This Perfect Day

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, 309 pages

His nameber is Li RM35M4419, although his grandfather, who could remember a time before UniComp, nicknamed him Chip.  He is one more member of the great global Family, his life precisely planned by the infallible computer, his mind and body carefully treated so as to remove any inclination to instability or vice.  Yet all is not as it seems in this perfect world.

This Perfect Day falls squarely within the tradition of dystopian novels defined by Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451.  The conventions of the sub-genre are sufficiently well-defined that a skillful author makes his point primarily in the ways he deviates from them.  Levin, whose other novels include Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, Sliver, The Boys From Brazil, and A Kiss Before Dying is certainly skillful, if not always subtle, and he writes a better thriller than any of the canonical three.  His dystopia is a therapeutic nightmare in the same sense that Orwell's was political and Huxley's biological.  Particularly interesting are his deployment of a Spinozist pseudo-Christianity emptied of everything save for a vague ethical content as one of the chief supports of the system, the relative sexlessness of his less-than-decadent future, and his awareness of the basic duplicity involved in any such project, beginning with the ease with which generalized benevolence masks the passion for power.