This month features Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives, Bloomsbury, ISBN 0747538026, £5.99 |
|
|
As well as The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin wrote Rosemary’s Baby, A Kiss Before Dying and The Boys From Brazil.
How’s that for nailing down the zeitgeist before it has a chance to float off?
Okay, so he also wrote the filmed-starring Sharon Stone Sliver (which I recently read as part of research for Finding Myself, and can’t remember anything about (and anyway, it’s not a patch on John Cheever’s great short story ‘The Enormous Radio’, which goes a lot further on the same central idea in a lot less space)).
Published first in 1972, it’s amazing how little The Stepford Wives has dated. Only a very few of the cultural references would be inappropriate now. The heroine, Joanna, is a bit of a curio, moving to too-perfect Stepford with Walter, her proto-New Man husband, and her up-front proccupation with Women’s Liberation – but that’s the Theme (definitely capital T) of the novel. Very little that she does or thinks seems improbable, she just wouldn’t talk about those issues in those terms; she would talk about them, though. The reader is likely to give a slight chuckle at her suggestion that some evening lectures be arranged in town on the subject of ‘what rock music is all about’, but there are amazingly few hey-man-groovy moments.
That, perhaps, is because the town of Stepford was a vision of a future we went past a couple of years ago: Silicon Valley comes to Milton Keynes. ‘Joanna looked at the neat low modern buildings, set back from the road and separated each from the next by wide spans of green lawn: Ulitz Optics… and CompuTech… and Stevenson Biochemical, and Haig-Darling Computers, and Burnham-Massey-Microtech,… and Instatron, and Reed & Saunders,… and Vesey Electronics, and AmeriChem…’ Naomi Klein would hardly have to move a comma.
It’s a measure of Ira Levin’s success that I would have a pretty hard time giving the main plot-twist of The Stepford Wives away – the eponymous women have long been a by-word for airheaded mechanistic female consumerism. And consumerism, as envisaged and created by men, is the clear target of the book: ‘That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.’
Some of the most touching moments come when normal human imperfection and mess is seen in all its loveableness: ‘I went into Norwood to get my hair done for your party; I saw a dozen women who were rushed and sloppy and irritated and alive; I wanted to hug every one of them!’
The flipside of this is the creeping evil of the impeccable: ‘Bobbie, in her immaculate living room – cushions all fluffed, woodwork gleaming, magazines fanned on the polished table behind the sofa – smiled at Joanna and said, “I’m sorry, I was so busy it slipped my mind?”’
Joanna, of course, comes to fear that she, too, will be tidied away, upgraded, replaced by an actress.
They never stop those Stepford Wives,
They work like robots all their lives.
Ira Levin writes a fantastically clear English – Stepford itself is seen with a kind of slow-motion underwater clarity, as if a tropical fish might swim by through the air at any point. It’s no surprise so many of Levin’s novels were adapted as films – they read very much like screenplays to start with; the crap doesn’t have to be cut, it was never there in the first place. The prose is far from utilitarian, though; beautiful verbal details abound, some almost Nabakovian: a conversation is ‘gap-ridden’; Joanna’s main ally, Bobbie, has ‘take-in-everything eyes’. And how about this for perfect balance: ‘Joanna said good-by to her and watched her go down the curving walk toward her battered red Volkswagen. Dogs suddenly filled its windows, a black and brown excitement of spaniels, jumping and barking, paws pressing glass.’ In fact, it’s almost spookily perfect…
|
Author interviews
