This is no dream, she thought. This is real, this is happening.
The nights are getting longer, the days are getting cooler (high eighties over here in North Carolina instead of mid nineties, that counts as “cooler,” right?), and Halloween is only 22 days away, time for a month of spooky-book reviews.
Rosemary’s Baby is a book I’ve been nervous about reading ever since I saw a (lightly censored) version of the movie on TV back when I was in middle school. The film struck me as overwhelmingly creepy, with that feeling of dread and everyone-out-to-get-you, not to mention the horrifying dark sabbath, so surely the book would be even scarier. Turns out I needn’t have worried; if you can handle the film then you’ll have no problem with the book. The 1968 movie based on Ira Levin’s 1967 best-selling horror novel is one of the most faithful adaptations I’ve ever seen. So much so that I’m honestly not sure if fans of the movie will get anything more out of reading the book.
When I say the film was a faithful adaptation, I don’t mean just the plot or the character motivations. Everything in the movie was lifted in one piece from the book. The initial tour through the Bramwell apartment, the laundry-room conversation with Rosemary’s doomed neighbor Terry, Rosemary and her husband Guy’s awkward first dinner of vodka blushes and overcooked steak with the Castevets, Rosemary’s growing sense that something isn’t right with her pregnancy, every single bit was word-for-word from the book. Even Rosemary’s beautifully surreal dream sequence, the author could have written all of it as a screenplay from the start, right down to the Sistine Chapel blending into the underside of a shelf in the linen closet, and Guy’s flippant explanation about having drunken sex with Rosemary when she was unconscious.
…she wished that no motive and no number of drinks could have enabled him to take her that way, taking only her body without her soul or self or she-ness – whatever it was he presumably loved.
We do get to see Rosemary’s thoughts throughout the book, so there’s a bit more explanation about her life (lapsed Catholic from Omaha) her family (mostly disowned her due to her moving away from Omaha and marrying a Protestant) and her friendship with Hutch (I particularly enjoyed how the author told the story of the fatherly Hutch looking out for Rosemary and her two best friends when they’d first moved to New York, with just a brief mention of how he stepped in for such emergencies like The Night Someone Was on The Fire Escape and The Time Jeanne Almost Choked to Death.)
Mostly what we see in the first half of the novel is Rosemary’s determination to be happy. The move to the Bramwell reads like a love letter to New York apartment living, and the author includes all sorts of little details about furniture and paint samples and living room design and how that one room will be perfect for a nursery. None of it feels desperate or shallow, it’s just cheerful and real; a young couple who’ve been married long enough to be comfortable with each other, but recently enough that everything still feels like a just-starting-out adventure that will turn into a happily-ever-after, just as soon as Guy’s acting career finally takes off.
…lucky she-and-Guy, with the good part that would get attention even if the show folded, would lead to other parts, to movies maybe, to a house in Los Angeles, a spice garden, three children two years apart.
Rosemary’s pregnancy marks where the novel starts to turn darker. The reader sees Rosemary’s desperate attempts to rationalize away things that she knows aren’t right, even if she can’t quite put her finger on why. And then there’s the constant pain, like an abusive partner gradually separating her from friends and anyone else outside the Bramwell.
Up until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world.
And that’s the part of the book that actually horrifies me most; the dismissive attitude by Rosemary’s doctor and her husband that the crippling pain is normal. Everything’s fine, pregnancies always cause some soreness, never mind it’s so bad that she can’t eat or sleep or do anything else other than writhe in pain for months. That kind of gaslighting merges with the overwhelming betrayal that’s going on just outside Rosemary’s field of vision, the suffocating feeling of watching Rosemary try get help, to explain to someone what’s going on, knowing that she’s not crazy when she so obviously looks like she is. It feels so much scarier at times than the supernatural plot by a coven of Satan worshipers.
The ending of the novel left me with exactly the same thought that the film does: I want to know what happened next. What would Rosemary’s life in the Bramwell actually be like from now on? Would the successful and famous Guy eventually decide he’d paid too high of a price? (Although if you think about it, the fact that he was willing to offer up what he did as payment means he couldn’t have valued it that much in the first place.) And there are several lines that indicate there’s very little loyalty within the coven, so how long before the whole plan collapses under it’s own weight of distrust and narcissism?
The final image of Rosemary standing over a bassinet is part of what makes this book still popular today, and since both Ira Levin’s 1997 sequel and a made-for-TV sequel in the 1970’s have mixed reviews (“mixed” here meaning people can’t decide if they were dreadful or just disappointing) it’s probably for the best if all of those questions stay unanswered for me forever.