This Perfect Day

This Perfect Day – Ira Levin

After Unification, everybody lives peacefully, cooperatively, and according to schedule. Thanks to monthly treatments, nobody has aggressive or selfish urges, and any member of the Family could substitute for any other member because they are all genetically engineered and chemically modified to be just like everyone else. Of course there are the occasional exceptions of skin tone slightly paler or darker than normal, or one brown eye and one green eye, such as Chip has. Chip frequently gets the sense that something is a little off about life in the Family, but it takes him a while to figure out how “freedom from” differs from “freedom of.” As he struggles with “sick” ideas, alternating between receiving overdoses and underdoses of treatment, Chip comes to the realization that life under strict computer control is not necessarily the best way to live. But in a world controlled by a supercomputer, can anything happen outside the scanners and medicenters, or do the treatments always come just in time with just enough dosage? Can anyone outwit Uni?

I’ll keep it short because this has been done before. “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Fahrenheit 451” or any other in a long line of dystopias that feature protagonists struggling against the sense that some ultimate power might not be letting me live as good of a life as I thought I had. I didn’t feel that this novel added anything particularly fresh to the genre. In fact, I was often confused by it. Locations are renamed with numbers, and while the more important locations are eventually referred to by their “pre-Uni” names (like Argentina or Majorca), I still want to know where Afr17022 is. Books like this tend to leave out a lot of background information, assuming that you’ll catch on as you go (oh, “fight” and “hate” are bad words in this world), but sometimes I would have preferred a simple explanation earlier rather than guessing about the exceptionality of breasts 100 pages into the story. I also got particularly annoyed by the multiple surprise turns in the story. You can see what’s coming from a mile away, and it happens, but wait, then something else happens. OK, I know this storyline too…there it is. But wait, something else! Here we go again. It’s alternately mind-numbingly predictable and absolutely blindsiding. You had no idea that was coming, but now that it’s happened, you know exactly what’s going to happen next. It stopped making sense after a while and felt more like someone was trying to mash storylines together. And the ending was downright absurd. If you read this book, you’ll have to let me know what you think, because even as I was reading it, I couldn’t believe that the story went where it did. Stick with the classics; they’re classics for a reason.