Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...another sense, Winfrey's production of Beloved is a logical extension of her TV book club; it brings a novel she loves to millions, who can read it at the movies. Morrison was an early beneficiary of Oprah's literary saleswomanship; her 1977 Song of Solomon was the book club's second selection. "Sales were thunderous!" the author says. "It sold more in three or four months than it had in its entire 20 years...
...none of Morrison's novels had been filmed, and that was fine with her. "I was always annoyed," says the author and Princeton professor, "when my students would ask, 'When is there going to be a movie?' I told them that a novel is not what happens before the movie. Why can't it just be a book?" Morrison knows the page and the screen are only distantly related, especially in the adaptation of a novel like Beloved--dense, elliptical, teeming with allusion and metaphor, leaping from now to then and back again, in pain. Turning a book into...
...pages into her new novel, Walker stages a highly illustrative scene of lesbian sex. Is it fiction or is it gynecology? A moot question when confronting an author whose continuing crossover success depends on reaching an expanding audience. Walker flits gnomically through space and time to tell the story of an American family and its transformation from a repressed patriarchal unit to a spiritual sorority of free radicals. Fans of the well-focused The Color Purple may not appreciate Walker's looser style or such unintended crack-up lines as "...in the branches of the nearest tree lives the first...
Paris is for lovers. Why, in the 1960s, a girl could even love her genially alcoholic writer dad (Kris Kristofferson). Based on the memoirish novel by James Jones' daughter Kaylie, this beautifully observed film is a domestic epic in miniature: of precocious kids and stern teachers, of maids and their amours, of complex friendships ended by fate's whim. In an exemplary cast the standouts are Luisa Conlon and Leelee Sobieski as the daughter at seven and 14, and Anthony Roth Costanza as her brilliantly effeminate best friend. The Merchant-Ivory attention to period detail often seems like the movie...
John Edgar Wideman subtitles his eighth novel, Two Cities (Houghton Mifflin; 242 pages; $24), "A Love Story," but his version of that familiar genre seems at times the antithesis of standard romance. Robert Jones, 50, meets Kassima, 35, at a dance club, and she eventually invites him back to her house. Good sex leads to good conversation and then to love, an emotion that fills Kassima with terror and dread. Within a recent span of 10 months, both of her teenage sons were killed by gang violence in her Pittsburgh neighborhood and their father died of aids he contracted...