E. M. Esq.

In “When Film Gets Good…” Terry Southern maintained that it was “wasteful, pointless, and indeed in terms of art, inexcusable, to write a novel which could, or indeed should have been a film.” There were subtleties to his argument that I won’t go into – his point was that film, being more of a direct appeal to the senses, can run rings around novels when it comes to portraying straightforward dialogue and narrative. Now, being a writer himself he naturally didn’t leave it there, but insisted that prose writers needed to pull their socks up in terms of originality and offer something that films could not.

I mention this because I’ve just finished Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade, which is one of those novels that’s infatuated with written language. The dialogue is a strange mix of well-rendered, down-to-earth speech and magniloquent tangents, and the descriptive prose is as likely to veer into surrealistic stream-of-consciousness as it is to set a scene. One reviewer compared it to Thomas Pynchon and that’s not miles off, though I think the sentences are livelier and the plot more solid than I’m used to from Pynchon.

Comparing that to what I read before it, which was Donna Tartt’s The Secret History… the language was interesting in that it was, I suppose, more formal than I’ve come to expect from a modern American writer, and it was a well-written story (apart from the occasional “So yeah, forgot to mention, but he’s gay, right? That’s important” kind of moment) but it didn’t really do much that a film couldn’t have done just as well, if not better. That’s not to say I don’t respect its right to exist in book form or anything, but I believe it would have benefited from being, so to speak, more of a book.

I think the core of the matter is that when a story consists of “We were in this place, and we did this, and he said that” then it’s more suited to a screenplay. Novels, for me, are at their best when they rely on the specific capabilities of the medium – sophisticated, innovative use of language, extended monologues, authorial asides, the conventions of academia…

This applies to any medium, of course. A lot of films fall down because they try to just adapt a book rather than using it as source material and rebuilding from the ground up. Likewise, far too many computer games try to bogart the techniques of film rather than exploring their own medium (Half-Life and Portal are notable high-profile exceptions). Music… I don’t know, it’s just generally annoying.

To get back to Thomas McGuane, then… what I liked most about Ninety-Two in the Shade (and I liked it very much indeed) is that it’s firmly out in the territory of pure written language. That may put a lot of people off, but there are hundreds of thousands of straightforward novels out there and one more filthy deviant ain’t gonna hurt anyone.