The Stepford Wives

Tags:  sci-fi,

This classic has good suspense and, as always from Levin, is well plotted. I won’t bother to summarize, since so many others already have, but it’s interesting to see a writer bring out the spooky side of sunshine and clean floors and fresh-smelling laundry.

If you took the TV commercials of the 1970’s at face value, with their cheerful housewives happily cleaning perfect homes, and built a world that embodied what those commercials portrayed, you’d come up with Stepford. It’s not a human world. It can’t be. But we live in a culture that has accepted and internalized the idea that that’s how the world should be.

I wonder what this book would look like if it had been written today, in the even more more self-involved, more false and more hyper-perfectionist world of social media. What would you have to be, in the end, to dwell comfortably in that world?