Round 2
by Joshua Adams

At first blush, proving that fiction is more vital than film isn't a question of taste but one of logic. Since when has a great movie spawned an irresistible book? From "The Grapes of Wrath" to "The Godfather," "The Virgin Suicides" and "The Lord of the Rings," the train moves in the other direction, often to the chagrin of prose partisans, like me. Fiction begets film, and, Peter Jackson's LOTR notwithstanding, it mostly does so as a commercial afterthought. William Faulkner, himself the inspiration for a character in the Cohen Bros. quirky Barton Fink, spit out screenplays for money, but, when it came time to do some heavy lifting, went back to Yoknapatawpha County, to a stream of consciousness so improbably rich that only the loosest and simplest of film adaptations could claim its mantle, and rightly so.

But why does contemporary fiction seemed dwarfed by Hollywood, with respect to appeal, impact, coolness and verve? A number of reasons qualify for partial credit, but most of the blame can be placed in a familiar place. TV and film have changed culture permanently. There is no going back to a mythical time when the imagination was the only route to vision — in the West, this process is at least as old as Christian iconography. When films were still confined to theaters, when going to the movies allowed for an entry and an exit into another world, people could still leave behind the graven images of the silver screen and return to their decidedly private lives and longings.

This is hardly the case today. Now, books that have been made into movies carry pictures of their stars and starlets on their covers. I can't think of a more violent blow against the privacy, and capability, of the reader to imagine, than deciding, in a pre-emptive strike, what imaginary people look like. Even if Meryl Streep was dynamite in The Hours, why should we always and everywhere think of her as Clarissa, or Nicole Kidman-cum-nose as Virginia Woolf?

Although Friedrich Nietzsche is pulled into service even in the clever The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to bless the forgetful, we can use him to push back because film's apparent triumph over fiction mirrors the tyranny of the base over the noble in "The Genealogy of Morals." Being overcome by a film requires no effort; a movie robs its viewers of agency even while it plunges them into catharsis. One might object to drama in the same fashion — and critics, starting with Plato, did — except for the fact that plays are performed live, and, as such, they have a claim to life, too. Things can go vividly, horribly wrong on stage. When they do, or seem to do, on screen, as in Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Adaptation, we're outside the conventions of the genre, which is where the revolutionary impulse in every art form wants to take us. Even the comparatively staid Lost in Translation does not give us what we want, which is a resolution. This is why Sophia Coppola's film won the Oscar for best screenplay, despite having an almost laughably insubstantial script. The film wins us over because, in its ambiguity and its desire to be interpreted, it is almost like novel.

So we stay home from the movies. Where are all the good books, then? Dozens of competent novels get published each year, but, for convenience, and because every underground author shoots for the brass ring, it pays to look at the prizewinners. Consider the evidence. Over the past five years, the following have won the Pulitzer Prizes for fiction: "The Hours," "Interpreter of Maladies," "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," "Empire Falls" and "Middlesex." The following have won the Man Booker Prize: "Disgrace," "The Blind Assassin," "The True History of the Kelly Gang," "Life of Pi" and "Vernon God Little." The following have won the National Book Critics Circle Award: "Motherless Brooklyn," "Being Dead," "Austerlitz," "Atonement," "The Known World." Say what you will about these choices, plus a few National Book Award-winners like "The Corrections," but it's difficult to maintain that contemporary fiction is somehow in the midst of a talent drought (and this tally doesn't even take into account fiction published in other languages). The audience for serious fiction stateside may have been cannibalized by movies, and our attention spans halved by HBO, but decent, even exhilarating books are still out there for the reading if we put in the effort as readers. That "Empire Falls" doesn't have the cachet of a "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Great Gatsby" isn't a sign of its poor quality. It is a sign that canons don't like contemporaries.

What about the highly publicized work by younger, emerging prose writers? The people who churn out stuff that reliable grouch James Wood would, unfairly and typically, dismiss as "hysterical realism"? The genesis of that problem brings us back to our beginning. Writers such as Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith spin unusually detailed, smart, frenetic, oddly empty plots that seem quite like ... you guessed it: films and TV. After all, one of the funniest parts of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is a parody of an audition for "The Real World." In her eloquent piece in the New York Times about the process of watching her book become a two-part A&E special, Smith subtly implied that "White Teeth" somehow seemed destined for the silver screen from its first page.

These are telling examples. "Reality television" is a convenient metaphor for Eggers' memoir and later novel, while Smith's narrative scope increasingly looks like the simultaneously small and all-seeing viewfinder on a handheld videocamera. Importing narrative techniques into fiction isn't new. In another age, Charles Dickens brought a similar economy of exhaustion from commercial journalism to the novel. But if the untidy tidiness of "AHWOSG" or "White Teeth" feels forced, it's because, despite digression after digression, the necessity of the authors' omniscience crowds their readers out. This is not to say these books are bad, or even mediocre, or that we don't enjoy them. Rather, after we realize that we're spectators and not participants in their meaning, we understand: They're really movies in disguise.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)

More:
Round 1 by James Norton
Round 3 by Louis Cooke
Round 4 by Stephen Himes

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)