Commanding a lot of attention ... Norman Mailer addresses an anti-Vietnam demonstration. Photograph: Dave Pickoff/AP
No doubt people say this every year, but I can't remember a 12-month period in which America has lost so many of its best-known writers. Potboiler king Sidney Sheldon crossed over to the other side of midnight on January 30. The world mourned the loss of Kurt Vonnegut and his unique brand of satire on April 11. Lloyd Alexander, author of the marvellous Chronicles of Prydain books, passed away on May 17, while New Jersey native Marc Behm died in his adopted home of France on July 12. September 16 saw the passing of Robert Jordan, the bestselling author of fantasy epic Wheel of Time, which will remain in suspended animation at volume 11 unless someone else decides to finish it up. And earlier this month, Norman Mailer and Ira Levin died within two days of each other.
Based on the quantity and vehemence of the trumpeting tributes and scathing rebuttals, Mailer has the current lead in the public's mind in the quest for eternal memory. But an Associated Press article late last week put necessary perspective on this, comparing and contrasting the sales records of Mailer, Vonnegut and Sophie's Choice author William Styron (who squeaks in under the 12-month wire by dying a year ago November). And if cold, hard Bookscan numbers are something to judge by, Vonnegut wins by a mile: Since 2006, Slaughterhouse-Five has sold 280,000 copies. Mailer's The Armies of the Night, a Pulitzer winner in 1969, sold just 3,000 copies, and Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, winner of the Pulitzer in 1968, has sold less than 2,000 copies. And it looks like those two won't be seeing big sales spikes anytime soon.
The explanation is a no-brainer: Vonnegut is usually discovered by teenage boys who gravitate towards his black humour and low tolerance for the establishment, and after reading one book they usually seek out the rest. Mailer and Styron, on the other hand, are generally not read at a young age (except by the overly precocious, I suppose) and the combined forces of door-stopping length, outsized personality (in Mailer's case) and self-conscious prose keep mass readership at a distance.
Which brings me to Ira Levin. Like Mailer, Levin burst onto the scene in his mid-20s, attracting attention and awards with the astounding, much-copied psychological thriller A Kiss Before Dying (1953). Unlike Mailer, his death didn't merit the star tribute treatment; while the obituaries were not entirely dismissive of Levin's gifts, several had the whiff of bemusement at his supposed lack of prose style. But who needs to be showy when you've written Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, novels which may not be read widely now but whose stories live on thanks to the movies?
Move past the obvious and what emerges is a writer unafraid to blend genres - his books include elements of dystopia, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, suspense and crime fiction, though not all at once - or to criss-cross between formats. When Levin wasn't writing novels, he wrote plays (like the long-running comedy-thriller Deathtrap) adapted books into film scripts (like No Time for Sergeants) and tried his hand at a musical libretto (Drat the Cat, an underrated vehicle for Lesley Ann Warren that closed after a mere seven performances.)
No matter the vehicle, Levin had a knack for telling stories that left indelible imprints upon readers, filmgoers and passive bystanders alike. His prose, unlike Mailer's, may blend into the woodwork, but the single world "Stepford" conjures up a landscape of post-feminist terror that The Prisoner of Sex could never hope to equal. Give Mailer his tributes in high places; but just as Vonnegut will continue to capture the imaginations of younger readers, Levin will live on through the power of ideas that go beyond entertainment into properly mythic territory.
