NY Times link:
[N]ext year should see the appearance of another Roth movie, "American Pastoral." Whatever the outcome, it's unlikely that this book will fall victim to that other hazard of adaptation: being all but rubbed out by the brilliant film version. Why? Because "American Pastoral" is probably too good a novel — in the way that Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" is too good to be erased by David Lean's classic film of same, and in the way, conversely, that Mario Puzo's "Godfather" is too bad a novel to avoid being trampled to death by Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather."
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, nonreplicable properties of the written medium; the more likely it is, to adapt Dylan Thomas, to move from language rather than toward language. Similarly, the finer the movie, the greater its tendency to emerge from visual images rather than flow in the direction of visual images.
It's this dual fidelity — to one's medium and to one's profoundest imaginative urges — that, at the highest level, gives a work of art its mysterious soul. If one thing emerges from the scant filmography of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and John Updike, it's that no cinematic adaptation could help itself to their best work's moving spirit, and no self-respecting movie would ever try to. --Joseph O'Neill
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