Write About Now

Why Novels Are Better Than Movies

You're being sniffy, I told myself. And defensive. Standing up for the novel when nobody's attacking it. He didn't say movies are better than books, he just said his dream was to become a filmmaker, and everyone's entitled to a dream. But for some reason I felt the need to point out just how impotent a director is in comparison to a novelist.

"With film," I said, "you have to rely on so many people. A novelist has absolute control. He writes the script, casts the roles, performs the parts and dresses the sets. He controls the camera. He doesn't answer to producers because he doesn't need a budget. No one looks over his shoulder and second-guesses. The director has to work through others to achieve his art, which means he's a manager as well as a creative. The novelist is free to sink or swim on his own merit."

When Your Alley Becomes A Runway

We found a teenaged girl sprawled on the pavement in the alley behind our building. Her shoulder dug into a brick wall and an impossibly long leg -- pale and bare -- extended straight out. The other was bent, like she'd slipped, and it must have been a terrible slip the way her body was twisted around. I stopped in my tracks, but Laurie kept going.

"This is a popular spot for them," she said over her shoulder. "I've been running into them all summer."

Them? Who were they? I peered into the doorway beside the girl and sure enough there were several others standing around, conferring with one another in whispers. I gazed again at the girl on the ground, and she looked more dazed than hurt. Eerily thin, too, with a pallor than glowed in the shadowy doorway. Ah, I thought. Drugs.

Shouldn't we do something? Laurie kept moving and, indifferent Samaritan that I am, so did I. As we neared our car, though, I stole a glance sideways to see if the girl had managed to get up. That's when I noticed the people with her in more detail. Two women in their mid-thirties. One of them held a piece of what looked like shiny foil, and the other hefted something black and menacing in her hands. A camera. Then it dawned on me. The contorted, heroin-thin girl on the pavement wasn't a junkie. She was a model.

Drifting

Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

Together in the Same Direction

"... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction."

T. S. ELIOT
"Religion and Literature," in Essays Ancient and Modern, p. 107