When Johanna, Walter, and their children move to Stepford, everything seems perfect. A little too perfect, in fact. Why do all the Stepford wives live to do housework and please their husbands? Is their a conspiracy afoot or are Johanna and her friend Bobbie imagining things?The Stepford Wives is a paranoid thriller by Ira Levin. There is also quite a bit of social satire as well. What would a community be like if all the women behaved like the stereotypical 1950's style housewife? It's a pretty creepy book, though Levin eases you into the waters little by little so you don't notice all the dead animals around the pond until you're up to your neck in it. The feel reminded me of Jack Finney's Body Snatchers a bit. When will it be Johanna's turn to join the ranks of the sexually charged housewife drones?On the negative side of the scale, the book is very much a product of its time. All of the male characters seem like they'd be right at home working with Don Draper. Also, the 1972 publishing date wasn't all that far removed from the book's 1950's portrayal of male and female cultural ideals. Now, over 40 years after the book was written, everything seems quaint and a little ridiculous.3.5 out of 5 stars. I'm throwing in an extra .5 for the level of creepiness.

As Peter Straub points out in the introduction to this book, a lot of people miss the point. It is not "the easy satire on the banality of suburban housewives that it is commonly taken to be - a misconception that has installed its title in our language as shorthand for those homemakers who affect an uncanny perfection." This resulted in the fact that, after Ann Romney's recent speech at the RNC, I was asked whether I thought she was "like a Stepford Wife." No, she's not. For one thing, her vocabulary is too large. But, more than that, referring to politically-active conservative women as Stepford wives undermines the feminist argument of this novella.The critical point here is that this novella is not a parody of the WOMEN of Stepford, it is a parody of their HUSBANDS. As with Rosemary's Baby, which is actually about Guy Wodehouse, not Rosemary or her baby, the title here is a deliberate distraction. This book is a humorous critique of the anti-feminist backlash that takes the anti-feminist slogan "War of the Sexes" at its word and suggests that men are so frightened by women's liberation that they will start executing them to prevent it. The fact that our narrators husband is a good guy, who at first treats his wife as an almost-equal only heightens the irony that, when offered a pleasure-android with bigger breasts who will keep the house meticulously clean, he is just as willing as all of the others to kill his own wife to get it. It was interesting to me to see how the book differs from the movie. Unlike most film-adaptations, several scenes have been added to the novella, and fairly little was cut, resulting in a rather long movie (for 1975 sci fi, anyway). There is even the addition of a surprising new character with the unlikely name of Raymond Chandler who isn't in the book. It also seems to me that the truth of the Mens Association is lost in the film: that it isnt a long-standing organization with an archaic membership policy, but it was a recent innovation founded to combat a growing feminist presence in Stepford after Betty Friedan gave a well-received speech. Also unusual for a film-adaptation, the movie has more explicit sexual references than the book does, and plays up that side of what the men are up to while the book leaves this largely to the readers imagination. At any rate, the premise of this book is disturbing, and it is intended to be. The prose is efficient and the pacing effective. At its short length, it is a quick read and may actually comment more deeply on American society than it is generally given credit for doing.

"Satire" may be one of those words everyone has their own definition of. In terms of film, by two favorite satires are Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Network. In addition to being hysterically funny, I liked how credible they were, using a Life Magazine approach to document the world as it was at that time and then pushing it one step further. Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives is neither hysterically funny or plausible. Billed as a "satirical thriller", it was published in 1972 and has been adapted to feature film twice, by William Goldman in 1975 and Paul Rudnick in 2004. The plot involves Joanna Eberhardt, a semi-professional photographer who relocates to the hamlet of Stepford with her husband Walter and two children. Joanna balances married life with independence and social equality, as women's liberation sweeps the nation. She observes that almost all of the women of Stepford seem stuck in a TV commercial, cleaning floors, cooking meals, looking sexy, and putting their husbands first.Joanna sees red over the Men's Association, a male only club in Stepford that meet each evening at a clubhouse off limits to women. She finds it strange that Stepford doesn't have a female equivalent and agrees to let Walter join when he promises he'll change things from the inside. Meanwhile, she befriends the only women of Stepford who seem to have a brain; a spitfire named Bobbie Markowe and a tennis bunny named Charmaine Wimperis. Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss and Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan's Island) took these roles in the film.If ever there was a novella that could've been scribbled on cocktail napkins, The Stepford Wives is it. There are airplane novels, but this is the first taxi cab novel I've read. The book could be finished on the way to the airport in time to discuss it with your fellow passengers. It's a conversation starter, with no two readers likely to agree on what was going on in Stepford, what happened to the characters or whether the women's movement might provoke some sort of retaliation from men.To grab me by the throat, a good thriller needs credibility on a basic level. Comic thrillers I've read or seen take their plots deadly seriously and spike the punchbowl with wit as needed to sort of have it both ways. Satire, a far more difficult brew, absolutely requires credibility to work, otherwise, it turns to farce or science fiction at best, cartoon at worst. Whatever The Stepford Wives is, Levin never grabbed me by the throat. There's no atmosphere, no dread or tension (so much for the book being a "thriller"). It isn't funny (that eliminates "satire"). The characters aren't endowed with the basic quirks or intelligences to make them interesting or real. What dialogue there is sort of lies there flatly, while Levin skips through a lot of dialogue or plot with quick summaries.I really can't stand joke based books. Here is something I might dislike even more, a one-joke based book. Here is Levin's joke: "What if men were so threatened by the women's movement that they murdered their wives and replaced them with, wait for it, robots! You know, like the audio-animatronic figures at Disneyland?" Levin devotes some copy to Joanna & Walter's sex life that offered a peek at who these characters were and where they were going to end up, and he raised my pulse a bit in the climax, which is creepy for a few sentences. I can honestly say that I was rooting for the robots at that point. As opposed to satire, I found the novel to be more in the category of "so bad it's good", except, it wasn't very good. It's superficial, lazy and boring.There are some amusing questions in the scenario Levin concocted, but the author doesn't have the imagination to explore any of them. Were husbands put in charge of murdering their own wives, or did Stepford hire a professional? Would the cops or family members or pets suspect something was amiss? How do the robots assimilate into society? What happens when one of them requires maintenance? Do HOA dues cover that, or is it extra? These questions and any possible answer is more amusing than anything offered in the book, which I found over-rated and under-developed.