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. Continue reading ‘Fun with words’
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