Books into movies: always a fun topic and certainly I was hoping to get something slightly more out of Joseph O’Neill’s essay in the Times, which points out that, taken together Phillip Roth, John Updike, and Saul Bellow – those surprisingly long-living saurians of literature (image stolen from a memorable illustration that accompanied this unforgiving review of Toward the End of Time, penned by D.F. Wallace in 1997) – have seen very little of their work adapted successfully for the movies.

Obviously, much of O’Neill’s case depends on what you think about Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), Seize the Day (TV film, 1976), or Rabbit Run (1970). O’Neill counts all of these movie versions of Great Novels as failures to deliver cinematically at anywhere near the level the book does as literature; the argument, of course, jumps off from the apparent critical consensus that the recent adaptation of Roth’s recent The Human Stain really bites. I must admit that I haven’t seen any of ‘em, so to a certain degree I don’t have much room to comment – although note that the writer sneakily puts the James Caan adaptation of Updike’s most famous novel in the “failed” column without having seen it either; he says that since it was never released in the U.S. it must have stunk. Specious, Mr. O’Neill, specious, but I shall pass over it.

I have seen The Witches of Eastwick and, indeed, between the spectacle of Nicholson and Susan Sarandon making like a pair of Smithfield hams, and the fact that its unthoughtfully goofball approach to witches more or less paved the way for the wince factory that is Charmed, there’s much to regret. That said, Witches isn’t by any means lacking in watch-it-while-you-fold-the-laundry entertainment value. But that doesn’t necessarily belie O’Neill’s point: I don’t think many people count the original as among the Updike’s best work.

Anyway, O’Neill blames the failure more or less on the fact that the authors all do their big work using unlovely male protagonists, who face middle age rather than the possibilities of youth, and whose complexities, which become involving when embodied in the writers’ skillful language, flatten into mere dysfunction on the screen. (He also notes that Woody Allen’s success mining the terrain of hyperverbal, neurotic male self-regard made adapting novels suited to that perspective, particularly many of Roth’s, superfluous). He makes the more cynical point that we’d prefer to watch films that have more young, good-looking people in them than one is likely to run across in a film of, say, The Poorhouse Fair or The Counterlife. (Though it would be nice to see somebody like Charlie Kaufman work up Roth’s “The Ghost Writer.” OK, maybe not Kaufman, but somebody interesting…)

It’s an interesting theory, and one which helpfully extends the “good book”/”bad movie” adage. But I’m not sure that it’s all quite right – take the Neil LaBute treatment of Possession was almost entirely devoted to ensuring that we the viewers got lots of time looking at pretty young people, and the result was an hour and a half of amazing stupidity -- on par with the last couple of Star Wars crapsteroids -- one of those movies whose badness consists in there being simply no discernable reason for its having been made, or for the characters in it to have spent a nanosecond of screen time, and this DESPITE the presence of Jennifer Ehle (Note that Byatt’s perfectly adaptable -- “Morpho Eugenia” became the satisfying Angels & Insects.)

I have a hard time thinking of examples of totally satisfying examples of adaptations of contemporary literary fiction. A few things spring to mind: The Virgin Suicides, The Ice Storm, Wonder Boys. Decent movies from good novels. But none of these are examples of books that felt important to me. Only adaptations of older fiction seems to work consistently well for me – I saw The Wings of the Dove not long ago, and liked it tremendously. But, then, I haven’t been getting to the movies much these days.