Shocking 1950's Blockbuster Is Still A Pageturner

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	• Peyton Place Grace Metalious Northeastern, 1999 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Starts well but falls apart in Act Three

"Peyton Place", a soap opera-esque tale of life in a small town in New England, starts extremely well but is let down by its ending. Grace Metalious does an extremely good job of introducing the audience to her cast of characters, setting up the sub-plots and making the reader feel that he or she is really living in this town, but unfortunately, too many of the sub-plots are left unresolved at the end and those that are, are resolved so quickly that I came away feeling disappointed. For example, after spending 300 pages leading up to the murder of one of the characters, she gets through the resulting trial in one short chapter.

In many ways "Peyton Place" reminded me of Larry McMurtry's "The Last Picture Show", a book about life in a small town in Texas. However, McMurtry has a much better idea of pacing and how to finish a book, and I found his characters to be far more entertaining (the residents of Peyton Place, although interesting, are not fun to spend time with). It is for this reason that I consider "The Last Picture Show" to be one of my favourite books of all time, whereas "Peyton Place" is "just another book" that I have read.

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Small town secrets

I loved "Peyton Place!" Written in 1956, this book caused a commotion when it was published due to its many illicit topics, which were considered very taboo at the time. More than 50 years later, this book still triumphs as an excellent portrayal of a small New England town full of mysterious characters and many hidden secrets.

Allison MacKenzie is the central character of the novel, which is set between 1937 and 1944. Allison is a young schoolgirl who struggles to find acceptance and contentment among her classmates and also pines away for her missing father. Meanwhile, Allison's mother, Constance, fights her attraction to the school's new headmaster, Tom Makris, while fighting to keep the truth about Allison's father under wraps. There are many other people roaming around Peyton Place, including Selena Cross, a classmate of Allison's who falls in love with the charming Ted Carter but hides the disturbing truth about the reality of her home life. Leslie Harrington is the richest man in town and is used to getting his way with everything, but he refuses to try and tame his son, Rodney, who spirals out of control. Add to the bunch a respected physician, two nasty spinster sisters, and the town drunks, and you have all the makings of a fantastic novel complete with violence, illegitimacy, sex, and everything else you could possibly ask for!

Yes, "Peyton Place" is kind of trashy in a "Valley of the Dolls" kind of way, but that doesn't change the fact that it's entertaining and brilliant. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to sink their teeth into a thoroughly engrossing story.

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Other Books

A really pretty tame book about a particular town, where the author through an author character looks at the peccadilloes of various people in the town of the time.

These range from sex, to being a scumbag employer, to drunks, wife beaters, all the usual stuff you would expect to find in a place in the country, as the Great Detective would tell you.

Fairly dull.

Shocking 1950's Blockbuster Is Still A Pageturner

When PEYTON PLACE was published in the late 1950's it was a phenomenon. Those of us who are over forty or so still recognize the title as being synonymous with a locale filled with scandal and gossip. Aside from its historic notoriety this is a very readable novel with realistic characters and several intriguing plots.

The setting of the novel is Peyton Place, New Hampshire a small mill town in the 1930's and 1940's. The book focuses on several young people in the town as they grow from early adolescents to adulthood in this small hypocritical community. The female protagonist is Allison a young woman with literary ambitions. Allison's mother has a closely guarded secret about Allison's birth which will seem silly to modern readers but was apparently scandalous in the 50's. Allison's schoolmates include Selena, a smart ambitious girl from the "shacks" with a horrible secret of her own, Rodney the overly indulged son of the mill owner who rules the town and a nervous boy named Norman. This book is not just about teenagers though as the stories of their parents and other townspeople are also told. Serious problems and tragedies occur in the town and the writing is suspenseful enough to keep the reader turning the pages.

PEYTON PLACE is often compared to another novel of small town secrets KINGS ROW. Though PEYTON PLACE is not quite as well written as that novel they do share the theme of the hidden lives of respectable seeming small town residents. The hypocrisy of the residents and the fear many of them live in of being gossiped about and the choices they make to not "be talked about" are the two elements of PEYTON PLACE this reader will remember.

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Unexpected pleasure

I groaned when I heard Peyton Place was the next book club selection. I'd seen the movie. It was just about sex, right? Promiscuity. The skeletons in small town closets. What would I want to read it?

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Well, it did deal with sex. Promiscuity. The skeletons in small town closets, but the introduction by Ardis Cameron placed the book in the context of the times - both societal and literary. It wasn't the smut I dreaded but social commentary on small-town life in the late 30s and early 40s.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

When Grace Metalious's debut novel about the dark underside of a small, respectable New England town was published in 1956, it quickly soared to the top of the bestseller lists. A landmark in twentieth-century American popular culture, Peyton Place spawned a successful feature film and a long-running television series-the first prime-time soap opera.

Contemporary readers of Peyton Place will be captivated by its vivid characters, earthy prose, and shocking incidents. Through her riveting, uninhibited narrative, Metalious skillfully exposes the intricate social anatomy of a small community, examining the lives of its people -- their passions and vices, their ambitions and defeats, their passivity or violence, their secret hopes and kindnesses, their cohesiveness and rigidity, their struggles, and often their courage.

This new paperback edition of Peyton Place features an insightful introduction by Ardis Cameron that thoroughly examines the novel's treatment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and power, and considers the book's influential place in American and New England literary history.

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