And I read Animal Man based on your recommendation. Awesomeness all the way.

And Maugham is a perfect author for the subject of this post — a shit load of his books and plays have been adapted to screen (scroll down and you’ll find the list): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Somerset_Maugham

Interesting piece of trivia: Bill Murray agreed to the lead role in Ghostbusters on the condition that his adaptation of The Razor’s Edge, a Maugham novel, be made with himself starring.

My recommendation: if you bother to start reading Maugham, avoid Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge. They’re the fan favourites, but that’s just because they’re both bildungsromans.

I say go Cakes and Ale, or maybe Moon and Sixpence.

Obviously, anyone else who ain’t as enamoured by those views (I suppose aloof, curious, misanthropic humanism is a decent description) ain’t gonna like Maugham as much as I do.

That’s always the risk with big idea books: you’re always going to divide the audience between those who loathe and love the big idea.

WHITE NOISE I consider the hipster leftist’s ATLAS SHRUGGED or THE FOUNTAINHEAD.

(But, hell, I loved WHITE NOISE! Perhaps because it was always more about Big Ideas than Big Emotions…)

The Road actually reminded me most of Dancer in the Dark. Both I thought to be devised solely to create maudlin, highly charged and emotionally manipulative situations regardless of how terribly plotted, thematically ridiculous and full of terribly one-dimensional characters the story might be.

Nevertheless, Dancer in the Dark I loved because von Trier and Bjork were so effective in making me emotional and forget the preposterous situation the characters found themselves in. They played with filmic devices that cause emotional responses and did so artfully.

I think people liked The Road because the story is designed to produce an emotional response, and that coupled with the sense that something “literary” has been read and understood makes for a positive reaction.

I think McCarthy’s prose, though, is trash, a self-consciously literary style with little going for it. I agree wholeheartedly with A Reader’s Manifesto (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers), which derides the modern American fiction of Proulx, McCarthy, Auster (I loved New York Trilogy, was bored by most everything else) and DeLillo (White Noise is one of my most despised books).

Anyway, I think you’ve basically nailed the key issue – it’s all about the money. There’s a huge portion of the population who will see a film over reading a novel so if you’ve got a good story then why not re-package and re-sell it as a film? Actually doing the novel justice is almost an added bonus (when it happens).

But I know that’s not the issue you’ve raised here. What you are asking is why bother with the film, if it does nothing different, if you’ve already read the book and I suppose I am saying that I do think the experiences are different enough to make the redundancy moot.

My big complaint with ‘faithful’ adaptations is when the filmmakers stick so dogmatically to the plot and dialogue that they lose the meaning and nuances of the text. Sometimes significant changes have to be made from novel to film to adequate express what is really underlying the text. In other words, what you said in your piece about fidelity.