Thomas Mallon offers some qualified praise to Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place in the NYTBR. He thinks it is several cuts above today’s romance novels.

He writes, “Metalious’s writing is mostly undemanding, but it’s also, often . . . not bad. Compared with Jacqueline Susann, her 1960s successor, she reads like Willa Cather.”

At times, Metalious’s characterization reach heights that even Forster might have approved: “Unlike the sexual automatons of romance novels and beach books, some of Metalious’s characters are actually, by E. M. Forster’s old definition, round. Constance MacKenzie, the dress-shop owner hiding the secret of her daughter’s illegitimacy, is sympathetic and pretentious; brittle and basically well intentioned: interesting, in a word. The book is scarcely feminist — its wisest speeches are given to Dr. Swain and Tomas Makris, the new school principal — but its real hero is Selena Cross, a girl who kills the stepfather who raped her.”

Rare highbrow praise for popular pulp fiction.