“‘She says she has to warn you about something a man is —’”
The job of the literary fiction writer is to take the reader on a hike. And the sad fact is that most people, most of the time, don’t feel like going on a hike. So the writer must employ all her charms; she must dispense treats at regular intervals; she must make good conversation; she must, above all, be keenly aware of the reader’s need for frequent rest.
The job of the thriller writer, on the other hand, is to take the reader out for a day of skiing. Certain natural laws (gravity, acceleration, the pulse-quickening effects of proximity to danger) play to her advantage. And so the thriller writer’s charms, being superfluous, naturally begin to wither. The thriller reader is thus confronted with many an ungainly sentence, many a cardboard character, and he doesn’t mind, or even necessarily notice, due to the trees whizzing past.
Ira Levin is that rare thing: a skier with the heart of a hiker. To read his novels (which are, for my money, the best thrillers of the past seventy-five years) is to feel yourself in delightful company, even as you hurtle downhill. The narrative voice is nimble, with a slight smile. Every scene serves a purpose and ends once that purpose has been served (Stepford Wives is a mere 35,000 words). Levin’s unusual care for his readers is most conspicuous in his plots — he would, you get the sense, follow you home from the ski slopes and fastidiously make your bed, if he could.
The best place to see Levin’s plot virtuosity in action is The Boys from Brazil. The story takes place in the mid-1970’s, when a bunch of fugitive Nazis (Mengele foremost among them) come up with a plan to create a global Reich. The book runs on dual engines: you want to know whether the Nazis will pull their plan off, and you want, perhaps even more urgently, to know what their plan is. Thanks to a mediocre 1978 movie adaptation, I knew precisely where the book was headed, and I still kept my wife up well into the night, bedside lamp blazing, involuntarily muttering things like Jesus and Oh no.
The suspense begins when the book does — the Nazis are holding a meeting at a Japanese restaurant in Brazil to set their plan in motion. Unbeknownst to them, their conversation is being recorded — a young Japanese waitress, paid by a twenty-something Nazi-hunter, has hidden a tape recorder underneath the table.
The Nazis discover the recorder and Mengele, with terrifying charm, confronts the waitress, who readily confesses what she knows: that the young man who paid her is staying at a nearby hotel, is wearing a blue jacket, etc etc. Off Mengele and his goons go to find the man before he can do anything with his tape.
Meanwhile the young man, back in his hotel room, has called an older, better-resourced Nazi-hunter to tell him about his coup. And while the young man stumbles over his words and futzes with his tape recorder, the Nazis race toward his door. Thus do we find ourselves facing the quintessential Levin predicament: the perilous transmission of critical information.
In every Levin novel there comes a point — or sometimes multiple points — at which Character X needs, for the sake of all that is good, to decant some bit of knowledge into the head of Character Y. The creepy neighbors are actually Satanists! (Rosemary’s Baby). The creepy neighbors are actually killing women and replacing them with robots! (Stepford Wives). Levin’s genius is in how he manages these moments of decanting — how he makes you believe, despite everything you know about storytelling and fate and Nazis, that the crucial information might this time really make it into the ready receptacle of Character Y… and how, at the crucial moment, he lets the bottle drop (oops).
So: the Nazis turn up at the hotel. The young Nazi-hunter has told the older Nazi-hunter some but not all of what he heard on the tape. Now he just needs to get rid of whoever’s pounding at the door.
Here Levin does something fiendish. He needs the Nazis to get into the room and scupper the call. But he needs (to keep alive in us the elevator-door-closing-as-we-race-toward-it feeling that is, for mysterious reasons, the unique pleasure, the value proposition, of the thriller) for us to believe that they might not.
If the Nazis came armed with a battering ram, the door would be knocked off its hinges and the game would be over. If they came armed only with some lame bit of bullying (“Open that door this instant!”), the door would remain locked.
But what Levin has the Nazi shout is, “ ‘Senhor there’s a Japanese lady here, looking for someone who looks like you! She says she has to warn you about something a man is — .’”
Would you fall for that? I think I would. You’d have to at least open the door to see what was going on, wouldn’t you? (Note too the fact that Levin, unlike many a crime writer, possesses an ear. The way I read that line, it reads: She says she has to warn you about something. A man is —. The dropped period, the elided grammar, conveys the jumbled-together-speed with which this regrettably clever Nazi is speaking.)
Anyway, the young man falls for it. And so he dies. (This takes place all of thirty pages into the book; I’m not spoiling much). And Levin assures us that he’ll pour the next bottle much more carefully.
One of the ways that I console myself, when writing seems like a singularly foolish way of spending time, is to think: you’re increasing the store of beauty in the world. Even if all I can add is a couple of puny saplings at the edge of literature’s Yosemite — well, forests need saplings too. The type of beauty I’m usually thinking of is the beauty of a heart-piercing short story, the beauty of a soaring scene. But more and more I’m impressed by the beauty of a well-turned plot — a beauty that has less in common with greenery, maybe, than with the little trap-doors carved by certain types of spider. This type of beauty evokes a different sort of gasp, a different and darker sort of admiration. Levin is one of literature’s great spiders. Walk carefully.
This will get back on my reading list! Thank you.
I don't usually read thrillers...but now, apparently, I'll have to.