Susan Minot's Evening
The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly was the summer movie issue, and it looks like a movie version of this is coming out--starring Vanessa Redgrave and Meryl Streep, with Claire Danes and Meryl Streep's daughter as young Redgrave and Streep. There's a whole Fried Green Tomatoes thing going on here--a dying woman flashes back on her adult life, especially to the weekend of her best friend's wedding, where she met the love of her life. Of course the movie version will be drastically different (half the characters are missing, judging by the imdb listing, and we never see Streep's character as an adult in the novel) but it could make for a compelling film. Oh, the book gets an A-. It would have been an A, but I hated that the lack of punctuation stream-of-consciousness narrative splashed over into the bits that weren't the dying woman's thoughts. Seriously, use quotation marks.
2 comments:
you know, I couldn't stand that book.
I think it's because the person who recommended it only recommended books where the female protagonist engages in some kind of illicit or slightly unsocially acceptable affair. I always thought that she could see herself as that protagonist, and I never could.
(one of her favorite books was Shopgirl - I hated Shopgirl)
in retrospect i'm not entirely sure why i gave it such a good grade, when normally the whole plotline of people suddenly falling in love drives me nuts. i guess i was in a good mood and wondering what the movie would be like. :)
shopgirl wasn't as bad as that other novel steve martin wrote! ugh!
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