Gideon LeekThe summer after graduating college I received the text message “Five days” from an unfamiliar number. “Huh?” I replied. Seconds later, another text: Now it was “Four days.” I regretted the huh. This was no wrong number, and the declining interval did not inspire hope for, say, a surprise party. What awaited me in 96 hours? My mind raced with possibilities, many involving gardening shears (a source of inexplicable personal terror), and all resulting in, if not death, a greatly reduced lot in life. I corresponded with friends and family about the countdown: “I can’t believe no one else is concerned about this”; “I’m pretty sure I am being stalked”; “Do you guys really not think I will be killed”; and, in regard to the (then recently announced) film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, “Wish I wasn’t gonna be killed in four days so I could live to see it.” (The novel had appealed to me for paranoia-based reasons.) The severity of the situation successfully communicated, I began to search the Internet for answers.
A one-time payment of $2.99 on Been Verified (the official reverse-phone-lookup of the MTV show Catfish) revealed the identity of my SMS doom clock. The phone was registered to the father of a fellow 2021 graduate and was, presumably, in the possession of my ex-peer. While this did conjure up the anxiety-inducing image of fellow newly minted alums brainstorming the ideal target for the “Five days” ploy and settling on me for victimization, I was also relieved — this classmate was not the killing type, there were no gardening shears ahead of me. The clock struck 12 on the fifth day and I was still alive, shaken but unharmed. I kept telling the story for a few months, but eventually moved on — life had other deadlines for me. In his debut novel, The Threat, Nathaniel Stein, a prolific New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” contributor and successful sitcom writer (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The League, Angie Tribeca) asks what would happen to someone who preferred to remain menaced. (The Threat was almost certainly written during the WGA strike this past summer.)
“Mr. Melvin Levin, I’m going to kill you. You’ve worn out my patients for the last time and your through. My fury will rain down on you like a pack of rapid dogs and you’ll be flayed. I’ll smash your head into ten million pieces and cut them and feed them to the dogs. I’ve got my eyes on you.” So begins Stein’s [sic]-laden tale of nebbish meets note: Everything about the missive is misguided except, ironically, Mel’s name, which in its rhyming foolishness could’ve been flatteringly improved by creative misprision. (As is, it suggests both Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy’s put-upon avatar in Anna Karenina, and the nominative ill luck of a typical schlemiel — indicative of Stein’s balanced sense for the high-minded and the goofy.) Melvin Levin’s private life consists mainly of deferring to unreasonable demands from his two demanding neighbors (who have both recently “unleashed masterpieces of favor-asking”), doing time-consuming back exercises for a complicated lumbar problem involving tweaking (get it? he’s spineless), and being overshadowed at work (a nondescript cubicle gig where he has been waiting on a modest promotion for 19 years). It would be just his luck to get flayed.
For Levin, as it was for me, a threat is earth-shattering: seismic proof that we’ve been on shaky ground all along. But where I felt vindicated in my long-held suspicion that I would not make it in post-college life (in this case, literally), Levin sees the threat as a sign he’s called for higher things. Under the auspice of an imminent demise he abdicates his responsibilities and begins to live imaginatively: “No longer hemmed in by the rigid rectitude that had suffocated him for so long, he was now a person who breathed the full freedom of life.” Not bothering to finish the presentation on which his promotion rests, Levin brushes off the neighbors, indulges in small sins (such as stealing pens and declining to inform a stranger on the street of the loss of a scrap of paper), and begins to spend what little money he’s put away purchasing “threat accoutrements,” including “a pair of fine binoculars” and “a few maps of the city, which he had marked in mysterious ways and spread across the surface of the desk.” He indulges in a new wardrobe (“so few of his outfits were appropriate to a death threat”) and dines at restaurants with “sumptuous cloths and leathers, glistening metallic fixtures of the utmost expense, and magnificent marble surfaces,” musing “we dine among marbles and hardly look at them, let alone stroke them.” After all, fury may rain down on him at any moment, not to mention rapid dogs.
As scary as facing your impending demise might be, The Threat is a comic novel. This is a very different thing than a drama with some really good jokes in it, like Emma or Lolita or The Corrections, which use a dramatic plot as a backbone along which hilarity interrupts like vertebrae. Instead, at every level, from syntax to sentence to structure to synopsis, The Threat works for a calculated comic effect. There are intermittent nodes of sentiment — Levin, 41, single, friendless, professionally unfulfilled, and hobbyless, is a sort of de trop doomcase with real pathos potential — but they occur below the punchline. To appreciate The Threat, it helps to be in on the joke.
The relevant comic formulation goes like this: You are introduced to an action, taught why it’s passé, and then given a word for those who do it. This is how, for example, Seinfeld introduced the world to “double-dippers.” But one can imagine comedians waxing on about door holders or urinal peekers in a similar vein — here’s one I just came up with: “I couldn’t believe it, she took the whole tray. Face it, she’s a leftover-taker!” (A similar joke, in Bruce Jay Friedman’s comic novel A Mother’s Kisses, describes a neighborhood boy as “eating low-priced gas-producing vegetables” and proceeds to attribute his dialogue to “the vegetable eater.”)
The worldview in The Threat is similar, but with an absurdist touch: Levin seems simply to see the world this way, sans humor. He shows us “Leonard the enthusiast,” who is always “rubbing his hands in readiness for an enthusiasm,” then a “rotund IT worker,” to whom Levin makes a gesture of “rotundness” (“demonstrating the magnitude of something by throwing his hands outward”). Later, an officemate who dares purse his lips and blow becomes a “whistler” with a “whistling manner.” Levin sees people as walking verbs and adjectives. The fallacy of composition is an unwise way to navigate reality, and Levin, in his willingness to define by individual traits, sometimes fails to experience the multifaceted. From the existence of a threat, he conjures the totality of a man of serious menace (“So now I’ll have manglings,” he thinks). Only when he shows the note to his distinctly unimpressed coworkers (“It’s poor composition”; “It lacks a closing sentence”; “A mixed metaphor”) does Levin begin to realize he may be “dealing with a threatener of the third or even fourth rank.”
But because he has already enacted a similar error in his self-image — receipt of the letter convincing him that “he was now a man under the threat of death walking through mysterious, rain-soaked streets” — Levin is forced to moonlight as a threatener’s assistant or risk losing his life’s newfound spice.
On receiving a second prose disaster from the killer to be — “I’m watching you and before long your toast. I coud care less. Don’t even think about making any sudden” (this one breaks off mid-sentence) — Levin, giving in to an “irresistible temptation,” does a little ghostwriting: “With swift strokes [he] made the ‘your’ into a ‘you’re,’ added an ‘l’ to the ‘coud,’” and, at end “ added the word “moves.” But touching up copy is just the start. After the killer begins contacting him by phone, Levin, expecting a “dangerous conversational pas de deux with his sworn nemesis,” is forced to carry the conversation. The caller is mostly monosyllabic, his voice is “wheezy, and even weak,” and his connection cuts out often. His litany of threats (including the distinctly unalarming “I’m going to slice you open like a package”) is interrupted by a prolonged coughing fit. Frustrated with the threatener’s lack of self-generated escalation, Levin begins to make suggestions (including, a favorite, that he be sent on an “odyssey”). Ultimately, to maintain his status as a threatened man, Levin has to issue threats of his own.
Stein’s novel is a nightmare generated by dissonance between the individual and the world, like David Fincher’s The Game or Polanski’s The Tenant. But where, in those two films, an outside intervention (by brother and domicile, respectively) has made daily life difficult, what’s thrown Levin out of whack is internal. But the dissonance remains comic, not dramatic. Closer to the misunderstandings created by circular reasoning in Catch-22, or applying a medievalist’s perspective to modern life in A Confederacy of Dunces, or being accompanied by a Borscht Belt parental unit in A Mother’s Kisses, the humor in The Threat comes from imagining the mind of a sitcom script supervisor in a world threatened by a lack of writer’s rooms. A useful professional tool becomes absurd when applied off the clock. Stein, like me in my post-baccalaureate angst, is less afraid of death or flaying than of his specialized skills being moot in the real world. There are some things worse than gardening shears. ❖
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