The Stepford Wives
The Stepford Wives
So, to the third novel in my set by Ira Levin…
A ‘Stepford wife’ has become synonymous with a rather vapid but pretty woman who is subservient to her husband and loves domesticity, but when the phrase was coined in The Stepford Wives, it was telling a cautionary tale about gender equality.
Levin’s writing in the early 70s. Feminism is on the ascendant; women have choices; and other women are the ultimate threat.
The Eberhart family – Mum Joanna, husband Walter, children Pete and Kim, move to Stepford from New York City – the ‘filthy, crowded, crime-ridden, but so-alive city’.
Numbering tennis, near-professional-level photography, politics, women’s lib – especially women’s lib – as her interests, Joanna is disconcerted to find the women who are her new neighbours are completely and compulsively absorbed in their household duties; all looking and behaving like pretty, big-bosomed actresses in commercials for domestic products. She’s rather horrified when Walter decides to join the Men’s Association in order to stay in touch with local issues, but he assures her the best way to effect change is from within.
She sets about discovering why, within months of moving to Stepford, women change so radically. And why for six years there have been no social groups for them. What happened to create this bizarre town? Is it anything to do with chemicals leaking from the industrial plants in the area, or seeping into the water supply from the ground? Or are the husbands – many working in those industrial businesses – concocting something at the Men’s Association with which to brainwash their womenfolk? Or is there something even more sinister going on?
I have to confess this story isn’t my kind of book at all. Totally fantastical and unbelievable. With a highly unsatisfactory ending to boot. So, something of an anticlimax after the promise of A Kiss Before Dying. But at least I’ve discovered that fact by actually reading them for myself before being influenced by other reviews or simply watching someone else’s interpretation. And I’m now done with this author.
Ira Levin: another masterclass
I have to confess the closest I’ve got to the American novelist/playwright, Ira Levin, is watching the film of The Stepford Wives during a period of convalescence. But given the stature of the man, I decided I really ought to remedy this and read some of his books for myself.
He was a mere 23 years of age when, in 1953, his first book, A Kiss before Dying, was published. It was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece in the crime-thriller genre, winning prizes and selling in eye-watering numbers. And it’s quite short – yeahhh! So that’s the one I decided to tackle first. Tackle? Says a lot about my overall approach, huh?
It was anything but. Accessible, gripping, masterfully plotted and written. And compulsive. Short chapters, and division into three parts, give added momentum. I easily finished it in a day in between wallpapering and weeding and cooking.
The story’s set in a small college campus. In Part 1 we see things from the perspective of the nameless murderer – blond, blue-eyed, handsome, street-wise, charming and a lady-killer in both senses. But also a gold-digger and a psychopath. We know he despises women and only wants them for what they can give him. In the first 84 pages we watch him manipulate and scheme to get rid of Dorothy Kingship aka Dorrie, a girl with a hefty inheritance and a baby on the way, who has dared – yes, dared in a most inconsiderate way – to thwart his plan to get rich quickly. We see him carefully and methodically get rid of her, completely confident the murder will be declared a suicide, and no one will ever know. And the effect is the more clever because we are in on the build up, the increasing threat of violence, but the actual moment of murder is left to our imaginations. So far, so fairly standard plotting.
But then comes the clever bit: a complete change of point of view. Part 2 sees Dorrie’s sister, Ellen Kingship, piecing together aspects of the circumstances that simply don’t add up. She’s convinced Dorrie didn’t take her own life. But how to prove it? She knows the man in question is a blond and handsome student in Dorrie’s cohort at college … but which one? Plenty of young men on the campus fit that description. And how can she trace him without endangering her own life? Approaching each potential blond suspect with a tissue of lies is fraught with peril. Was his the hand that pushed her sister so violently? Was his the smile that watched his ‘problem’ plummet from that 14th storey? As readers we grow increasingly tense as each betraying slip of Ellen’s tongue is detected through blue blue eyes, magnified by a suspicious brain. And who’d have thought torn paper snowflake crafting could be so spine chilling?
The body count increases. The murderer grows ever more audacious, intrepid, and bold. And now, we the readers know who he is.
Part 3 turns its focus on Marion, the third and last Kingship sister – our murderer’s last hope of inheriting a fortune. But there’s one blond handsome man who knew Ellen better, genuinely cared for her, and he is determined to bring this psychopath to justice, and save Marion from his clutches. Meticulously, incrementally, he obtains the evidence, by fair means or foul, and the net closes inch by agonising inch. Levin achieves a finale so tightly coiled and slowly released as to warrant the accolade from no less a personage than Stephen King: ‘the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel …. Every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting … he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drug store’.
Oh, and even in his debut novel, a mere stripling, Levin had the confidence to describe Ellen running down 14 storeys and through deserted night streets in one long breathless 24-line sentence! Impressive stuff.
Treats in store …
