Why Books Are Better Than Movies

The Wife a novel by Meg Wolitzer.  Simon and Schuster.  219 pp.  $16.00.  ****

They aren’t always better.  The Godfather is a case in point, though it was a better book than it gets credit for.[1]  From Here to Eternity was quite a good movie.[2]  But The Wife is a much better book than movie not only because it makes all its points better, but because it has the uproariously funny voice of the narrator, which I was not prepared for, having only read The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, an entertaining book but not quite a stand-up comedy routine.  Take, for instance, the opening scene of the novel, which was fifteen minutes or so into the movie, as Joe and Joan Castleman are in first class on the airplane that is taking him to receive his literary award.

“Drinks had already been served before takeoff, and we were both frankly bombed, our mouths half open, our heads tipped back.  Women in uniform carried baskets up and down the aisles like a sexualized fleet of Red Riding Hoods.

“‘Will you have some cookies, Mr. Castleman?’ a brunette asked him, leaning over with a pair of tongs, and as her breasts slid forward and then withdrew, I could see the ancient mechanism of arousal start to whir like a knife sharpener inside him, a sight I’ve witnessed thousands of times over all these decades.”

Furthermore, the prize he is receiving is the Helsinki Prize[3], not the Nobel, which makes a huge difference for me.  And she tells us in the first line of the book—spoiler alert!—that she has decided to leave him.  She doesn’t wait until his insulting speech at the ceremony.  That makes more sense too.

The movies that are not better, almost by definition cannot be, are those in which the books have a wildly entertaining narrative voice.  You can do a voiceover to capture some of that.  But in this case, you’d have to let the woman recite the whole thing, she’s so constantly funny.

She also makes her points better.  This is one of those books where the title practically tells the whole story.  It’s interesting to me that Wolitzer has made her narrator older than herself, but younger than her mother, who is also a novelist.  Joan is a student at Smith College in 1956.  That was on the cutting edge of the changes that were about to take place for women.

She was coming into her own when the male novelist was king, when the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner had taken over and was dominating the literary world.  Joan refers to them as “those men who own the world.  You know the kind I mean: those advertisements for themselves, those sleepwalking giants, roaming the earth and knocking over other men, women, furniture, villages. . . . Joe was the writer version, a short, wound-up, slack-bellied novelist who almost never slept, who loved to consume runny cheeses and whiskey and wine . . . who was as entertaining as anyone I have ever known, who had no idea of how to take care of himself or anyone else, and who derived much of his style from The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.”  She means that he’s an incredible slob.

The thing of it is, we accept all that when she says it.  We accept that Castleman was incredibly entertaining and swept this young woman off her feet when she was young.  But the movie can’t show that, or at least it doesn’t.  The guy doesn’t seem witty and entertaining in the movie.  He does seem incredibly needy.

What’s harder to believe is that this extremely gifted, intelligent, fascinating and funny woman—look how well she writes!—played second fiddle to this man for so many years, and didn’t even try to put herself forward.  She says it’s because the men had center stage and wouldn’t listen to her anyway.  An older female novelist—in both the book and the movie—warned her away from a literary career.  Yet there were plenty of women who—even if they didn’t get the credit they were due—had decent careers as writers.  Wolitzer’s own mother had a decent career.  We understand what Joan is saying, but we don’t quite buy it.

The novel, like the movie, includes a Big Surprise, the major revelation, at the end, the thing I can’t bring myself to spoil for the reader or filmgoer.  As my wife was going to bed the other night, and I was thirty pages from the end, and I told her the book didn’t have the Big Surprise, as the movie had; I was quite sure of it at the time.  And then, ten pages later, it showed up.

I still don’t quite buy it.  I think the point that Wolitzer was making, that there was a time in American culture when many talented women subsumed themselves to their husbands’ careers, though they were just as smart and talented as the men; that they often felt resentment at their roles in the background, especially if the husband did very well (there’s a scene of wives at a Writer’s Colony here that is simultaneously hilarious and infuriating); that they even stood by when they knew their husbands were cheating with young women, because they knew the men weren’t really serious (though Castleman had run off with her after cheating on his first wife); that they were ultimately full of rage.  The Big Surprise makes that rage more justified.  But it also isn’t quite believable, and I’m not sure it’s necessary.

There’s also the same melodramatic ending in the book as in the movie, and that seems a cop-out too.  I agree with Joan’s decision—on the first page of the book—to leave this fatuous idiot, and I’d have been interested in seeing how she did it, and how both of them did.  The melodrama at the end robs us of that.  It makes for a neat ending, but not a satisfying one.

[1] And Fools Die was a fascinating book, much more personal.  While I’m at it, The Fortunate Pilgrim is an excellent literary novel, written before Puzo sold out.  Though he never sold out all that much.  He actually found his true voice.

[2] Though the book won the first National Book Award, and is better than people give it credit for.  I’m just saying.

[3] Not sure there actually is such a prize, which makes it all the better.