Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place continues the work Ardis Cameron began with the introduction she wrote for the 1999 Northeastern University Press reissue of Grace Metalious's notorious 1956 novel. In her latest work, Cameron offers an ambitious and complex examination of how Peyton Place functioned in mid-century America and, in particular, how it served as a site of identity exploration and contestation for many of its readers as well as a crucible for Metalious's authorial self-fashioning. Notorious for its catalogue of a small New England town's undertow of gossip, Peyton Place received especial scorn for its sympathetic portrayal of women as desiring subjects and because such content was penned by a woman. Cameron foregrounds the cultural labor in which the novel engaged: its interventions in gendered expectations; its articulations of social injustice; and “what [Peyton Place] did not only to the readers who couldn't put it down but also to the social, cultural, and literary truths their reading pecked apart” (8). Metalious's novel was not, Cameron asserts, “a call to social action.” Rather, it was a call to attention, “an exercise in rupture, a deep gash in the iron fabric of conventional ways of thinking and being” (14). For some, especially for many of its female readers, it was a call to recognition, a voicing of discontent and longing that forced a confrontation between gendered expectations and true selves. Throughout Unbuttoning America, Cameron offers an energetic and complex examination of the multiplicity of cultural forces that not only prepared the way for Peyton Place’s existence but also helped create and ready its readership for the novel's sympathetic treatment of women, sexuality, and difference, as well as its author's seemingly unlikely rise to celebrity status.

Cameron's background as a social historian is evident in the range, scope, and depth of her explorations into both the convergence of forces that forged the novel's existence and the force of impact of Peyton Place upon mid-century America. We learn about how dime novels enabled female wage workers to imagine alternative identities for themselves, “reworking old identities as they went and fashioning new, aspirational, and at times, political subjectivities” (24), thus laying the groundwork for an audience ready to receive, reflect, and perhaps act upon the selves that emerged from reading Peyton Place. Cameron explores how changes in the publishing industry increased women's influence therein, opening up opportunities for women writers telling women's stories due to “lady editors” attuned to the narrative thrum of female longing and aspiration in the manuscripts they read. We're given a primer on the rise of celebrity culture, its “produc[tion] of new publics” and the commodification of the author. Here, that author is Grace Metalious, whom Cameron reads as “a potent signifier,” whose life stories “readers used … to make sense of their own lives, shape new social identities, rebel against social constraints, negotiate conventional meanings, and perhaps change them, too” (151). Unbuttoning America is at its best when Cameron works in this realm, illuminating all that made Peyton Place possible and what Peyton Place itself made possible.

There is some quibbling to be done. A short study of fan mail as genre would have helpfully placed readers’ responses to Peyton Place within a broader context and provided a sense of how responses to the novel differed (if at all) from the correspondences of readers with other published authors. In addition, Cameron's literary analysis occasionally gives pause. Readers familiar with Peyton Place might wonder how the word “lusty” applies to Constance MacKenzie, the sexually repressed protagonist who mistakes libido for indigestion for much of the novel and to whom Metalious does not refer in such terms despite Cameron's assertion to the contrary (128). Or they might dispute the claim that Constance's “conflicted relationships with men” are reconciled as a result of “the possibility of exciting married sex” (143), instead pointing out that it is only when Constance tells her lover the truth of her past that she can initiate and enjoy sexual intimacy. These and other such moments distract from the fine work that Unbuttoning America does to reveal how powerfully and profoundly Peyton Place affected mid-century readers; they don't, however, imperil the thorough and original research Cameron does throughout her monograph.

Cameron concludes Unbuttoning America with the hope “that no one will ever again be surprised to find Peyton Place the subject of historical inquiry or fail to imagine the importance of its cultural labor in the making of modern America” (188). Her work here serves as a bulwark against such doubts about Peyton Place’s value, providing a strong case for the book's significance as a mid-century dynamo that enacted and activated possibilities for its readership and for the nation.