Emily Toth
Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Pp. 409. $18.00
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

Peyton Place, published in 1956, was the most commercially successful American novel of the 1950s. The rather lurid story about the nasty things going on behind the clean fronts of a small town in New Hampshire created a heated controversy about morality and literature, and it catapulted author Grace Metalious into sudden, unexpected, and unprepared-for stardom. Metalious, whose name quickly became a synonym for scandal, was unable to produce another work that matched Peyton Place in quality and success. She died in 1964.

Peyton Place was very much a product of the 1950s. As time went by, other books were published that surpassed Metalious's novel in sales numbers as well as reputation. Peyton Place gradually lost prominence and eventually went out of print. Interest in the book was rekindled by the scholarly focus on mass and popular culture. The novel has been reissued, as was the only book about Metalious, Inside Peyton Place by Emily Toth.

Inside Peyton Place shows a rounded picture of Grace Metalious, the housewife from New Hampshire who violated every cliché and taboo about women, especially mothers, and authors in the United States four decades ago. Toth shows Metalious's family background in the French-Canadian community of Manchester, New Hampshire, and her gradual development from a frustrated housewife who created stories as an escape from her environment into an author caught between individual expression and the demands of the book trade.

Grace Metalious's fame rests on her controversial first novel, Peyton Place. Toth presents the book in such a manner that it appears as more than just a succès de scandale. She never claims that the novel-as well as the subsequent Return to Peyton Place, The Tight White Collar, and No Adam in Eden-was an outstanding work of art, but she makes a strong case for them having a cultural impact as "an opening wedge in the fight for freedom of expression" (241). Sometimes, however, the literary critic remains too silent. While it is undeniable that Peyton Place "represented lust and rebellion-against boredom, conformity, the double standard"-and Metalious "proclaimed that young people had more choices than suburbia and gray flannel suits" (139), Toth neglects to comment almost completely on the literary quality of the novels.

Inside Peyton Place concentrates not so much on the author as on the woman who also wrote successful books. Much of the book is concerned with Metalious's personal troubles, her marital difficulties, and her increasing alcoholism, which eventually caused her death at the age of thirty-nine. The stories about the author's private life take up such room that Toth's claim that Metalious "had a vision to communicate-about women, about outsiders, about small-town hypocrisies" (362) is sometimes rather difficult to follow.

Inside Peyton Place is a reissue; the book was originally published in 1981. Unfortunately, Toth does not appear to find much to add after twenty years. The afterword from 1999-set off from the rest by a different typeface-consists of only ten pages that provide some information on Metalious's family and question Toth's approach, without giving more than general answers. The addition to the bibliography consists of a single-page listing of mostly Internet material without references to scholarly works.

In her afterword, Toth remarks, "Inside Peyton Place, if I were writing it now, would probably say more about kitchens and less about bedrooms" (376). If that is so, one wonders why Toth chose to reissue her twenty-year-old book unchanged instead of producing a revised or even completely new text in tune with the critical concerns of today.