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Masterpiece theater

Movie versions can't replace the classic books, but sometimes they're all we can manage.

Seen any good books lately? Not at the bookstore. At the movies.

A few years back, when Merchant Ivory Productions started making movies of classic novels by E. M. Forster - Howards End, A Room With a View, and Maurice - such an idea still seemed something of a novelty.

But it's become a full-blown trend. In recent years, we've had celluloid adaptations of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, The Portrait of a Lady, and Washington Square; Graham Greene's The End of the Affair; Balzac's Cousin Bette; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, to name some I've seen.

Jane Austen, of course, has become a one-woman film festival, with Emma, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion all completing successful cinematic tours to land triumphantly on video-store shelves. The recently released version of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth has already won one-of-the-best-films-of-the-year raves. Even poor, neglected Somerset Maugham has served as inspiration for Hollywood, with his novella Up at the Villa made into a character-study movie last year.

Meanwhile, customers of even unimaginative video stores can choose from their pick of leading actors playing Hamlet.

Why do we go to see classic novels or plays animated on the screen?

In some cases, I suppose, it's because we love the story and consider it a strong bet in an age awash in mediocre movies. But that's often a recipe for disappointment, which was what I felt after seeing one of my favorite novels - Wharton's The Age of Innocence - turned into an opulent Martin Scorsese dinner party.

But more often the reason is not because we're familiar with the novel but exactly the opposite. Either it has faded from memory, or we never quite got around to reading it in the first place. Honestly, do you know anyone besides a French literature major who has read Cousin Bette?

Watching Emma, the written version of which I hadn't picked up in at least two decades, I quickly realized how eroded my knowledge had become; memory had transplanted Emma's father - Mr. Woodhouse, the wonderfully drawn valetudinarian perpetually fretting about his friends catching cold - into Pride and Prejudice and plunked him down as patriarch of the Bennet brood. As for the plot, well, all I really remembered was that Emma was more than a bit of a snob and that she didn't want poor flighty Harriet entertaining designs on the majestic Mr. Knightley.

But who would have reread the novel to refresh the details? Maybe during that mythical month by the shore we dream about in the Hawaii of the mind but not in the two-four tempo of real life, when reading is too often relegated to a drowsy half-hour before bed.

What the trend is really about, then, is not so much anticipating the plot of a well-known work but a form of literary triage. Literary movies give us a way to reclaim a half-forgotten acquaintance with a book we read long ago or to get the basics of a novel we never quite got around to cracking. With time short and classics long, often the choice isn't between reading and viewing but between movie knowledge or no knowledge at all.

No doubt there's a lot lost along the way. A director's vision replaces the more fertile workings of our imagination. And the rich and involute language of a classic novel is too often deflated into duller modern dialogue. My favorite single line from Jude the Obscure, which in my early 20s made a far more vivid impression on me than, say, The Mayor of Stockbridge ... er, Casterbridge, is this description of Sue Bridehead by her husband: "Her intellect sparkles like diamonds while mine smoulders like brown paper."

In the film, Kate Winslet sparkles like diamonds as Sue, but you'll wait in vain to hear her spouse speak those words.

And, heaven knows, if you hadn't read Great Expectations and tried to glean a sense of the novel from the loose adaptation with Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Robert De Niro, you would have a Dickens of a time trying to translate that Gulf Coast gallimaufry into what others had to say about the book.

What would the authors think about cinema as Cliffs Notes?

I suspect Balzac wouldn't be so very pleased. As he wrote to one of his many female correspondents, "I find people very impertinent when they say I am very deep and then try to get to know me in five minutes." I don't suppose 90 minutes or two hours would seem any more just. Greene, who wrote what he called "entertainments" for Hollywood, would likely be more pragmatic.

As for Maugham, I think he'd be puzzled by the choice of Up at the Villa, one of his lesser works, for a movie memorial but pleased indeed about the attention he always craved but affected to disdain. Yet jealousy would temper his pleasure, for he would be vexed by the endurance of Henry James, whom he considered pompous, windy, and in no small way ridiculous. And for whose work he (hopefully) predicted a short shelf life.

"Henry James's fictions are like the cobwebs which a spider may spin in the attic of some old house, intricate, delicate and even beautiful, but which at any moment the housemaid's broom with brutal common sense may sweep away," Maugham wrote in one of several catty critiques of a man he saw as a rival.

Perhaps the only solace he'd have in seeing James's work brought to film is the notion that the very reason people see the movies is that they seldom pick up the books.