A 721-page biography about the father of the atomic bomb, a send-up of the publishing industry’s simplification of black lives and a Glaswegian tale of an adult woman with an infant’s brain: the books that inspired this year’s best picture Oscar nominees are as varied as the films they spawned. Leading us to ask: if there was a golden statuette for “best book that inspired a best picture nominee”, what would the contenders be?
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Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Journalist David Grann’s 2017 investigation into the murder of wealthy Osage Native Americans for their oil rights is a remarkable book. While Martin Scorsese’s epic three-and-a-half-hour film adaptation focuses on the first two sections of it, Grann’s investigation goes further, exploring how a sinister conspiracy in 1920s Oklahoma led to “the world’s richest people per capita becoming the world’s most murdered”.
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American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin
American Prometheus is as epic in scale and scope as Christopher Nolan’s best picture frontrunner. This 721-page tome is everything a biography should be: painstakingly researched (it was 25 years and tens of thousands of documents in the making), deftly written and illustrated with great photographs. While Nolan’s adaptation is something of a whistle-stop tour of Oppenheimer’s life, culminating in his 1954 security clearance hearing, Bird and Sherwin’s authoritative biography leaves little to be answered. The film-maker’s adaptation is impressive, but the authors’ ability to condense years of research into a compelling page-turner that doesn’t once feel like a slog is more impressive still.
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The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
The Zone of Interest seems misplaced among the nominees for best adapted screenplay given that it shares little more than a title with Martin Amis’s novel. That it deserves a place among the best picture shortlist, though, is unequivocal. In contrast to Jonathan Glazer’s stark adaptation, Amis’s 14th novel is often classed as a black comedy – though with its mise en scène of the “popping, splatting, hissing” of an Auschwitz murder meadow, you’d be forgiven for failing to see the funny side. The book toggles between three perspectives: that of camp commandant Paul Doll (modelled on real life Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, on whose domestic life Glazer’s film focuses), Angelus Thomsen, an SS-Obersturmführer intent on having an affair with Doll’s wife, and Szmul Zacharias, a member of the camp’s Sonderkommando, the prisoner work unit responsible for extracting gassed prisoners’ “goldstopped teeth with pliers and chisels” and grinding their ashes. Though they share nothing in the way of plot, the central theme of Amis’ masterful novel echoes down through Glazer’s equally indelible film: “Who are you? You don’t know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest, and it tells you who you are.”
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Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
You can’t help but wonder how Scottish author Alasdair Gray, who died aged 85 in 2019, would receive Yorgos Lanthimos’s suitably madcap adaptation of his 1992 novel Poor Things. (Delightedly, one would assume, aside from the Glaswegian erasure.) Purported to be a late Victorian memoir found in a rubbish tip by Gray, who is credited only as its editor, the full title of Gray’s novel is Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless MD, Scottish Public Health Officer – though that probably wouldn’t have fit on the cinema listings. Interspersed with the author’s illustrations (he famously illustrated all his own covers and wrote his own blurbs) as well as letters, journal entries and maps, Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter, an adult woman who had her brain swapped with that of her unborn child. As charming as it is confounding, it’s the perfect jumping off point for readers who haven’t yet had the pleasure of spending time in the weird worlds of Alasdair Gray.
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Erasure by Percival Everett
“I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race.” So goes the opening page of Percival Everett’s experimental 12th novel Erasure, in which the American writer takes a scythe to the publishing industry’s obsession with stories about “the typical black life in an unnamed ghetto in America”. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer of little-read, impenetrable fiction, has just had his latest novel rejected by publishers for its failure to be “black enough”. In frustration as much as retaliation he writes a parody ghetto novel called My Pafology – later renamed Fuck – that unwittingly becomes a runaway success. Cue 80 pages of chaos, misspelt chapter titles, unpaid child support and a thinly veiled version of Jerry Springer. American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s faithful film adaptation, doesn’t stray too far from this terrain in terms of plot. But Everett’s coruscating prose and experimentation with form – CVs, academic papers and, of course, 80 pages of Fuck are interspersed throughout – offer what the film, for all its brilliance, never could. If the best picture Oscar was awarded based on its source material alone, this, for my money, should be the winner.
