Most novels come and go, soon on the remainder table and then forgotten. Some, however, are publishing sensations and great commercial successes in their time. One such was Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, published in 1956. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for fifty-six weeks and spawned an industry, with movies, a sequel, and a hit television series. But no one would call it a great work of fiction. And today, while in print, it is only a name to most people or, perhaps, a metonym for “dirty books.”
Others, genre books, are read generation after generation. The mysteries of Agatha Christie sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. But while their plots are often ingenious (they make terrific airplane reading), their characters are forgettable at best (although such great actors as David Suchet and Joan Hickson have brought Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple to vivid life in television productions).
And then there are the classics. People have been reading Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels for three centuries. Charles Dickens has been dead for half that, but his novels will survive as long as the English language itself. Indeed, he is so readable and his characters so memorable that he is able to use absurd plot devices that no lesser talent could possibly get away with. (After the foundling Oliver Twist is trained by Fagin and his gang to be a pickpocket, the first pocket he—unsuccessfully—picks, out of all the teeming
