By John Hood
Sales are down, execs are losing
their heads and indie stores are dropping like leaves.
Even Oprah, who with Eugenides and McCarthy has shown
some incredible keen, can’t save the dogged day. Yes,
the book biz is in the bins, folks, big time. And it
seems nary a word can change things.
So what, pray tell, is an author to do?
Well, if you’re anything like Ian McEwan, you get all
cinematic over it.
Or you let someone get cinematic for you, anyway, with a
nifty little flick from Out of the Book.
Begun by the great good people at Powell’s, perhaps
America’s pre-eminent indie bookseller (sorry Mitchell),
the Out of the Book film series looks like it’s gonna be
the next best angle in wedging words into the hands of
the reader.
Talk about a novel way to sell a novel. A chat with the
scribbler, a visit to the scene, some soundtracking —
this is decidedly not your father’s book read. Add the
fact that the mini-flick’s simultaneously opening in
50-plus of the nation’s finest indie bookstores and
comes available on DVD, and it’s got unique written all
over it.
Of course there’s a book behind Powell’s play, and like
all of McEwan’s previous spinnings, this one is pure
gamesmanship, despite its rather slender composite.
This is McEwan, dig? — the cat who last gave us an
incredibly wild Saturday, was thrice short-listed
for the Booker (he finally won for Amsterdam),
and has suffered the galore of prizes and awards
(including ones from the National Book Critics Circle
and the L.A. Times), so no matter how slim the
volume, he’s bound to go deep, and to get heavy. In
On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22), the
deep is a drown and the heavy gets breathless amid
petting, and crushes a couple’s coupling beneath their
own virginity.
Really.
As always, we shan’t spoil the story — buy the book! See
the movie! — but we will say it’s worth the hyperbole.
And the hype.
We’ll also tell you this is not McEwan’s first foray
into the world of celluloid. Not only did he write
The Ploughman’s Lunch, Sour Sweet and
Macaulay Culkin’s irreconcilably irreconciled The
Good Son, but he’s seen Harold Pinter screenplay his
The Comfort of Strangers for Paul Schrader, and
has watched The Cement Garden, The Innocent
and First Love, Last Rites get lensed,
respectively, by Andrew Birkin, John Schlesinger and
Jesse Peretz. But unlike some of the above, there’ll be
no inconsistencies with Out of the Book. This is
McEwan, face-to-face.
Publishers have begun to balk at bankrolling bookstore
tours — cutting ’em in twos and threes or outta the
campaign altogether. In their stead they’re back to
trying excerpts (Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles
in Vanity Fair) and full novelettes (Stephen
King’s The Gingerbread Girl in Esquire).
Hell, lately they’ve even started making scribblers
stand behind the podium and speak for their suppers:
Harper Collins, Knopf and Penguin have all set up their
own in-house speakers bureaus, and Random House has
joined forces with the American Program Bureau to do
likewise.
But till now we’ve never seen anything like Powell’s
Out of the Book. Whether or not it further marks the
beginning of the end of the author’s whirlwind
visitations is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is that
the world now has a whole new way to get to a writer,
and that cannot be a bad thing for books.
Read on!
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach screens Saturday, June
16, 8:30 p.m. at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral
Gables. For more information call 305-442-4408.
Hood is online at
www.therealjohnhood.com.
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