Rating: 5.0What it's about:
All the beautiful people live in the idyllic village of Stepford, Connecticut, an affluent suburban Eden populated with successful, satisfied hubbys and their beautiful, dutiful wives. For Joanna Eberhart, a recent arrival with her husband and two children, it all seems too perfect to be true -- from the sweet, accommodating Welcome Wagon lady to all those cheerful, friendly faces in the supermarket checkout lines. But just beneath the town's flawless surface, something is sordid and wrong -- something abominable with roots in the local Men's Association. And it may already be too late for Joanna to save herself from being devoured by Stepford's hideous perfection.
My thoughts:
At the heart of this novel is a mockery of conformity and a satire of "the oppressors and their desires". After Joanna and her family move to Stepford, she sees that something about the women isn't quite right. All they do is smile and clean their houses. They are pleasant but very distant. They are all the same. Except for two other women who are also recent arrivals in the too perfect town of Stepford. Those two other women eventually conform to the domesticity of the Stepford women. Joanna is left to wonder at the conversion her two friends go through. Did they conform by choice or is there something in the water that changes the women of this town or worse? Is it something the men are doing to their women to make them especially beautiful and diligent in their housework? The Stepford Wives is highly readable, witty and clever. To quote Peter Straub in the introduction of this book, "Like everything else he [Ira Levin] has written, this book resembles a bird in flight, a haiku, a Chinese calligrapher's brushstroke. With no wasted motion, it gets precisely where it wants to go."
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