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Tanya's Reviews > Sliver
Sliver
by
by
This erotic psychological thriller was Ira Levin’s first novel in fifteen years, after
The Boys From Brazil
in the mid-70’s, and other than the subsequent and final Son of Rosemary, an allegedly terrible sequel to the iconic and excellent Rosemary’s Baby which I’ll never read, it’s unanimously the one rated the lowest� and I get why. I’ve loved everything else by Levin that I’ve read so far—his stories are always a wild, exhilarating ride with great twists—but the writing here isn’t very good (to put it mildly—it goes beyond Levin’s trademark matter-of-fact sparseness), the protagonist’s choices are utterly unrealistic, and the ending is such an unlikely, ironic cop-out that I couldn’t help but laugh, although I’m sure Levin was going for poetic justice rather than ludicrous deus-ex-machina. I was very much in the mood for a quick, enjoyably ridiculous thriller though, and I inhaled it in two short days. It’s not appallingly bad, but it’s also nowhere near good, yet I enjoyed my time with it. Sue me.
Kay Norris, an attractive and successful thirty-nine year old book editor, moves into an apartment in a slender 21-story high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which the tabloids have already dubbed the Horror High-Rise because of a series of bizarre, deathly accidents that have befallen four of its tenants. She starts an affair with the building’s young, handsome, and rich owner, who, unbeknownst to everyone, has surveillance cameras and microphones installed in every apartment. What follows is kind of the opposite of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with an intriguingly prescient Big Brother spin: Instead of a voyeur who witnesses a murder, the voyeur is the one committing murders to protect his voyeuristic habit.
The "romance" aspect of Sliver is so terrible, I truly cannot stress this enough—it’s so absurd that it’s funny. Here’s a worldly woman who somehow doesn’t think it’s a massive red flag when a guy openly admits to being attracted to her because she looks like his dead mother� and six weeks into a fling, when she finds out what would, for most rational people, be a deal breaker, she’s instead willing to marry him so she wouldn’t have to testify against him in a court of law. At least she has second thoughts when murdering gets added on top of the peeping. Small mercies, oh baby.
The theme of technology posing a threat to our privacy has ensured that the novel has aged well in a way Levin couldn’t possibly have foreseen in 1991 though; the trashy, gritty veneer of the suspense thriller hides a pretty compelling and uncomfortable exploration of the forbidden lure and addictive nature of voyeurism. In our age of social media, who hasn’t ‘watched� someone who was unaware of it? Where is the line, and how do you know if you’ve crossed it? If anything, Sliver is more relevant now than when it was first released, and all the more unsettling for it—and it was even ahead of its time in a way, as the Peeping Tom exhibits what can only be described as binge watching behavior.
Kay Norris, an attractive and successful thirty-nine year old book editor, moves into an apartment in a slender 21-story high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which the tabloids have already dubbed the Horror High-Rise because of a series of bizarre, deathly accidents that have befallen four of its tenants. She starts an affair with the building’s young, handsome, and rich owner, who, unbeknownst to everyone, has surveillance cameras and microphones installed in every apartment. What follows is kind of the opposite of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with an intriguingly prescient Big Brother spin: Instead of a voyeur who witnesses a murder, the voyeur is the one committing murders to protect his voyeuristic habit.
“Life. The real thing, the soap that God watches. A sliver of it anyway. No actresses, no actors, no directors. No writers or editors. No commercials. And every bit of it true, not somebody’s version of the truth.�
The "romance" aspect of Sliver is so terrible, I truly cannot stress this enough—it’s so absurd that it’s funny. Here’s a worldly woman who somehow doesn’t think it’s a massive red flag when a guy openly admits to being attracted to her because she looks like his dead mother� and six weeks into a fling, when she finds out what would, for most rational people, be a deal breaker, she’s instead willing to marry him so she wouldn’t have to testify against him in a court of law. At least she has second thoughts when murdering gets added on top of the peeping. Small mercies, oh baby.
The theme of technology posing a threat to our privacy has ensured that the novel has aged well in a way Levin couldn’t possibly have foreseen in 1991 though; the trashy, gritty veneer of the suspense thriller hides a pretty compelling and uncomfortable exploration of the forbidden lure and addictive nature of voyeurism. In our age of social media, who hasn’t ‘watched� someone who was unaware of it? Where is the line, and how do you know if you’ve crossed it? If anything, Sliver is more relevant now than when it was first released, and all the more unsettling for it—and it was even ahead of its time in a way, as the Peeping Tom exhibits what can only be described as binge watching behavior.
“H´Ç´Ç°ì±ð»åâ€�on that God’s-eye view of life, a sliver of it.â€�
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