Levin
From Edgar Allan Poe, I learned of the seductive and often destructive allure of gloomy introspection. From Stephen King I learned the joy of unrestrained writing, of casting the sandbags aside and letting the balloon of the imagination soar. But as brilliant the spell cast by those two masters, no writer influenced my own approach to the novel like Ira Levin.Levin was a genius of story telling. His style was simple yet sleek, somehow stealthy. His prose was so realistic, a Levin novel became a lesson in voyeurism. You are there watching the self-aware housewife brooding over the strange changes in Stepford. You are in that swank New York apartment, eyebrows raised while you watch the strange behavior of the old people as they dote on the couple down the hall.
Read The Stepford Wives or Rosemary’s Baby and come back to me and report on the wasted words you find. I don’t expect to hear from you on that at all. Levin never waxed superfluous. If it didn’t advance the story he cut it, so that the reader ultimately held a slim book that nonetheless was packed with more thrills and chills than you will find in 250,000 word literary whales. He was concise and crafty, the kind of author that could pack more in one paragraph than most of us can manage in a chapter.
His work was weighty but never preachy. In Stepford, he examined the American Dream at it’s ugliest, the quest for the prettiest, most obedient wife, the neatest home, the most orderly of lives. In Rosemary’s Baby, he brought the Devil out of the realm of mythology and introduced him in mainstream America. In The Boys from Brazil, he revisited evil from the past and presented it upon modern society, greed and power bolstered by scientific advances that may doom rather than save us. In A Kiss Before Dying, he gave us more mundane horror, replacing Utopian desires and Devil worship with murder and mystery. It’s a crime drama without the supernatural element but it’s no less terrifying under Levin’s masterful hand.
Levin scared the crap out of us without ever raising his literary voice. He never hurried, he never resorted to gimmicks and he never failed. He made us feel that the things we fear the most might happen at any time, right here in the comfortable world of light. In Levin’s view of things, something terrible is always looming.
Yet he was funny, too. He was funny because that was apparently how he saw life and the way people interact with each other. That view of things made his stories believable and when you combine believability with horror, things get uncomfortable.
Just seven novels in four decades, Levin wrote, a stark contrast to the long list of credits authors put up today. He preferred quality over quantity and the readership is the benefactor of his approach.
Levin died Monday at 78. In his honor, I’m going to go back and hack out every other sentence from everything I’ve ever written. Part tribute and part of my never-ending quest to mimic that magical, elegant style that borders on perfection.
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November 16th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Sorry that one of your inspirations has died. I read Boys from Brazil years ago and agree that it was masterfully written.
I believe that everyone, whether they admit it or not, has some kind of mentor, inspiration, muse, whatever, that they strive to be like. Mine, which should shock no one, was the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. With Peter North and Gene Simmons thrown in to balance things out. And a sprinkling of Mickey Rourke and his brother PJ. Add the grace, beauty and prose of a youthful Cassius Clay, and the soul of James Brown, and the spirit of Bob Marley (the artist, not the Maine comedian).
November 17th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Sounds like you’re looking for designer genes, Gil.