(Almost) Unfilmable
If only your novel made less sense
FROM: Ian Reynolds, The Treadwell Literary Agency
TO: Karl Hoeflich, author
Dear Mr. Hoeflich,
We have received and reviewed your manuscript, “Stroke My Me-ness, The Pus Kronikles, Vol. 1(?)”
It is abstruse, pretentious, condescending, puerile, baffling, hostile, staggeringly self-indulgent, and crammed with references so obscure you must have invented them specifically to frustrate the reader.
In other words, congratulations.
You have plopped a fragrant turd into America’s instant gratification punch bowl and we here at TLA are always on the lookout for a talented new irritant eager to split the intelligentsia into warring factions.
But is it, as you boast, “unfilmable?”
Twenty years ago, I would have said your 1214-page doorstop (plus notes, maps, pronunciation guides, box scores and appendices) about three generations of singing pustules trying to break the glass ceiling of professional lacrosse was resolutely unfilmable.
The intertextuality of the first 600 pages alone, with its 17 overlapping unreliable narrators chanting hymns to the Pus-Verse in backward rhyming slang, seems to keep Cameron Diaz safely outside the…
