This Perfect Day

Over the years, I've read plenty of things by writers considered among the greatest ever. Shakespeare, Goethe, Camus - even if I enjoyed their work to varying degrees, I could nearly always see why they earned as much acclaim as they now hold. And then there's Ira Levin, the greatest writer I'd never heard of. In Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, Levin was responsible for some pretty iconic works of 20th-Century fiction. And in This Perfect Day, he created one of the most puzzlingly overlooked.

Perhaps it was down to the fact that, by 1970, readers felt that the dystopian novel had already been perfected. Certainly, This Perfect Day veers dangerously close to the likes of Brave New World, with its society of genetically faultless drones, and 1984, with its all-seeing surveillance state. But these comparisons do it a disservice, as Levin manages to create a world just as prophetic as the cornerstones of the genre, and almost as inventive.

This Perfect Day pulls the classic trick of setting up a world that appears utopian, before gradually revealing details that help you realise it's actually the exact opposite. The world's society - or "family" as they call themselves - have been united for generations, increasingly genetically homogeneous and provided with regular "treatments" of drugs that keep them free of any disease, but also passive and satisfied with their existence. "Hate" and "fight" have become the dirtiest words imaginable, jobs are guaranteed and assigned to everyone, and the likes of homelessness and famine have been eradicated. All of this thanks to Unicomp - a vast supercomputer beneath a mountain in Switzerland that keeps track of each individual and decides the turns their lives will take on their behalf. But our hero, Li RM35M4419 - Unicomp assigns names too, from a choice of four per gender, but Li prefers to go by the nickname Chip - is a bit different. With one green and one brown eye, he's marked out as physically different from everyone else at birth, and it's not long before his behaviour starts to cause concern too. Chip shows a tendency for creativity; despite being pushed down the career path of a geneticist, his real passion lies in designing buildings, and he's interested in art as well - both pursuits rendered irrelevant by Unicomp.

This earns him the attention of a group of fellow subversives, who meet in secret to partake in activities usually banned - by tricking medical workers into reducing the dosage of his treatments, Chip is able to better appreciate the pleasures of smoking, drinking and reading for enjoyment. He also begins to see the problems with some of Unicomp's decisions - the fact that despite the lack of disease, everyone dies aged 62, and how, free of his chemical suppressants, he is capable of feeling aroused more than once a week. He also starts to wonder if there are groups completely outside society, living as people did in the days before Unicomp. In fact, there are - living on a few remote islands dotted around the world. Chip eventually escapes to one of these colonies, based on Mallorca, and starts to put together a team to destroy Unicomp once and for all. But it's once Chip and his gang make it to Switzerland and into the heart of the mountain that the book's real twist is revealed - the true nature of the islands and the real reason Chip was marked out as different, leading to a satisfying conclusion with plenty of explosions, subterfuge, and a surprisingly happy ending that neatly ties up an overall very well-developed plot.

And it's this plot that helps elevate This Perfect Day to the level of its predecessors; it's a plot-driven book, with Levin's socio-political commentary merely bubbling away in the background. The way he manages this is quite brilliant, dropping in hints and fleshing out the world where necessary, leaving the reader with a full picture by the end. It's a believable one too, a world where all possible data on everyone is stored by a faceless computer, and freedoms are gradually limited for the greater good - without people having been asked whether they actually want that. As Chip comes to learn, being free from all suffering is not the same as being free, and it's the two sides of that complex debate that This Perfect Day nudges us to consider.

This Perfect Day deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as the greats of 20th-Century dystopian fiction, not least because it does a much better job of being actual fiction than so many comparable works.

4.5/5

Couldn't think of anything beyond this.

Good as Gold

As I have already established on this blog, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is my favourite book of all time, and while I have read a lot of very good books since, nothing really comes close, for me, to its staggering complexity, profundity, humour and pathos. So it's only natural that I should eventually get round to reading some of Heller's other books, to see if he could do it again. Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, was a good attempt: almost on par in terms of its brilliant dialogue and lampooning of American politics, but let down by a lot of rather bland passages relating to the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island. Good as Gold is Heller's other well-known book, considered by many to be his second-best. It also focuses a lot on the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect going in.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. It's no Catch-22 - what is? - but it also mostly avoids the mundanity of the least interesting parts of Closing Time. Good as Gold follows the misadventures of a man, Bruce Gold, trying to find his place in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, increasingly post-segregation America. He doesn't find it easy: working as an academic and occasionally publishing books and articles, he is shunned by his family who, while proud of his achievements, seem to think that he thinks that he's above them. But he's also shunned by members of the elite circle of society he has been forever trying to break into who, whether openly or not, always think of him as beneath them.

As the novel opens, Gold is stuck trying to get a book about "the Jewish experience in America" off the ground. The trouble is, despite having lived it, he can't seem to decide what that experience actually is, nor will anyone provide him with a clear answer. It is during this period of writer's block that he ends up churning out a shorter article of questionable merit and content, which of course ends up making him famous - not that anyone bothers to read it. It's here that Good as Gold really gets going, as Gold is invited to Washington where a high-ranking government position may be waiting for him. It turns out that the president is a big fan of a review Gold had written of the president's autobiography, and enjoys reading said review when people around him are talking about "agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health, education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest" - like in Closing Time, the satire here is just far too on the mark. Anyway, the scenes in Washington are as close as Good as Gold gets to Heller's truly best writing, introducing a succession of increasingly outlandish and memorable characters, all with some darkly comedic analogy to convey, and all of whom, directly or indirectly, want to remind Gold of his place as a Jew.

Because, no matter how much he may try to escape the fact, Gold's story always endeavours to remind him of his origins. A verbally abusive father, a mocking brother, five bickering sisters and their assorted partners, a stepmother who gets madder by the day and a wife who just doesn't seem to care any more are omnipresent throughout the book, whether in the foreground or in the back of Gold's anxious, overthinking mind. There are his childhood companions too, all of whom are less educated and talented than him, and all of whom have been a lot more successful in life. So while Gold does his best to break the cycle - attempting to elope with the daughter of a billionaire, penetrate the very highest level of government, and move in those elite circles that have never accepted him - he finds himself drawn back to his old Coney Island neighbourhood, and a succession of excruciating dinners and parties with his family, in rooms where everyone hates each other but is too proud to say so directly. I can't pretend to understand the American Jewish experience, but I suspect that this is what Heller is trying to convey with these plot lines, and he does it well.

Good as Gold isn't without its flaws: some of the prose drifts far enough into abstraction as to be unclear, Heller misses the chance to fully develop his satirisation of academia, and there's a whole section dedicated to how terrible Henry Kissinger was which, while it makes a lot of valid points, just feels out of place. But all in all there's a lot to like: the ludicrously eccentric billionaire Pugh Biddle Conover, who has forgotten everything but how to be racist but still comes through for Gold in the end, Gold's contact in Washington Ralph, who reels off one-liners with practically every line, the description of Gold's fitness regime that destroys his body but leaves him feeling in peak condition... and most of all the relentlessly brilliant dialogue, conversation after conversation of tragically funny misunderstanding between people that reflect the frustrations of life so well.

Good as Gold is a bloated, confusing mess - and that's what makes it so good.

5/5

There's a lot of discussion here about whether any Jews had truly been successful in America. The field of music is noticeably absent from that discussion.