Word: segal
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That he likes bad characters, bad plots, and bad endings? It doesn't seem fair to criticize Erich Segal '58 for making a buck the easiest way he knows how. After all, he would probably be the first to admit the slick vapidness of his "novels." Because, of course, they are not novels...
...Segal writes screenplays, beautifully thin scripts for beautifully thin people to act in beautifully thin films. When he took his screenplay Love Story to Paramount Pictures more than a decade ago, they told him to turn it into a novel while they were making the film. The ruse worked, and for one glorious week, Love Story stood at the top of both the hardcover and paperback bestseller charts and was the number one grossing movie in the country. Not bad for a Harvard man who teaches Latin and Greek literature at Yale...
Unlike Oliver and Jenny Barrett, who were nearly perfect, Segal has wilted under Mammon's gaze and added Oliver's Story to the screenplay-novel genre. And now comes Man, Woman and Child, the kind of novel a writer produces only thrice in a lifetime, a literary tortilla, a hardcover hors d'oeuvre...
This is the sort of setup that tempts jealous gods and novelists. What will it be this time: brain tumor? Hodgkin's disease? coronary bypass? Segal has something more imaginative in mind. In 1968 Husband Bob attended a conference in the south of France. The country was gripped by unrest, and he managed to get his head in the way of a policeman's cosh. First aid was administered by a beautiful female physician who then prescribed house calls. What patient could resist such doctor's orders...
...quibble? The time has long passed when it was amusing to use Erich Segal for bayonet practice. The boy from Brooklyn, N.Y., who became an Ivy League classics professor and bestselling author, tells a good story, or rather he pictures one. His narrative technique is more cinematic than literary. In addition, Love Story and its sequel Oliver's Story owed their popularity to one of Hollywood's most successful formulas. Like the old immigrant movie moguls, Segal has a shrewd instinct for providing audiences with idealizations of America's traditional affluent classes. There can be trouble...