the book very cautiously, endearing the reader to her small-town setting, with Indian summer leading the townspeople into a false sense of serenity before the hard winter hits.  There's the typical group of old men in the town square, who are probably bigger gossips than any of the local housewives.  There's the old doctor who still makes housecalls.  There's the wealthy man who runs the mill (and basically runs the town).  There's the spinster school teacher who wonders if she is reaching any of the students she teaches.  There's the family who live over in one of the shacks, where only the poor and degenerates live.  There's the single mom (Allison's mother, Constance) who is doing her best to raise a child on her own while running her own thrift store.  There's the town drunk, who manages to waste all the money he makes on alcohol, leaving his wife and two kids to suffer.  There's the young lawyer in town who wants to do what's right.  And there are a crew of teens and pre-teens who are eager to enter adulthood, discovering things about themselves and the opposite sex that lead them down the path of temptation and desire...

All of that seems pretty tame, especially by today's standards.  Well, just like Metalious's opening to the book provides a false sense of calm, so does the book provide the reader with a false sense of normalcy.  It isn't long after the story opens that readers discover Constance is keeping a huge secret from her daughter (and the whole town!) regarding Allison's father.  It is also revealed that Allison's friend, Selena, must deal with an abusive step-father and protect her younger brother, since their mother seems to be unable and unwilling to prevent her father's drunken outrages.  One night changes everything for both girls when Selena is raped by her own step-father while Allison watches from outside the shack where the Cross family lives.  She ends up pregnant, and with no one to turn to, she runs to the town doctor, who, upon finding out who put her in this condition, does the unthinkable (and illegal) act of aborting the child.  It's a secret they keep between them, but one that comes back to haunt them both before the end of the book...

Then there's the introduction of Michael Rossi, the school's new principal.  He takes an immediate liking to Constance MacKenzie, but eventually, that relationship leads to trouble between Constance and Allison, and the truth about Allison's father comes to light, forever changing that family dynamic.  There's also the mill owner's son, Rodney Harrington, who has never been held responsible for anything and fancies himself a ladies' man - but all the while, he is hiding the truth of his own virginity.  When he finally does get the chance to bring truth to all his lies, it's a road that leads to his own destruction, which begins the downfall of his father and his hold over Peyton Place.  The town is just chock full of people with secrets, from the Page sisters and their hatred of their late brother's widow to the woman everyone deems a witch who likes to watch through a hole in the shrubbery as her neighbors go at it to the town drunk who locks himself and three other men in a basement for weeks while they drink themselves into a stupor to the young girl who gets her arm mangled and torn right off in a faulty carnival ride to a shack-dwelling mother who hangs herself in Allison's closet to the young girl who kills her own step-father rather violently rather than let him lay one more finger on her.   Peyton Place may seem idyllic on the outside, but it's blacker than the most sinful soul once you start peeling away its layers...

And we must not forget poor little Norman Page.  This boy is quite an odd character in this book (which says a lot, considering the nature of many of these characters).  Introduced in the second chapter as "Little Norman Page," he is depicted as a fairly pathetic young boy, unable to defend himself.  He is later shown to be a mama's boy, to the extreme that it is revealed he enjoys having his mother give him enemas, and much later, the reader learns his mother continued to breast-feed him until he was four years old (with rumors she still fed him that way on occasion now).  There is a scene at the end of chapter 17 of Book One (the book is divided into three "books") that truly defines Norman's relationship with his mother - one of complete and utter co-dependency, with one unable to live without the other.  Reading this, it made me think of Norman Bates' relationship with his mother in the film and novel, Pyscho.  Turns out Psycho, written by Robert Bloch, was published in 1959, three years after this book came out.  Leaves one to wonder if perhaps Bloch got inspiration for his character from little Norman Page...

This book definitely features a lot of racy content for a book published in the mid-1950s!  By today's standards, it's probably not all that sensational.  Despite this, I definitely got caught up in the lives of these characters, and I found myself rooting for some and anxiously waiting for others to get their just desserts!  But I do wonder just how much of the book actually made it into the film, and what parts were removed or toned down for the film and later television series.  I see the two films and most of the television series are available on DVD on Amazon, so I'm thinking I need to purchase those and find out!

RATING:  9 goldenrod-filled clearings out of 10 for a tale of small town America fraught with every possible soap opera trope one can imagine, and then some!