Best seller gets grudging critical respect fifty-seven years later.

Although Grace Metalious's novel Peyton Place was a best seller from the day it was published, thanks to its provocative content, it never gained critical acclaim. A 2014 New York Times retrospective marking a half century since the author's death sniffed, 'Metalious's writing is mostly undemanding, but it's also, often ... not bad.' Damned by faint praise fifty-seven years down the track. Metalious can rest in her grave. 

By the flower-powered free-loving 1960s Peyton Place's themes were old hat. Anyway, by this time the fiction prurience index had been turbocharged by any copycat writer who could type. In later decades the book was forgotten almost completely and if mentioned was mistaken for the movie or the TV series or the meme or the lyrics – Tom T. Hall: 'Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you're all Harper Valley hypocrites'. 

Writers 'who could type' proliferated in the computer era, when they mightn't have bothered with pen-to-paper, perhaps even with an IBM Selectric. But by this later era and until today, even readers of best-selling steaminess understood that they were sometimes reading trash. On my occasional treasure hunts in second hand bookshops (the latest find being an excellent example of The Film Till Now, a 1951 copy of the 1949 revised and enlarged edition of the 1929 Paul Rotha original: price $3) I often see entire shelves of those thick dark-coloured paperbacks with the word 'Shades' in the title; and I occasionally say to the person behind the counter, 'There's a reason you have so many copies of those, and it's the same reason you're not going to sell them.' The wise ones nod and smile and say yes, we wanted to put them in the recycling bin but the manager said no; and the not-so-wise ones just stare at me, dumbfounded, and go back to dusting old copies of Let's Go To Europe 1982 or Raising Your Pet Budgie. I enjoy trying to pick which type I'm going to meet. You can't always tell by looking at them – but sometimes you can!

Today's reader picking up Peyton Place will find a seeming incongruity between the languid prose and the undeniable plot explosions – abortion, murder, suicide, betrayal, exploitation, adultery, rape, you name it. But there is no inconsistency. The language, the author's style, is never staccato as you might expect for such a shocking story; but rather it is a meandering, slow-flowing river. Partly this is because it was written as a series of flashbacks via sifting the contemplative inner thoughts of the major characters as they try to integrate the shocks of life into a moral order; which is something everyone has always done every day. Today, people just do it out loud on Twitter. 

Metalious avoids the studied judgmentalism that infects so many today's issues-based censorious rants posing as novels. She makes the point is through newspaper owner Seth Buswell, who to the frustration of budding journalist Allison McKenzie, refuses to editorially pulpitise. "I get riled up the same as you … ," he tells her. "I've often threatened to use the paper as an instrument of exposure … but I never do it. Why? Because I believe in tolerance …". Later, much later, drinking, he analyses his own rationale:

I was trying to teach you not to care too much. … caring too much … showed in your writing, and that, my dear, my too young, my sweet, my talented, my beautiful Allison, does not make for clear, cool, analytical prose. 

'Issues' are there by the dozen, of course, but in 1957 they were just plot lines. There is no sanctimony – on the contrary, the entire novel satirises its several virtue-signalling characters as Hypocrites or Pharisees. These are not limited, today's automaton-writer style, to the novel's white male capitalists. 

Metalious's prose is evocative and her dialogue is restrained and measured; even clipped where it needs to be, and it successfully controls the vast emotional rollercoasters dictated by the plot. The effect is credible. The small observations are key to the quiet, considered watercolour of detail the author paints: 

They ate eggs and toast and drank coffee, and there was sunshine all over the yellow tablecloth. 

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Peyton Place 

Grace Metalious 

Frederick Muller Ltd, London 1957 

My copy is inscribed Marlene Walker 1st Flr, T&G 31.7.57 

(T&G is the iconic towered Art Deco building in Melbourne's CBD)

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Kitchen Hand instant review: Take a dreamlike retro journey into mid-twentieth century fiction that is light years away from today's world.