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| "One of the half-dozen most influential horror novels of all time." |
Today: part two in our look back at classic horror novels!
When it comes to Rosemary's Baby, the movie gets a lot more attention than the book. The film is widely considered a classic, while the book is thought a flimsy bit of long forgotten pulp trash, whose own author almost disavowed it, even going so far as to blame it for the dumbening of America. But if you take the time to go back and revisit it, not only is it a snappy little read with a wry, mordant, ironic sense of humor, it's also a minimalist marvel of structure, characterization, and efficiency, expertly executed by a playwright and craftsman.
Like most people trained to write for stage or screen, Ira Levin was more about structure than style. This is something certain literary types will made snide comments about, or (worse) praise faintly. But Otto Penzler gets it. In his introduction to the novel's 2010 edition, the mystery master perfectly sums it up: Levin's sentences are "models of precision, making up what they lacked in velvety, mandarin, overripe prose with clarity and forward movement, with never a wasted word."
I recently sat down and did a structural analysis of novel and if you'd like to know how Levin pulls it off, here it is. For those who are not horror or suspense writers, feel free to skip the next section.
A Structural Analysis
Let's start with characterization. In chapter one, we already learn that Guy is a good liar, and that Rosemary is sweet, and a people-pleaser. We learn this in the brief interaction between Guy, Rosemary, and a couple of real estate agents. In addition to characterization, a lot of really important exposition is delivered through dialogue, which might seem easy and obvious but then Levin gets ingenious with it, actually delivering expository information through half-heard bits of conversation floating through Rosemary's dreams. The walls in her apartment are thin, you see, and she can hear the Castavets plotting right through them... but of course she doesn't yet make the connection.
With Levin, everything -- especially set ups and characterization -- comes down to individual, granular moments. Let's take the famous sandwich scene in chapter five. Husband of the year candidate Guy takes a sandwich and beer supplied by Rosemary without even saying thank you. Levin uses this scene to advance the action (Rosemary says they have been invited to dinner at the Castavets), to establish character (Guy = thankless dickwad) and set up Guy's frustration with his career, which makes what happens next plausible and believable. (Side note: this is why I have such issues with the excessive word-count phenomenon I see going on in so many contemporary novels. You don't need a hundred pages to show us that Guy is a dickwad. You just need one sandwich.)
The fantastic part about the plotting in Rosemary's Baby is that everything evolves through action. You can practically feel the story beats lining themselves up in a row, but they're never obvious. In one scene, Guy is pondering the Castavets' scheme. How do we know this? He's up late at night, smoking a cigarette. That's it. That's all it takes. At the time, on the first read, you might not even notice it. But later, when the story starts paying off, you realize what a subtle set up it was.
Later, Guy gets real close to blowing the whole act when he lashes out at Rosemary after the party scene, after she got some very sane advice from her girlfriends, calling them a “bunch of not-very-bright bitches who should mind their own god-damned business,” and dismissing Dr. Hill as a Charley Nobody.
Rosemary objects:
“I’m just going to let Dr. Hill examine me and give me his opinion.”
“I won’t let you,” Guy said. “It’s -- it’s not fair to Sapirstein.”
“Not fair to -- What are you talking about? What about what’s fair to me?”
So Levin steps back and has Rosemary’s pain suddenly, inexplicably disappear. It’s not time for that crisis yet, not if we want to keep stringing this girl along, anyway. No, Rosemary won’t show another flash of anger and insight until after Hutch’s death, when she reads the book All of them Witches. Of course, at that point we realize C.C. Hill isn’t quite the dreamboy of the western world after all, when he sells her straight down the river.
Speaking of Hutch, here’s another great example of how Levin strings us along with little breadcrumbs throughout the book. A chance conversation with Hutch’s daughter at the hospital informs Rosemary that she (Rosemary) is seeing Dr. Sapirstein about twice as often as an ordinary woman. It will also be a chance moment at the Doctor’s office that will tip her off to his frequent and smelly use of the tannis root. Levin does rely a little bit on coincidence -- for example, having Rosemary run into Guy’s vocal coach and discovering about the Fantasticks tickets -- but only these three times by my count, which isn’t outside the realm of probability.
Finally, Levin is great at lulls. Almost all of chapter six in part two is just Rosemary being happy, and even after Hutch dies and she finds out about the witches, there is a lull where things seem smoothed away. Even after the iconic hot-phone-booth suspense scene, Rosemary has a chance to lie down in a cool room… until they take her away.
So basically, Levin does everything you’ve ever been told to do while writing suspense: he "shows us the gun," he lets us stay one step ahead of the main character (but not two), and he litters the trail to the climax with lots of little bread crumbs. Yet, incredibly, the book doesn’t feel overly plotted. One thing Rosemary’s Baby has in common with the Exorcist is the simplicity of its concept. I also notice that Levin uses -- probably unknowingly -- many of the principles M.R. James suggests for writing good horror. He keeps the setting modern, and banal (for realism), proceeds slowly, keeps his evil pure evil, and when he’s ready to (usually between chapters 7 and 10), delivers an eminently “Jamesian wallop.” Levin observed that “the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears,” which also explains why act three is less than a quarter of the length of acts one and two. No need to linger once the act is done.
Incidentally, pregnancy itself is also a simple concept -- from month one to month nine, a small human being develops. It’s how that tiny person develops that’s really amazing. Levin said, “I was struck one day by the thought (while not listening to a lecture) that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!”
It’s simplicity itself. I wish more horror writers, readers, and critics would learn to appreciate this concept. Elaborate plot twists are not always necessary. If there’s one criticism that almost always strikes me as meaningless, it’s “I saw that coming.”
Criticism
Interestingly enough, almost none of the criticism of Rosemary’s Baby deals with the fact that nothing in it is really unexpected, except, strangely, Renata Adler’s (!) original review of the film in the New York Times: "The movie—although it is pleasant—doesn't quite work on any of its dark or powerful terms. I think this is because it is almost too extremely plausible. One gets very annoyed that they don't catch on sooner. One's friends would have understood the situation at once."
I really wish the producers had gone with this for a movie poster pull-quote: “Rosemary’s Baby is …. pleasant.” - Renata Adler.
But I promised to talk about the book, not the movie, so let’s see what the paper of record had to say about the novel, shall we? In Thomas J. Fleming’s original 1967 review, he catches on immediately to how great the story concept is:
"Ira Levin has 'urbanized' the ghost story. Instead of a creepy mansion on a windy hill, he has given us a haunted apartment house on upper Seventh Avenue. Into this highceilinged warren (with its vaguely sinister gargoyle facade) move Rosemary and her actor-husband, Guy."
And he loves at least the first two thirds of the book: "Mr. Levin’s suspense is beautifully intertwined with everyday incidents; the delicate line between belief and disbelief is faultlessly drawn."
But he hates the ending -- though not because he saw it coming. He seems to hate the ending because he saw it:
"Up until this point, we are with him entirely, admiring his skill and simultaneously searching out possible, probable, and improbable explanations of how he is going to extricate his heroine. Here, unfortunately, he pulls a switcheroo which sends up tumbling from sophistication to Dracula. Our thoroughly modern suspense story ends as just another Gothic tale.
Riding high on the jacket is a quote from Truman Capote comparing Rosemary’s Baby to The Turn of the Screw. Alas, this is precisely where it fails to measure up. James knew too much about the ambiguities of reality to make us decide whether his terror emanated from the supernatural or the torturous, unexplored depths of the human mind."
Fleming deplores the “literal resolution” of this story, demonstrating a failure to understand the pleasures of the horror genre -- but then, this is a guy who thinks a comparison to Dracula is a mild insult.
Personally, I think Rosemary’s Baby is a bit like Rosemary herself. People think she was stupid, but she wasn’t. She was a lot smarter, and a lot more self aware than people remember. She read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for fun, and she was really good at Scrabble. Don’t underestimate little Rosemary Reilly from Omaha. She might just end up in charge of your whole god damned coven.
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