What she wrote...

FROM an island in Maine, Susan Minot arrived in New York for the annual Yaddo benefit in a pair of silver sandals. She brought as her unofficial date her sister, Eliza, who wore a matching pair that Minot said she had given her a few years back.

It was one of those Minot moments, as recognisable as an overloaded boat bag to readers of Monkeys, the autobiographical novel that established her high-WASP literary reputation and spawned several books by her siblings.

She was in town for Evening, the screen adaptation of her 1998 novel. Also present was Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Cunningham, her credited screen co-writer. The film stars Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep, Hugh Dancy, Patrick Wilson, Glenn Close, Mamie Gummer, Toni Collette, Eileen Atkins and Natasha Richardson.

Film adaptations are usually unpleasant. But unlike the normal book-to-screen process — take a fine-boned literary novel, change it completely, then stick the prepositionally awkward “based on the novel by” in front of the author’s name — the film’s producer, Jeff Sharp, a friend of Minot, has tried throughout the protracted history of Evening to keep her at least nominally involved.

He was not always able to keep her happy. Minot writes books that exude the code-consciousness of Beacon Hill even as her characters go nightclubbing, and her opinions often seem to issue from the same place.

As the film evolved, it lost some elements — among them the finer calibrations of Brahmin folkways — that distinguish her fictional universe, and she increasingly distanced herself from the production.

She and Sharp originally envisioned the film as a small independent production with a screenplay by Minot — she had written Stealing Beauty for Bernardo Bertolucci — after Sharp retrieved the rights from Disney.

Sharp read the novel on his way home from New York to Columbus, Ohio, where his mother was dying. “It was a comfort to me,” he said, “because it reinforced the idea that you have to sit back after you’ve done all you can, and let go.”

Minot went on to write “draft after draft,” said Sharp, who has also produced Boys Don’t Cry. “She tried so hard,” he said, “but she couldn’t see her way out of the book.”

In it Ann Lord, a bright, brittle New England matron with a secret in her past and cancer confining her to her deathbed, drifts back and forth on a tide of memory and morphine between present and past: a wedding on a 1950s summer weekend in Maine where she met and lost perhaps her one true love.

A reading of Minot’s screenplay, with Chloë Sevigny as Ann, only heightened the frustration. “Susan’s imagery was there,” Sharp said, “but not quite the characters.” He asked Cunningham to have a go at the script.

Minot said Cunningham is “a writer I respect, someone who would understand character, who would understand relationships.”

But a hallmark Susan Minot story — girl meets slightly unacceptable boy, girl loves boy, girl has to renounce boy — emerged as an Eisenhower-era Michael Cunningham triangulation of girl loves boy, other boy loves girl and boy, tragedy ensues.

Having worked in both genres, Cunningham has concluded that “novels are like very big ships that can hold lots of passengers, but a film is different.”

He cut Ann’s four children to two daughters and subtracted many of the friends and relatives coursing through her remembered life.

Similarly, he made Ann and Harris, her love interest, much more outsiders to the wedding’s patrician circle, he said, “because a film needs to deal with sharper, more immediate contrasts”.

And though the bride’s brother, Buddy, is barely mentioned in the novel, Cunningham placed him in the middle of the emotional triangle. “I find myself drawn to threesomes,’ Cunningham said.

Cunningham and Minot communicated through Sharp. “There were a few ‘hmmm’ moments’ on her part,” Cunningham said, “and she won some concessions”.

But, Minot said, once the production’s logistics and limited budget moved the primary location from island-bound Maine to Newport, Rhode Island, “it changed everything.”

She practices her craft on the outcropping of American fiction where class still matters, and while Cunningham and the director, Lajos Koltai (Fateless), saw in the clapboard Cushing mansion crowning a Newport peninsula “a perfect dream of earthly reward,” Cunningham said, Minot said she saw the wrong social setting.

An island like North Haven, where she spent her childhood summers, “is a very particular kind of social scene,” she said. “It’s a WASPy, not a showy, kind of wealth, like in Newport.”

Minot, on the other hand, can seem reserved bordering on taciturn, which is “more from my background than from my personality,” she said.

The author Honor Moore (The White Blackbird) shares much of that background. “Susan’s writing has that sort of meditative regret, like Henry James, of opportunities not taken, connections not made, experiences not had.”

“For Michael there’s a kind of natural affinity,” she added. “He’s interested in family and inheritance, and in women.”

But Minot has not soured on film-making. She has acquired the film rights to Monkeys, and is working on the screenplay, which she hopes to direct. — NYT