Market Penetration

In his recent disquisition on fiction's loss of audience to television shows about the Mafia, John Freeman opines that "America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood" and that the novel has additionally "been whacked by a number of things," such as the decline of public education and the rise of advertising.

While the spread of a kind of voluntary illiteracy in American culture certainly doesn't help in the effort to perhaps entice a few current nonreaders into becoming readers, I really don't think The Sopranos has likely distracted the attention of many people who might otherwise have been reading novels, certainly not many people who under different circumstances might have spent their time with Nabokov or Beckett. Would it really be a coup for literature if some of those watching The Sopranos were instead reading James Michener or Mario Puzo, in reality the true "myth-making" alternatives to "the screen in its many incarnations"? And if by pointing out the dominance of the "language of advertising" Freeman is criticizing the "book business" for its marketing of trash of all kinds, including that which is sandwiched between covers and called a "book," then I certainly agree with him, although presumably he would be satisfied if such advertising were used to attract readers to real books. Indeed, later in his article Freeman lauds the way such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac managed to combine literary ambition with "market penetration."

Freeman is probably correct, however, to cite competition from Hollywood as a detrimental influence on the standing of fiction, but its influence is not of the kind he imagines it to be. If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it's because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it's not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it's because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire. If certain movies and the various cable miniseries programs seem livelier than fiction, it's not because fiction no longer "develops characters" on a grand scale, or has abandoned "some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel" or fails to render itself in "a deeply American language," characteristics Freeman believes are positively in evidence in The Sopranos; it's because too few novelists manifest any interest in sounding out the yet undiscovered possibilites of fiction as an alternative to the conventional narrative practices upon which film and tv continue to rely.

It is precisely the desire to achieve "market penetration" (a market that the movie business has not only penetrated but has saturated with its seed) that has caused fiction to become less and significant to the development of American culture.

I began to ponder these issues well before reading Freeman's article. I have long thought that most mainstream "literary fiction" was inspired less by writers' familiarity with literary history and more by the narrative demands of film. This doesn't necessarily mean that most writers want to produce plot-driven thrillers and melodramas or sweet romantic comedies. Indeed, the sensibility exhibited in much contemporary literary fiction is perhaps closer to that informing the "art film," the "independent" movies that can be described as "quirky" or "offbeat" or, simply, "serious." This kind of film has the advantage of combining a degree of artistic credibilty with some plausible prospect of popularity, should the film in question "find its audience," manage to accomplish a measurable act of "market penetration." With many writers, my impression is that their most deeply-held ambition is to see their work adapted into such a film, which would allow them to maintain their artistic cred while also having the work affirmed by those attuned to and sanctioned by our "most powerful myth-making muse."

But I was especially provoked into examining this phenomenon more closely when I recently watched Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perotta's novel Little Children (screenplay written by Perotta himself.) I found it to be a reasonably pleasant, mildly "quirky" satire of suburbia, one that especially zeroes in on Americans' increasingly fraught attitudes toward parenting, fraught because so many parents have hardly ceased being "little children" themselves. My impression of the novel, based on the reviews and weblog discussions I'd read at the time of its release, was that it was a relatively unquirky literary satire written by someone specializing in the "youth" scene (his previous novels were Joe College and Election, the latter also made into a well-known film.) I decided to read Little Children to see if I had perhaps too quickly discounted him as a writer, although I suspected I would find the novel just another in the very long line of mediocre works of fiction that Hollywood directors and scriptwriters had managed to elevate into better films.

What I found was not just a mediocre work of fiction that managed to be transformed into a watchable film, but a mediocre novel that was mediocre precisely because it was obviously written in order to be so transformed.

If ever a movie could be said to have "filmed the book," the Field/Perotta version of Little Children is it. Very little of the book is left behind in the transference to film. The plot remains virtually undisturbed, much of the dialogue comes from the novel verbatim or with very minor changes, and almost all of the characters introduced in the novel are included in the film (although a couple of them, such as the husband of co-protagonist Sarah, have a diminished role, and the husband's subplot in particular--concerning his obsession with an online porn vixen--is pared back). The novel's scenic narrative structure, by which relatively brief, self-enclosed scenes, alternating primarily between those involving Sarah and those involving Todd, the "Prom King" with whom Sarah begins an extramarital affair, move us forward in a leisurely, episodic fashion is faithfully reproduced in the film. The ending is changed slightly, but not in such a way that the novel's underlying point ("boy, aren't these people pathetic!") is lost. One can easily imagine the screenwriter making his way, page by page, through this novel and converting its prose into scene headings and dialogue.

And yet the film, as an aesthetic experience, is an improvement over the novel. It's not a great film, but as "quirky" independent films go, it holds one's attention and provides the occasional amusing insight into the reverse trajectory (it's all downhill after college) so many Americans have followed in the last few decades. (In this way the film--but not the novel--is reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, although Yates's novel is much bleaker, less content with mere amusement.) The novel, on the other hand, is a slog, full of uninspired prose and hackneyed observations. And this difference, in my opinion, is all the difference in the world. The movie spares us Perotta's labored, cliche-ridden, "unobtrusive" writing. It spares us passages like this:

Aaron had discovered his penis. Whenever he had a spare moment--when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story--his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper.) Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

Almost every sentence here is built out of banal phrasing and worn-out expressions: "had discovered his penis"; "a spare moment"; "soft and dreamy"; "a sudden leap forward," etc. The last sentence in particular is a headlong accumulation of cliches. (I can't decide if the "standing invitation" is meant as a pun--a bad one--or is just lazy writing.) This is supposed to be a "plain style," but its effect is precisely, through its very shoddiness, to draw attention to itself rather than away. I spent more of my time wincing at the woodenness of the prose than following the story, and without "story" a novel like Little Children has nothing. The film rescues the story from the writer, as the director has at least some "style" in cinematic terms. The novelist has none.

One might say that since Perotta himself wrote the screenplay he was able to preserve most of the story another screenwriter might have altered, or that since it is his story he clearly does have some talent as a writer. But these claims only reinforce for me the conclusion that the novel was probably written with the screen version in mind and that the talent Perotta has is precisely a talent for screenwriting. The concepts of "story" and "character" his novel manifests are those prized by moviemakers. Aside from the adultery plot and the supporting cast of "offbeat" characters, Little Children (the novel) has little else to offer, nothing readers who read novels that in one way or another advance the form (even a little bit) would find compelling. I understand that practically everyone in the world has a "screenplay" in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you're going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?

Comments

[Roy Rubin]

If it makes any literary fan feel better, the movies are in steep decline.

I'm not sure this author's critique of Perotta's prose is about lazy writing. Is there envy the fellow gets his work filmed?

[pari]

I'm not sure that novelists write with the idea of their works becoming movies. For those of us with credible small publishers, the possibility certainly is enticing. Financially, it's difficult to make a living at this craft; a movie deal might help (but I've heard too many horror stories to see this as a true silver bullet).

Am I correct in reading between the lines that genre fiction is only worthy of derision on this blog?

Just curious.

Within the "confines" of my chosen genre, I find tremendous freedom. What astounds me is that I'm starting to attract much younger readers 18-30 though my protag is in her early 40s. So, I'm not convinced about this decline of reading that's causing such hair loss right now.

[Dan Green]

"Am I correct in reading between the lines that genre fiction is only worthy of derision on this blog?"

You are not. I'm not sure why you would conclude that based on this post, which in fact derides "literary fiction."

[bdr]

"I understand that practically everyone in the world has a "screenplay" in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you're going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?"

$$$$$$

I don't say this to be snarky.

At the moment, the Perotta-model is how one pitches a novel to be snapped up, and the Hollywood model is lowest common denominator, which they gauge by book sales.

I remember when Mrs Ted Bliss was published reading a blurb somewhere saying someone had bought the film rights. Huh? I wondered.

It would be impossible to make a movie as good as an Elkin novel for precisely the equal and opposite reason a poor novel can make a good movie. How do you storyboard Elkin? How easy to storyboard out bad writing.

But it's the book sales that lead to the storyboarding.

[Roy Rubin]

and another reason why comics make good screenplays

[Mark]

Tom Perrotta doesn't seem a representative practitioner of "literary fiction." At least, I doubt he's someone MFA students are trying to emulate (which seems the standard for fashionable literary fiction, if there is such a thing). Just choosing a few off the top of my head, I'd say a representative pool of influential literary writers of the last 10-15 yrs would include people like Richard Ford, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Colson Whitehead, George Saunders--whatever you think of their work, none of these people seem to be writing with an eye toward movie adaptation.

[Dan Green]

I don't consider DeLillo or Wallace or Moore or even Saunders (whose work I don't like) to be part of "mainstream literary fiction." They've proven themselves distinctive, truly "serious" writers who, in the case of DeLillo and Wallace at least, are precisely writing *against* the grain of mainstream, movie-soaked fiction. Of the other writers you mention, I'm afraid I find Ford and Munro entirely conventional writers whose fiction would indeed seem to be good candidates for "indy" adaptations (at the very least.)

[Howard Goldowsky]

Come on, Perrotta is not as bad as you say he is. Every writer has his strengths and weaknesses. That being said, the characters' dialogue in the book form of [i]Election[/i] were not nearly individualized enough for the stereortypes that they were.

[Mark]

I wasn't making the case for any of those writers, most of whom I'm indifferent to. But any one of them is a more representative, more influential, more universally admired writer--among other writers--than Perrotta, who doesn't seem to have any pretensions to high art and who probably draws a fair number of his readers from the ranks of airport-fiction fans.

And if you're arguing that Munro or Ford writes with the screen in mind, you're either reading them badly or not at all. Ford's late (tiremsome) novels, in fact, seem just as much against the grain of movie-lust as DeLillo's or Wallace's. They are almost entirely first-person introspection, which has no place on screen, even though they probably will be badly adapted by someone. I don't disagree that there are writers out there following Perrotta's path, but you're just positing that this is the dominant strain in the literary world today--you haven't provided any convincing evidence that it's true.

[Dan Green]

"any one of them is a more representative...writer"

But they're not. They're exceptions. Very few people write like DeLillo or Wallace. Lots of people write like Perotta.

[MrTimbo]

But there's a decent-sized body of films, mainstream and otherwise, good and bad, that veer away from the conventional sort of storytelling (plot, character, resolution, all that) that The Reading Experience often critiques. Memento, Pulp Fiction, spring to the top of my mind as examples of self-consciously disordered narrative work. And plenty of story-free (or story-incoherent) human creations are turned into films. Old TV shows. Video games.

So I think there's something other than the drive to be made into film that motivates Tom Perotta to write the way he does. One guess would be that he believes the best way to get attention for his work is to make it go down easy. In the same way that Don Delillo announces his massive talent in a few sentences and seems therefore worth the energy of engagement, a book that fits Dan Green's characterization of Little Children would announce itself as not requiring much energy and therefore a low-risk investment.

However, I don't think that some degree of adherence to the precepts of conventional storytelling dooms a book to the nullity. It seems to me that the artful arrangement of these materials, plot, character, resolution, has the potential to amount to a kind of formal radicalism. Of course, all of the examples I can think of off the top of my head, Don Quixote, Anna Karennina, Mishima come from different cultures and times than the one in which Little Children was created and consumed. Obviously, the style of these works is a big part of what makes them appealling, but I also think that the manner in which they carry-out the dictates of, for the sake of short-hand example, tension and resolution and all that contributes importantly to their interest.

Also, Alice Munro rocks. I think I was part of another conversation on this blog where a series of people, including myself, described the experiencing of being dismissive of or baffled by her work and then for some reason or another, clued in more fully to the aesthetic experience of reading her fiction and being thereafter converted.

[BostonBookEd]

Lest we forget, there has always been a wide range of fiction writers, whether it was pulp or literary or both or whatever, and there is still a range. I wonder if what you're saying could be studied more, so that one could find a genre of novels that are movies-in-waiting-disguised-as-literature.

I worked for a literary agent who was partnered up with a film agent, and the film agent's assistant would read the novels from our clients in manuscript form to see if it was worth her boss trying to sell it to producers, to get it optioned. I don't know that I saw a problem with it. Your contention that this is now working ass-backwards, as it were, with novelists taking on a director's gaze as they write, is certainly debateable, and both sides could find evidence.

Part of me doesn't mind the occasional novelist with a cinematic vision. Does that mean I'm contributing to the downfall of literature as we know it?

[teddy]

"any one of them is a more representative...writer"

But they're not. They're exceptions. Very few people write like DeLillo or Wallace. Lots of people write like Perotta.
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