'Philip Roth: The Biography' Excerpt: How Nicole Kidman Broke Philip Roth's Heart
In “Philip Roth and Film,” the critic Ira Nadel claimed that “Roth takes pride in the proposed filming and production of his work, noting that film dramatically exposes his work to larger audiences.” “Pure rubbish, from the first sentence to the last,” Roth scribbled at the end of Nadel’s paper with his red Flair pen. On the contrary—as he once remarked to Hanif Kureishi, a screenwriter (My Beautiful Laundrette) who also wrote fiction—Roth found verbal precision more lasting than the pictorial kind, and was forever annoyed when a TV or radio spot about him and his work opened with, say, a clip from Goodbye, Columbus (the first movie based on a Roth book), as if the one had anything to do with the other.