But as Warner Books rolled out a $600,000 promotional campaign, newspaper critics had a picnic ripping into Ripley. “Nineteenth-century characters who talk like members of a ’90s support group,” sneered USA Today. “Stunningly uneventful,” pronounced The New York Times. “Chewing, shopping and changing clothes do not a novel make,” said New York Newsday.
Considering the odds against her, Ripley did her job far more effectively than the reviewers gave her credit for. The first 400 pages or so of “Scarlett” are a small triumph. Even set in a typeface almost identical to the original, the novel opens at Melanie’s funeral, with its heroine devastated but unbowed by Rhett’s departure a couple of days earlier. Within a few chapters, we’ve re-met Ashley, Mammy, Prissy, Aunt Pittypat and all the folks back at Tara. Perhaps only dedicated GWTW aficionados will appreciate how painstakingly Ripley has tried to re-create the tone of the earlier book-with the welcome elimination of its “sho’ ’nuff” dialect for the black characters.
Ripley’s contract with the Mitchell heirs included just two prohibitions: no graphic sex and no homosexuality. Both were easy to abide by, says Ripley. Still, the steam is turned up a few degrees from Mitchell’s “swirling darkness” euphemisms. Writes Ripley: “She pretended … that the warm, strong thrusting filling her aching emptiness was Rhett’s.” Whew.
As long as “Scarlett” remains anchored in Atlanta, Charleston and Savannah, it bears a reasonable relationship to GWTW. Ripley is not the skilled dramatist Mitchell was, but her descriptions of countryside, cityscapes and interiors delight. She does, however, go overboard in her detailed evocations of endless and enormous meals. We get it, we get it: Scarlett will never be hungry again. (Neither will Ripley, who will receive 15 percent of all “Scarlett” earnings, including movie, paperback and foreign rights.)
Unfortunately, “Scarlett” quickly loses credibility once its heroine, enamored of her father’s working-class Irish-American relatives, moves to the Emerald Isle for the last third of the book. There, the wealthy and class-conscious Scarlett implausibly identifies with the revolutionary peasant O’Haras, shedding her corsets and shoes to work in the fields and live in a house without furniture. She is cloyingly happy in County Meath with her baby daughter (who, I regret to report, is called Cat; I will not give away the father’s identity). At times the reader wants to slip into one of Scarlett’s too-frequently mentioned refreshing naps. Not, however, during a bizarre childbirth scene, where Cat is delivered, via Caesarean section, by a witch, on a kitchen table, during a raging Halloween storm. Fans don’t seem worried about Ripley’s liberties" 900,000 copies of “Scarlett” arrived in U.S. stores last week, and 250,000 sold the first day. In suburban Atlanta, 200 people were lined up outside a bookstore at midnight to get the first copies.
Hitching a ride on “Scarlett’s” petticoats are a cluster of parodies, as well as a first-rate new biography, “Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell,” by Darden Asbury Pyron. Pyron delves deeply into the family background and two marriages of the Atlanta newspaperwoman, and reveals such tidbits as Mitchell’s fondness for reading erotica, despite a distaste for sex in her own life. He also links her family members with characters in GWTW: Rhett, he says, derives from Mitchell’s complicated relationship with her mother, who urged her to be more than a Southern belle but never gave her much maternal warmth. Like an ideal mother, Pyron observes, “Rhett is sympathetic and intuitive. He is compassionate and tender.”
Ripley, the author of several Southern historical romance novels, is the first to acknowledge her good fortune in inheriting characters as unforgettable as Rhett and Scarlett. “The book is only marginally mine says. In trying to be faithful to the original, she reread GWTW five times. She even copied out the first 200 pages in longhand, hoping to absorb the author’s “voice” through a kind of osmosis.
If the effort was not entirely successful, at least Ripley makes us feel we’ve had an intriguing peek into one possible future for GWTW’s characters. Best of all, her Rhett is the same dashing heartthrob women everywhere have swooned over. So’ does Scarlett get him back? Of course she does. Will they stay together? Don’t be ridiculous. Ripley says she won’t be the one to continue the saga, but after all, tomorrow is another day–with another authorized sequel already on the horizon.
