Every once in awhile when a wonderful novel is adapted to a movie, the punditry gaggle and their snobbish fellow travelers resurrect the ridiculous canard that opines that only bad novels make good movies. A recent article in the New York Times by a novelist Joseph O’Neill cited Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain, Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick as prime example of this phenomena.

Oddly, he then cites The Witches of Eastwick as a disposable movie of a disposable novel. He apparently didn’t like the novel either.

As near as I can interpret Mr. O’Neill’s turgid article with its overuse of superlatives and dismissals, a common media disease, the movies referenced are also The Godfather, which he calls as “too bad a novel to be trampled to death by Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather.” On the other hand, he praises Apocalypse Now as “the greatest twinning of novel and film.” Note the word “greatest.” He goes on to say that Conrad’s Novella Heart of Darkness on which it is based contains “some of the best prose ever produced in English.” Best ever, my God.…

Read more: The Book-to-Movie Enigma

I have searched for an answer all my life. The characters in my novels, short stories and plays have contorted themselves looking for the answer. Authors, philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychics and scientists from all disciplines have beaten the bushes for the answer.

The question is: Why does someone fall in love with one person and not another?

Why did Jacob work seven years just to marry Rachel?
Why did David go crazy for Bathsheba, sending her husband off to be killed?
Why did Romeo fall for Juliet and vise versa?
Why did Abelard go nuts (or nutless) for Heloise?
Why did Ulysses voyage ten years to retrieve Penelope?
Why did Napoleon go bananas for Josephine?
Why one and not another?

It baffles everyone, including authors like myself who have been exploring this phenomenon in novels, short stories and plays for five decades. Scientists have theorized that it must have something to do with our genes, our DNA, or our senses; something deep in the brain that gloms on to a compatible something in another person.…

Read more: Finding Love: the Last Great Mystery

It was my freshman English teacher at New York University who inspired me to become a writer. His name was Don M. Wolfe and he hadn’t a clue that he had lit the fuse that set me on my lifetime path.

I was seventeen years old. In those days New York University had an uptown facility in the Bronx, overlooking the East River, a beautifully landscaped campus with a number of Georgian type buildings and a famous promenade called “The Hall of Fame.” I lived with my parents and brother in a two-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, an hour and a half subway ride from the campus.

Each morning my mother would rise, cook my breakfast and prepare two egg salad sandwiches for my lunch. In those days such motherly conduct was not considered pampering or female exploitation or fear of not being loved by her offspring. Mothering was a deeply respected, sincere and accepted occupation and to me, loving one’s mother and father and visa versa was an inbred fact of life.…

Read more: The Writing Life