Peyton Place question

I think Peyton Place is just a story about a little town, with its vices and virtues...there are a lot of little secrets, and even if they're just stupid as it seems to you they're important to the people who live them. In a certain way, the chitchatting about Peyton Place is the same as the chitchatting that mr Woodhouse keeps doing in Emma (obviously way far from it!!!)...it's important just because there are people who care about it. Personally, I've found PP a light novel to read (I've read it twice in my middle school), a little too vain, but we can't live only with masterpieces ^__^

Hi, Rebecca. Great question. I've read Peyton Place a few times (albeit quite a while ago) and have always been intrigued by it because G.M. was a Greek, like me, and my unusual last name is the same as one of the characters in the book, Thomas Makris (which was changed to Mike Rossi in the film version, Makris obviously being too unusual to the American ear).
But enough blabbering about me :).
Peyton Place was written to shock people into realizing that even so-called good people in sleepy little towns have dark secrets and closets bursting at the locks with unsavory skeletons. It's really just a commentary on the unfortunate side of the human condition and the conflict lies within the characters themselves (man against himself, as they call it in writing school), in how they choose to live and how they handle what other people do (man against society). It might help to put yourself in the characters' places and ask yourself if you'd feel conflicted about what who you are or what you see and do.
Remember, too, that reading tastes (to say nothing of cultural mores) have changed enormously since PP was written in the mid-1950s. When it came out, people were scandalized by it and although it sold out everywhere, in the end G.M. was a pretty much considered a pariah and died poor and virtually friendless.
Hope that helped.

Even though this novel is not a new book. It certainly shows that the same class struggles still exist. The Same differences of youth and the trust in people to be there for them. I think as an education tool it would be to the advantage of older youths, to identify with the teen girl. Things change,and they don't. Confusion, disappointment,loss,the same now as then.

IIRC G.M. grew up in a town like the one she wrote about, and got subjected to the same treatment as did her self-projected character Allison.

So did I. In the vicious little Vermont town in which I grew up, I could name exact counterparts for people like Rodney and his pals, for the poor white trash girl whose fat slob of a father raped and impregnated her... you name it. It was sheer horror, and I really enjoyed the book because the horror came straight through, unalloyed, just the way I experienced it; I felt as if I wasn't alone, for once.

I think writing the book was probably primarily a catharsis for G.M. and I wouldn't expect anyone to understand it who hadn't lived it... and anyone who was titillated by it, is a shallow, frivolous idiot.