Hopped up on speed to lose weight and getting nowhere near enough calories to sustain a grown woman, in the early 1950s Muriel Spark was on a path to become several things other than an acclaimed novelist. The poet T.S. Eliot, so she believed, was not only sending her romantic cryptograms to decode but was also, if we believe the testimony of an old lover, sneaking into her house to steal her food.

In her autobiography, Spark described her own state as an “illness,” in an earlier interview (one she later disavowed) as a “breakdown.” Yet she somehow stumbled through that mess in 1954 and tripped over the threshold of the Catholic Church. Following her conversion, she wrote twenty-two celebrated novels, marked for their outlandish comedy and, as Judith Shulevitz said, “screwball storylines that recapitulate our hapless drift toward final judgment.”

As the Sparks Fly Upward

Faith seems to have given Spark a principle on which to hang her world. “I was able to organize my work better after I’d got my spiritual life organized,” she once said in an interview. Indeed, still dripping from the Tiber, she wrote her first novel, The Comforters. It was an odd novel; many of hers were.

“These may be religious works, but they are not works of consolation,” said Ian Penman. “They are waspish, clear-eyed, and astringent. Far from her faith being a sop, Spark’s characteristic tone is bleakly comic.” John Updike compared her novels to “shards of glass.” It all worked. Spark developed a significant following—and a significant lore—enough of both, in fact, to warrant two biographies in as many years, two decades after her death in 2006.

Intriguingly, however, some critics have complained that both of these new books fail to treat her Catholicism with anything passing for serious attention or care. Faith is challenging to live, as Spark discovered, and difficult to discuss, as her recent biographers have apparently discovered as well.

Reviewer Nic Rowan complains that the more recent of the two, James Bailey’s Like a Cat Loves a Bird (2026), says almost nothing about it, and the prior, Electric Spark by Frances Wilson (2025), seems to misconstrue. Reviewer Lydia Sherwood points to several faults in the portrayal (“Wilson . . . is at her worst when writing about Spark and religion. This is true every time the subject comes up”), and Spark’s semi-authorized biographer Martin Stannard cocked an eyebrow as well:

“Despite devoting a chapter to Muriel’s ‘Conversion,’” he said,

Wilson’s otherwise scintillating account engages only distantly with the religious passion that drove Muriel to Catholicism . . . Wilson gives us the facts of this conversion: how Muriel moved from agnosticism to Anglo-Catholicism to her reception into the Catholic Church; how she seriously considered becoming a nun. We have a reliable account of what happened and when. But the why seems missing . . . The passion, in both senses of the word, has evaporated.

Based on these readings, Wilson makes it sound as if Spark were an unwilling convert to a church she couldn’t support. Whatever her own ambivalence about her faith, which seems apparent enough, Spark deserves better; her conversion can be seen, should be seen, as a pivotal moment in her life as an artist; she said as much.

The same could also be said for her near contemporary, Rosemary Tonks, though the outcome couldn’t be different. I regularly stalk the website of New Directions, looking for possible additions to my TBR (plenty of Muriel Spark there, incidentally). But a couple of years ago I spied Tonks’s The Halt During the Chase, her final novel, rereleased after decades of being out of print, and bought it. It’s something of a miracle it ever appeared because, whereas religion helped Spark organize her mind, it seems to have fractured Tonks’s.

Consigned to the Fire

Tonks achieved some fame for her poetry (two collections) and novels (six published in all) during the sixties, bleeding into the seventies, in a nine year sprint between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Then things got weird, beginning with a parade of terrible events, described here by Mark Ford: “The death of her mother, the breakdown of her marriage, the development of neuritis in her left arm, a costly lawsuit, a devastating burglary. . . .”

She turned to various eastern spiritual beliefs and practices for support amid the turmoil, including Sufism, Taoism, and yoga. None, as Ford notes, delivered. Instead, things got worse; she even lost her eyesight for a time.

The timeline’s fuzzy, but around 1980 she converted to a strident stripe of Pentecostalism, a galaxy away from Spark’s worldly Catholicism. The distance can be measured by the severity of her response. “It became imperative that she personally destroy a significant hoard of Asian artworks that had been bequeathed to her by another aunt,” said Ford.

These included Tang horses with riders, statues of Sung priests, Chinese jades and bronzes, and a Korean dancing figure. “The burning of some idols,” as she called it, took place in August 1981. Items that survived the incinerator she hammered to pieces . . . Two months later she visited Jerusalem to have herself baptized in the Jordan River. Her new life—which lasted more than three decades—had begun.

Tonks didn’t stop with the idols; she torched her own books, too. As Audrey Wollen detailed in the New Yorker,

Tonks, after her great renunciation, took a firmer line: destroying the manuscript of her final novel, despite characterizing it as “the best thing I had ever written,” was easy, as was pulling out of a contract with the Phoenix Press, which wanted to issue a selection of her poetry. But further action was needed: Tonks wrote to publishers instructing them to remove her work from the anthologies in which it had appeared, and she would even—or so the rumor goes—withdraw her own books from public libraries so she could burn them.

Tonks was fairly successful, as later book hunters could attest. When Michael Hofmann profiled her work for Poetry in 2015, a year after her death, he could scare up only three of her novels. Luckily for readers, Tonks’s family was more sympathetic to their plight and authorized reprints with New Directions (three so far). But before reissues recently began appearing, said Wollen, “getting hold of any of her work was prohibitively expensive; one novel could cost thousands of dollars.” And it wasn’t just her own work she came to despise.

Religion and the Literary Imagination

Outside the Bible, which she avidly read and shared with evangelical fervor, Tonks swore off all literature. “What are books?” she asked in her journal in 1999, offering the following answer: “They are minds, Satan’s minds . . . Devils gain access through the mind: printed books carry, each one, an evil mind: which enters your mind.”

Throw that against Spark. It is hard to imagine two more divergent conversions, though both were Christian. Spark entered the Catholic Church and penned twenty-two novels; Tonks emerged from the Jordan determined to destroy the six she’d already written. By her own accounting, faith gave Spark a way to order her imagination. Meanwhile, it persuaded Tonks to obliterate hers.

What made the difference? We need better biographies to tell.

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Chesterton’s essay ricocheted around my head after I read ’s latest, Medium Rare. Her first novel, The Portrait of a Mirror, gave readers Narcissus for the Instagram era. In Medium Rare, she retells the myths of Icarus and Phaethon, as narrated by another famous voice from the legendarium, Cassandra, who informs us at the start, “I always tell the truth; I am never believed.”

Despite the source material, we’re far from ancient Greece the minute Joukovsky’s satire begins. Phil Fayeton, a lowly Washington lobbyist for the American Association of Stone, Sand, and Shale (AASSS, unfortunately), pursues an impossible prize: filling out a perfect bracket for March Madness, the NCAA’s annual college basketball tournament.

Well . . . not exactly impossible, but the odds are loooong—roughly in the neighborhood of one in nine quintillion sort of long—so improbably, ludicrously, mind-bogglingly long that, as a publicity stunt, the founder and CEO of tech giant Daedalus (think Google) offers a billion-dollar prize for anyone who can do it.

Oops: Phil does it.

The Rise

Our narrator, Cassandra, a political fundraiser who sees herself writing novels someday, has known Phil and his wife Raleigh since college. Before the two marry, Cassandra warns Raleigh. “I see inconstancy and fitfulness—success portending pain,” she says. “Better steer clear.”

Raleigh doesn’t, and the two plow ahead into a life of middle-class mediocrity, complete with “a synthetically weathered home-decor sign reading ‘Love Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,’” suspended over the flatscreen.

In status-conscious Washington, Cassandra stands a cut above the couple but finds herself pulled back into their orbit as Phil ascends, one correct pick at a time. Throughout Part 1, Joukovsky charts the journey, using Phil’s winning bracket like a map.

Raleigh joins Phil early on, but, far along in her pregnancy, must watch most of the action from their humble home on the television, where buxom sportscaster Sunny Sanders visibly takes a shine to her husband, a shine that Phil (no, Phil! you dolt!) returns.

Cassandra’s husband, Miles, keeps Phil company on the road, while Cassandra supports Raleigh at home, even through the premature birth of Phil’s daughter, an event he misses because he doesn’t believe—no one ever does, do they?—Cassandra when she tells him over the phone that Raleigh’s going into labor.

Phil faces moments of temptation beyond his entanglement with Sunny, as when Daedalus CEO Arun Patil offers to buy him out before the competition ends. It’s far less than a billion, though nothing to sneeze at. Raleigh is mystified her husband doesn’t take the offer, but Phil believes in his bracket, believes in his singular genius for picking the winner of every game. He refuses the offer, and when the final buzzer sounds, Patil ponies up the full billion.

Phil is stratospheric, a modern Midas who has gotten exactly what he wished for. The trouble is, to quote Anthony Bourdain at the start of his own lamentably Icarian arc, “You’ll never know the consequences of getting what you want until you get what you want.”

And Fall

As Part 2 begins, Raleigh remains loyal, even submissive, to Phil and goes along with his schemes to further his newfound fame and fortune. She doesn’t know about Sunny. Cassandra knows, or thinks she does, but she can’t prove it. Nor can she bring herself to tell her friend, to whom she’s grown very close over the prior months.

While buying up primo real estate around the country and yachting around the Mediterranean, Phil sees reality television as the best way to extend his moment in the sun. When that doesn’t pan out, he turns back to his more natural environs: politics. He had been a lobbyist, after all, and Cassandra is a fundraiser. Who better to pitch in? What could be more obvious?

Cassandra hesitates. Sunny is still out there, and Cassandra knows better. But not even Cassandra listens to Cassandra. She agrees.

The trick is that as a moderate Republican, Phil doesn’t stand a chance of winning anything. But as a moderate Democrat, he could possibly steer a state like California in a more productive direction than the progressive candidate. He decides to switch parties and run for Senate. The polls look favorable, better than favorable, and high-dollar donors line up behind him, including Arun Patil.

But there, at the apex of the rise, where can he go but down?

As confirmation of his affair tumbles out, Phil finds himself at his big fundraiser, dunked in Patil’s pool—a dress rehearsal for an even greater, more fateful descent. Joukovsky is drawing, after all, from more than the tale of Icarus. Phil Fayeton’s mythic namesake did not fly too close to the sun. To prove divine parentage, Phaethon demanded the reins of the sun god’s chariot, lost control, scorched the earth, and was struck down by Zeus, falling dead into a river. Steady at the wheel, Phil!

Capering Around a Truth

Medium Rare is satire, which takes me back to Chesterton’s essay. Referring to the nonsense of satirists, he says, “It was a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. . . . Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth.”

Joukovsky’s satire capers around a particularly American truth: we launder luck into merit, wealth into worth, and visibility into authority. Phil owes his fame to blind chance, but swallows the media mythology that he is practically clairvoyant. In his telling, he didn’t get lucky; he saw it all from the start. He even promises to do it again.

Like Cassandra, we can see the disaster looming: “Inconstancy and fitfulness—success portending pain.” The odds against a perfect bracket are, give or take, one in nine quintillion. The odds against a man wrecking his life once he can afford to are quite a bit shorter.

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In a time when we tend to imagine our society lumbering into the New Dark Ages as legions of drooling doomscrollers, unable to read anything more complex than YA novels and Instagram tiles, Anna’s making a bet the other way. And she’s got actual skin in the game.

Her business, which she founded in 2019, depends on curious people sharing and discussing art, literature, philosophy, history, science, psychology, innovation and current affairs. She’s obsessed with the future of reading, how technology and the humanities relate, and how to nurture intellectual pursuits and interpersonal connection.

Anna hails from Budapest and now lives in New York, having spent stints in France, London, Brussels, and Lisbon along the way. Before Interintellect, she worked as a screenwriter, playwright, translator, editor, and journalist. Along with her work for Interintellect, she hosts The Hope Axis podcast and publishes her newsletter American Innocence here on Substack.

I wanted to talk to her about reading, conversation, the role of technology in art and discourse, and an immigrant’s perspective on intellectual life in America.

You left Budapest for London at thirty, lived in several countries, and eventually landed here in the great United States. What kept making you start over and what did you find in America that makes you want to stay?

Are you asking about my Odyssey?! I have been in a long courtship with America ever since I was a teenager! I was born in Budapest, went to high school in France, completed two postgraduate degrees back home while working as a screenwriter, journalist, lecturer, and music manager.

I like to build things, what can I say? I cofounded a big women’s rights platform in Hungary, participated in various European film festivals—e.g., Berlin—with my screenplays, and won a scholarship in London where I did my third degree in theater writing at Goldsmiths and staged my plays. Tragically, by the time I left Budapest for this scholarship, the Orbán takeover was being really felt in daily life: the media was closing down, the jobs were disappearing, and everybody was leaving. Several of my friends in the film world died by suicide. I knew my departure would be for good.

While in London, a lot of things happened. A personal life crisis meant that in 2015 I lost even the little scaffolding I had left after my immigration, and so I had to rebuild my entire life from scratch. This took a while. During this time, my thinking completely changed, my pain threshold widened like crazy, and I realized my domain knowledge in dialogue-writing, organization building, and linguistics could help me build something substantial that could help other societies avoid the collapse of public discourse I had witnessed in Hungary.

I wanted to build something long-lasting that could help people speak and think more freely, and by now I knew I was strong enough to do so. I knew there is no external authority that builds the world for us—it is up to us; we are all we have. And we have work to do.

After years of research and prototyping, Interintellect—an organization devoted to improving public conversation—was born. I raised my initial funding and started looking for a more affordable temporary base away from Brexit-anxious London. I relocated to Brussels, a well-connected French-speaking hub where I had a lot of old friends, to build the foundations until it would become clear whether I was meant to build the company in the U.S. or Europe. But almost the day after my arrival in Brussels, the COVID lockdowns started, and so I really had some focused time by myself! One and a half years.

It became increasingly clear from our company metrics that the strongest demand for Interintellect was in America. In the process of figuring out the right structure and the way forward, I also spent a year in startup-friendly Lisbon, and when I got my extraordinary ability O-1 visa faster than I expected, I relocated to New York.

I ended up coming in a moment of professional upheaval and a sudden personal bereavement. It was not always easy—I wrote about this period in multiple essays, e.g., “Grieving in America,” and also how it finally clicked for me in, e.g., “My Jewish Culture.”

Last month I received my green card and the certainty that I can stay in the best country for people like me: America. For the first time since those daydreaming Budapest years, I feel settled in a way that doesn’t seem to diminish my cravings, curiosities, and ambitions. My weirdness. I am very happy.

I’m homeschooling my sixteen-year-old son Jonah this coming year am looking to build an integrated curriculum. Your early schooling in Budapest taught cultural history as one connected story—Shakespeare alongside exploration, Victorian novels alongside industrialization, Greek plays alongside war. What did that way of reading give you? And how does that compare to your later education?

The funny thing about my education is how much of it was really self-driven, even though on the surface so “classical,” so Mitteleuropa. I started teaching myself things and reading books well before school. I often wonder what makes a child look up at the bookshelves and think, “I’m going to pick things from here.” That is what I did—whatever compelled me?

In school, I was a “rebel reader”: I somehow thought in terms of markets, as if the compulsory readings were just an option, up to me to pick which I liked, and otherwise read whatever I wanted. I must have been crazy annoying, sitting in class, with some not-advised book open on my knees day after day. I ended up reading some of the mandatory classics only much later, while during my school years I went through the parts of literature that really interested me: adventure, sci-fi, history, midcentury existentialist Weltschmerz, you name it.

Occasionally, I would acquire incredible literature teachers—Dr. Ferenc Vasbányai and Valéria Eszes introduced me to some of the most important texts of my life during middle school and early high school. I still think about them often. My Eleven Sentence Essays (of which my old Substack consisted) are directly derived from a Vasbányai exercise from when I was fourteen. Eszes still makes me discover poetry through her Instagram account. These people are true educators, the best people teenagers can have in their lives.

At university, I had the pleasure of studying with Hungary’s greatest living playwright and one of our best novelists, György Spiró. I was also taught by a leading Shakespeare translator, the recently passed Ádám Nádasdy. But for me at least it has always been about what I liked, what attracted me, and much less about the status of the teacher or the material. (I think that intellectually I am strangely status-blind which leads to some eclectic preferences. It is only knowledge that I respect deeply.)

My takeaway has been—and I know this is a popular thought—that it’s the love of reading and curiosity that has to be encouraged and amplified in the young. Once you want to know and have the self-confidence to seek, you will always seek out things to know and find them. You need to be allowed to discover this cognitive autonomy.

One thing I appreciate about your work: It exudes optimism. It’s there in your podcast name, hope. Pull that into the conversation about the reading crisis. I’m thinking, for instance, of your essay “The Sovereign Reader.” What do the people announcing a postliterate future of helpless doomscrollers get wrong, and what part of their diagnosis do they get right?

Thanks so much! I believe only in active hope, to be clear. Sitting and waiting—or as Peter Thiel would put it, indefinite optimism—I have no patience for. The world is how we build it, and the people who build the world are no better than you or me, so what really is our excuse? I think this is a good rule of thumb to live by, whether your active hope in a specific moment is deep preparation, the support of others, or accomplishing a great external act yourself. There is always a ton to do!

As for reading itself, I think people underestimate how little most people in the past actually read, and underestimate how much people today do: we read not just books but online articles, emails, texts, threads, etc., all day. So thinking that we live in a post-alphabet world to me sounds quite off.

When it comes to reading philosophy, literature, and the classics, that’s another question. As the economy changes and how social status and wealth are created changes, short-term thinking can lead young people away from the heavier books. My creed is that you should “always read the text”: being an autonomous adult in the world, with your own mind and opinions, requires you to have firsthand experiences with at least some of the foundational texts of our politics and culture.

I know this is not so simple to carve out time for today, but we all have a responsibility to try and to help each other, the best way for which is seeking out communities where these curiosities can be amplified and shared. In New York, the public library network is a free intellectual Canaan we can all partake in—while the online ecosystem provides unprecedented amounts of cultural treasures just a click away wherever you live.

And for those who think people have lost their sitzfleisch (their ability to sit for a long time and focus): just consider how much you’re sitting and focusing already! Changing your object of focus sometimes, especially if it leads to new friendships and shared discoveries the way it does on Interintellect, is much easier than you think.

There’s the big canon—however squishy it is at the margins—and all our little canons, our personal favorites. Keeping both gives us room to follow our whims and abandon books we dislike. I endorse. But how do we distinguish an honest judgment of personal taste from stalling out midstream in a demanding book? What’s your personal rule on that?

It is important to bear in mind that when it comes to taste we really only have personal opinion. There are many self-appointed and state-appointed gatekeepers, revered traditions, people whose job title suggests they know what’s up, people who are themselves artists and so we think they have better, more expert taste for other artists, etc. And yet, there are no real objective measures for what makes an artwork great, for anyone. Ever.

We have impression (how a piece of art feels in the moment, how beautiful or formally interesting we find it), intuition (how true we feel its message is, what other truths it reminds us of), what Jauss would call horizon of expectations (how we compare the work to past works and norms we have encountered), and context knowledge (what we know about a particular work at hand before we immerse ourselves in it). What we walk away thinking about a work of art we have just encountered will be a combination of these four things.

A canon is the accumulated such opinions of many independent people across often a vast span of time. We praise Hamlet not just because it is good—in that primal, first impression, intuitive sense—but because it is so good that innumerable people across centuries have independently come to the same conclusion that it is a masterpiece. Canons in this sense are basically statistical. The opinions of many, including the right gatekeepers and curriculum-makers, elevate you into it, and then subsequent generations of opinions keep you there. No small feat! When something is called a “classic,” that is worth being taken seriously.

A few years ago, a blogger asked his X followers what makes Shakespeare so great because he didn’t get it. I responded,

I think this is helpful for understanding how cultural canonization—I wrote one of my dissertations on this—is always a kind of matrix of such various considerations. We test art against multiple expectations and qualifications both personally and as a culture.

Having run a cultural institution for intellectual conversations for so many years, both hosting these conversations and just attending countless salons online and offline in our spaces, I am more confident than ever in advising people to trust their own taste. Across tens of thousands of such conversations, I have never met a person who didn’t have an innate capacity for good taste.

Taste is not something we copy or learn from others, but something we are all born with and must learn to feed and amplify in both ourselves and others. A great way to improve one’s own taste is not just filling our brains with the art of others, but by creating things ourselves as well, seeing the whole process from the inside. If you write yourself, even if only privately, you will understand books better—you don’t have to be a Pulitzer-winning author to have this power.

And so a “canon” is never fixed and it is never a monologue. It is the legacy and tradition that aggregate the opinions of other people on the one side, and your own impressions, intuitions, and judgements on the other, always interacting, always—when done well—influencing one another. In 2026, a well-timed blogpost, podcast episode, or Letterboxd review can rediscover a “lost” work of art for the entire global community. We are all stewards of the canon. The canon is us.

You read across Hungarian, French, and English, and you’ve worked as a translator. Do you have one personal canon, or does each language contain a different library—and perhaps a slightly different version of you? Is there a Hungarian Anna and a Manhattan Anna?

I would love to say I contain multitudes, and that there are all these different Annas. But I constantly have to realize my taste is very much “mine” wherever I may roam. I definitely have “eras”—the books I fell in love with as a teenager might be very different from what hits me hard today. I sometimes watch or read something and wish I had encountered it at a younger age. Other times, I come across something that I know I would not have been able to appreciate earlier, because I had to gain self-knowledge and life experience first. But the larger themes are always the same—more languages simply give you more color, more to choose from.

The physicist Michael Nielsen thinks we only have one question all our lives—everybody chases their one personal question in everything they do or create. That is definitely true about my own quests to understand human behavior, morality, relation, purpose, and redemption, the things that interest me the most.

Learning foreign languages enough to be able to read literature is a great gift you can give yourself even in the AI translation era. The fact that I can read “Hajnali részegség” in Hungarian (there is no good translation), which is perhaps the greatest poem ever written in the Hungarian language; Rilke’s heavenly “Und meine Seele ist ein Weib vor dir” in German (again, there is no good translation), the almost diabolically wise “Dans la solitude des champs de coton” in French (also untranslatable), or “Listen. Put on Morning” in English is just a great, great blessing, which fills me with awe and gratitude for this little glimpse into the brilliance of my species that is available to me.

Is there a Hungarian or French book that helped shape you but that you’ve found almost impossible to share with English-speaking friends because the translation misses something, or because the surrounding culture doesn’t travel with it? What gets lost?

Apart from some of the things I mention above? When I lived in France, I was introduced to the Marcel Pagnol universe—a kind of bucolic idyll, books and movies—that is beautiful and wistful. Manon des sources (Manon of the Spring) might sound familiar to some of your readers. It’s a kind of tonic for the soul.

A lot of music, definitely. Louise Attaque’s song with the super funny, pun-filled lyrics, “Léa.” The culturally tongue-in-cheek songs of Vincent Delerm, especially “Tes Parents” (ha!). All the rap and hip hop, too. I was in high school there, so you can imagine. We sat around and watched La Cité de la peur, which is basically the French Naked Gun. It’s two hours of puns! Untranslatable both linguistically and culturally.

When it comes to Hungarian, a culture I am vastly more familiar with of course, I never stop pestering my friends to read our great novels: Magda Szabó’s Abigail and The Fawn; Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight (the Rix translation!); Kertész’s heart-shattering, symphonic Kaddish for an Unborn Child; and his sucker-punch of a novel Fatelessness for which he won the Nobel (again look for the new translations). Maybe even Esterházy’s Celestial Harmonies if you’re up for it.

I am less of a Krasznahorkai fan—he is somehow too Scandinavian for me. I respect him but I don’t much relate to it personally. But György Konrád’s The Case Worker is superb; the same darkness but it’s more alive. Thanks to the Frankfurt Book Fair and the German publishing industry in general, a lot of Hungarian novels now have excellent translations.

Our poetry is much less accessible in English. I mentioned Kosztolányi’s poem “Hajnali részegség” above, but Illyés, László Nagy, Attila József . . . The French are just so much better at translating our poets. And the contemporaries: Varró’s fantastic children’s poetry, the confessions of Krisztina Tóth and Anna Szabó T., dear János Térey—who left us way too early—with his political satire verse play Protokoll. Genius. These will be gems to discover once there are good enough translations.

Coming from a tiny, unique language, it is both a source of sadness for me to be understood so little—for my culture’s works of beauty to be often so hard to share—and a source of a kind of mischievous pride, as if over a secret. I can probably run out into the street anywhere in America—except for New York—swear like a sailor for twenty minutes in Hungarian, and no one would understand a word. It could be a form of therapy.

Your sovereign reader still depends on other people—friends, critics, librarians, booksellers, book clubs (and even nonpeople like algorithms and LLMs)—to find the next book. Who or what has earned the most influence over your own reading life, and how has that changed over time?

In “The Sovereign Reader” I talk about building a cultural “map,” a mental system of orientation for yourself, over time—this in fact is the greatest asset one can have when building a personal culture. Just like in a big city, knowing where you are without having to ask is a guarantee of happy independence.

Ever since I was little, I’ve loved referencing—associations, understanding how different items of knowledge relate to each other. How one word connects to others via etymological roots. How one writer inspired another. Why two works of art appearing at the same time coincidentally might suggest some shared source worth investigating.

Luckily, my Hungarian education was very chronological, and so in many different classes one would learn what happened in various fields in a given era: in literature class we would, I don’t know, discuss Baroque poems, philosophy, theology; in physics class what Torricelli was up to; while our history teacher would guide us through the battles and revolutions of the 1600s. This perhaps old-fashioned model of instruction forever instilled in me a respect for simultaneity, contemporaries, sceniuses, and Zeitgeist.

It’s never too late to start: Grab a book about the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution or the Roaring Twenties, and start building your mental map. Once you have the foundations—any—you can start adding things to it as you go along, and just like a cab driver has the whole city modelled in his mind, you will soon have most of culture, at least as a shape, but enough to orient you.

As for finding what to read next, like most people I combine various methods. I live quite close to a Barnes & Noble, and I often just pop in to browse. I check the big literary magazines and the leading newspapers online daily. Substack, Twitter, and group chats also give me good pointers. Interintellect salons are a key source: I read for upcoming salons, host “book therapy” recommendation parties, and scroll our community Discord. Most of my friends love reading and so there is also the informal sacred duty of pushing one’s new favorite book on anybody who’s paying attention.

Plays, screenwriting—you spent a dozen years writing dialogue between imaginary people before building a company nurturing dialogue between real ones. What does a playwright understand about conversation that the rest of us might miss?

David Mamet, in his great book on drama Three Uses of the Knife, writes that every scene in a play has to be able to answer three questions:

1. Who wants what from whom?

2. What happens if they don’t get it?

3. Why now?

In film-writing, a key rule is that every scene has to either advance the plot or reveal character. (If it doesn’t, it will be cut.) Indirectly, revealing character of course also advances the plot in that it helps the audience understand and accept later choices made by that character.

Using Aristotelian as well as far more recent rulebooks, dialogue-writing tightly concentrates a lot of knowledge about personality, incentives, desires, and subtext that a novel can treat as loosely as it pleases. While watching the TV series Mad Men, which contains some of the finest dialogue-writing from the past one hundred years, I always marvel at how this series feels like reading Proust, that it is the same kind of depth, layeredness, and sad wisdom. But of course, a scene in Mad Men is distilled to maximum information density, a constraint that famously never troubled Proust.

And so dialogue-writers have a kind of algorithmic, essential understanding of human conversation which I found very useful when I first started researching psycholinguistics, social media, and language AI for Interintellect. I was trying to find a way to use my knowledge in a way that with the right science and technology could turn into a real-world utility, a product, a company, to make a real difference for human conversations in the world. After some years of this initial research Interintellect started, and to this day we have never had a toxic or disruptive incident on the platform. It’s been seven years now. So something must have been set up well.

As I understand it, the first version of Interintellect was an AI-mediated chat app for conflict management. When that technology proved premature, you turned some of its principles into an approach for human gatherings. What did that change of direction teach you about broken conversations, online and off? And a related question: How much of good disagreement comes down to the people in the room, and how much to the way the room is arranged? In other words, is bad discourse a people problem or a design problem?

It was a long process that led to what Interintellect is today, the intellectual salon platform where anybody with a good idea can host conversations online or offline, ticketed or for free. And who knows, maybe in the future it will change some more!

As early as 2014, I started experimenting with various formats and researching what kind of practical product could create the greatest positive impact. I was very excited about the AI language breakthrough, and between 2016–2018 built various prototypes with whatever was available at the moment and made discoveries about how conflicts escalate in language. Gottman’s mathematical research of couples therapy, which Esther Perel later also independently arrived at, was also very helpful. These are great duplicable models for something that feels random or ephemeral in real life.

After learning a lot, in 2019 I decided to switch to a less technical solution. This was both because the AI simply wasn’t there yet and I was eager to launch in the real world, and because I noticed very promising signs of how softer, nontechnical methods can also build spaces where conversations remain open, friendly, and constructive.

This was a contrarian move: everything at the time was about blocking, fear, and self-protection. The media was very wary of online exchange and saw it as a great danger. “Social impact” investors were pouring money into online “anti-toxicity” startups. But I decided to try and put aside these excessive forms of caution and went at it in the most permissive way possible: a handful of simple rules, a paid, real-name, real-face structure, and a strong community tier, but nothing else.

Now, many years later, we find this bet to have paid off. Indeed it is possible, at scale, to help people conduct conversations on any challenging or contested topic, and if the norms are set up right, the experience of the participants will be consistently positive. Starting nontechnically is a strange thing for a startup to do, but this is what we did—and then added technical elements gradually, based on our real life learnings.

In “If Machines Could Talk,” you describe human conversation as musical: it has rhythm, silence, bodily presence, and so on. Now that Interintellect is experimenting with AI again, what would an AI have to learn about that “music” if it were going to help people think together rather than keep individuals happily—or unhappily—alone with a machine?

AI is the great technological invention of our times, which going forward is going to be more and more embedded into every part of our lives. It is essential that AI is motivated to not divide people but encourage gathering and exchange, a democratic, civic, social lifestyle. If AI will be present everywhere, then it has to want to also be present but not obtrusive in our lives spent together.

At the individual level, the great problem with AI as an interlocutor is that it has no innate sense of time. We humans understand every event on a timescale; our conversations, our relationships, ourselves. Humans are the embodiment of consciousness with a limited timescope, be that our daily schedules or our general mortality.

AI still has difficulties with the simplest forms of human time—earlier GPT and Claude models sometimes didn’t know what year it was, let alone day. To this day, my Fable sometimes tries to send me to bed at 3 p.m. because it gets confused what time it is. But real conversation, just like music, is an act unfolding in time—speed, pauses, silences carry enormous meaning. Time is both the structuring factor of speech and an act of communication.

I wish LLMs had allegro non molto when the situation requires. Molto vivace! I wish they had a sense of when you are thinking or need a moment. Playwrights and film editors have of course always understood that the real human meaning is in the silence.

Our experiences with LLMs will always be imperfect until they have figured out how to “tango” with us, how to play with the rhythm.

You chose America, which gives you a different vantage from those of us who simply emigrated through the birth canal. What do native-born Americans fail to notice about our own intellectual culture—both what’s broken and what’s better than we think?

Today, most of the American discourse centers around grievances. The left thinks America is broken beyond help. The right thinks America is broken almost beyond help (and they can help). I agree with neither take.

The word that comes to mind when considering America is always potential. It is overwhelming and sometimes scary, but the fact is in America you really can just do things. There is enough space, capital, and people so that whatever you have on your mind, if you try hard, you will eventually somehow succeed. This really doesn’t exist anywhere else, not like this.

And so I think this “unscripted,” always entrepreneurial, and uncertain structure so familiar from Tocqueville determines also how intellectualism is done here. There exist simultaneously a celebration of success and a demand that the succeeding person must never act too superior to others. There is a great emphasis here on a success that elevates others too. I like it.

If you want a guiding and confining tradition, America is not an ideal place for you. If you want to build something from nothing—a career, a community, a movement—it very well may be. To Europeans, this scrappy way of thinking and learning might not seem “fancy” enough, but there is a great power to all beginnings. And, ultimately, you want to live in a place where status goes to those who try and not to those who resist change or seek rents.

On The Hope Axis, you ask guests what will be obvious to everyone in 2030 that is already obvious to them. Let me turn the question on you: What will be obvious to all of us in 2030 that is already obvious to Anna Gát?

I will just say that by 2030 we—people in the knowledge industries—will be doing work very, very differently. And what a “workday” means to us will have greatly changed. Just like during previous industrial revolutions, the changing concept of work will affect many aspects of society. One should prepare oneself.

Final question. You can invite any three authors—living or dead—for a long meal. Neither time nor language is an obstacle. Who do you invite, and what does the conversation sound like?

This is hard because a lot of great authors were or are quite insufferable in person. There is a reason one has to become an author! Normal people don’t spend all their time writing in solitude. We writers, I am sorry, are strange, and more or less antisocial people. Even I, running Interintellect, like to spend most of my time alone.

I am thinking: Who would be an entertaining person to have around, not just someone who wrote good books . . . So, okay, I would invite multiple people assuming some would cancel.

First, Tom Wolfe, Quincy Jones, or Gertrude Stein to bring us the celebrity gossip. I want to know whether Zelda Fitzgerald was really that witty and if Marlon Brando was really that good in bed. Let’s see if one of them accepts—these gossipy social butterflies are the hardest to book!

Then I would invite someone like Thomas Mann to tell us about discipline. I am in awe of these prolific men and women of letters. How did they write so much? We have a lot to learn from them. Sitzfleisch!

Thirdly, I would invite 1990 Camille Paglia, right when Sexual Personae came out, to talk to us about her interdisciplinary research into myth, art, and history; how to open one’s mind to the past and the future simultaneously; how to think as fearlessly and as unconstrainedly as she did.

But should she be unavailable? It was to my great sadness that I could never meet Derek Parfit in person before he passed—I heard he was a very, very strange person too. Also a genius. It would be to our benefit if he could join us and teach us a little bit about morality. If, that is, he accepts. We could all learn a lot.

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Nonetheless, I’m an optimist—if not by nature, then by practice.

Humans have two (among many other) remarkable traits: imagination and agency. We can picture alternatives to our present situation and use the canvas of our minds to sketch new approaches to whatever setbacks or difficulties we face. We can then tease, test, and try those approaches, take the feedback of our attempts, and refine our solutions. If at first you don’t succeed . . .

There are almost always means of improving any given situation. When addressing these disturbing stats last year, I discussed two possible answers: (1) keep reading and (2) model it for those around you, especially kids. Parents and their reading behaviors form a key factor in whether children will grow up to be readers themselves.

But let’s say you or someone you know finds yourself with a slightly different sort of problem.

The Spirit Is Willing, But . . .

Reading-crisis narratives up the ante in unanticipated ways, turning every abandoned classic into evidence not only of personal failure but complicity in societal decline. Way to let down the team, Jill.

That’s a lot of pressure, far more than any book—or reader—deserves. After all, it’s just Tolstoy; nobody’s bleeding out on the table. What if we lowered the stakes a little?

Maybe you wish you could read more but struggle to find time amid all the demands on your time and distractions of life. As the diced-up time of your day drifts downward like sad confetti around your ankles, it feels impossible to glue enough minutes together to either make progress on the books that matter to you or even discover what those books might be.

Guilt and shame lurk behind those feelings, naturally enough, ready to strike the moment you pause to ponder your situation. If you were only serious . . . if you were only more dedicated . . . better self-disciplined . . . After all, people around you seem to be making time for serious books, classic novels, the kind of literature intelligent people (a clan to which you obviously belong) claim they enjoy—and probably do!

But then you finally pick up that hulking tome and feel intimidated. It’s so freaking long! You don’t have time for that. Or your initial enthusiasm gets you through the first twenty pages. But then . . . yawn! Is this thing ever going to start? It’s so slow! The language is clunky and opaque. You put it down.

The next time the mood strikes, you can’t even find it. You look under the nightstand, behind a stack in the office. You can’t recall where you put it. Did you give it away, donate it? You pull it up on Amazon or Bookshop.org. You see it on a table at your local indie. It’s a sign. Obviously, a sign! Now’s the time, dammit. You’re ready to recommit.

But—and please excuse me for interrupting your newly forming resolution almost certain to disappoint you—if you try the same basic thing again, won’t you get the same basic result? I seem to recall a definition of insanity that dabbled with that formulation.

I get it. For years, the only crime about which I could definitively report in Crime and Punishment was putting it down. The punishment? Self-imposed: I’ve never benefited from a book my friends raved about. And I started The Brothers Karamazov more times than most smokers quit cigarettes. Eight times, nine times, ten? I lost count.

But I never quite lost hope, and that’s why I’m still around to offer you at least a shred of it—maybe more. Let’s try something else, shall we? I’m going to assume you want to read classic novels. Maybe not. No worries: These pointers are easily adjusted for most any kind of book. They come out of my own practice, which I’m pleased as a goat in garbage to say now includes classic novels on the reg. (This year I even finished both C&P and TBK; you can read my reviews here and here.)

1. Go Easy on Yourself

When we teach goal achievement at Full Focus, we stress choosing big goals that edge you out of your comfort zone. But in your enthusiasm, you never want to choose an initiating action you’ll later find intimidating. You’ll retreat back to the comfort zone—also known as Instagram, Netflix, or whatever nutrient-sparse media currently keeping you from reading. Nothing wrong with Instagram or Netflix if that’s your toast and jam. This ain’t morals; it’s math: There are only 168 hours in a week. Choose you this day whom ye will serve.

So, start with this. Pick something you think you’ll enjoy. If you find a book intrinsically interesting, you’ve got a much better shot of finishing it. There is no law in any state saying a book only counts if it’s difficult, you dislike it, or you dread picking it up. Just go ahead and punch yourself in the face instead. Or find something fun.

There are any number of reasons a classic novel might be tough going. Feel free to avoid any and all of them for now. Perhaps it’s long, defeatingly so. Awesome. Save that sucker for another time. Pick something more manageable. Yes, you might want to tackle Les Misérables, but what if you started with Of Mice and Men? You’ll knock it out in an afternoon. There are plenty of great classics on the short side of two hundred pages and many closer to a hundred. (Follow this footnote for a shopping list.1)

Another reason a classic might be a slog: the language reads like a potholed street with downed trees and traffic jams and God knows what else. No surprise if the writing was old when your great-grandparents were alive. Thankfully, no one will throw you in jail for taking an offramp and finding an easier road. Pick something more contemporary or an author noted for a breezy style. An easy hack for that? Have a look at what high-school English students were reading in the eighties or nineties. Hurston! Vonnegut! Kesey! Get a few of those behind you, and you’ll be ready to approach more perilous passages.

Another way to ease yourself in? Audiobooks. There are tradeoffs, but audiobooks have the benefit of bringing much of the momentum to keep going when a book bogs down. The player is doing the work; meanwhile, you’re getting the dishes done or going for a walk. You’ve never been so happy about folding laundry!

2. Make It a Dialogue

I mean this in a couple of ways. First, find a friend or a group of friends to read the book with. Goal research would suggest this method as well. Sustaining commitments is more effective when we can fall back on the support of others. A date on the calendar with someone you don’t want to disappoint is sometimes all it takes—works for running partners and Moby-Dick.

Now, some of you may hesitate on this next bit, especially my lumping it under dialogue. Lump it where you want—and feel free to disregard if you choose. But sometimes you just want to get answers to questions now. What’s more, you may have a string of questions too narrow or particular to easily find decent answers on Google. Ask the elves and gremlins under the hood at Claude or ChatGPT.

Contemporary large language models are surprisingly good on exchanges about classic novels. And here’s a real winner: If the novel is public domain and you can easily get a digital copy—Project Gutenberg is great for this—you can upload that to the LLM of your choice. Now you can directly query the book itself. As can tell us, Google’s NotebookLM (recently renamed Gemini Notebook) excels at this. I use Claude, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM all the time while thinking about literature. You have to watch out for hallucinations, but LLMs are a fantastic tool with a little care.

3. Get into the Season

Stories unfold in time, and that’s true for both the narrative and our experience of the narrative. Sync those up. I have, for instance, enjoyed reading classic horror and paranormal stories leading up to Halloween. Last year, I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein during the month of October, plus Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Stoker offers another opportunity to read in season. Dracula is composed of dated letters, journal entries, and diary pages. You don’t have to follow the sequence exactly. Read ahead, lag behind, whatever. But let the book itself give you the context for reading.

Timing reading with the season provides the sort of contextual cues to enrich and enliven all sorts of reading experiences. Last year I read both Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas and Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop during Lent. It was the perfect moment for both novels; my Lenten reflections added to my consideration of the themes in the books, and reflecting on the books added to my experience of Lent. Shusaku Endo’s Silence or The Samurai would both keep emotional pace with the season as well.

Now run with that idea. What about Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird for summer? I’d suggest both J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman for the back-to-school season. Then there’s Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for guess when, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome for the deeper days of winter. When you’re finally ready for spring? Cather’s My Ántonia. And tax time! What about Franz Kafka’s The Trial?

We can let the external reality of the seasons enhance the subjective experience of the stories, reinforcing the overall experience.

4. Couch It in a Bigger Story

C.S. Lewis coined the term “personal heresy” in a public debate with scholar E.M.W. Tillyard in the 1930s, an exchange later published as The Personal Heresy. Lewis argued against reading imaginative works of fiction or poetry as an author’s veiled memoir or an expression of their personal emotions or experiences. It’s reductive and misses the larger sense toward which an author strives. Literary critics sometimes refer to this as the “biographical fallacy.”

Point taken. But you know what sometimes makes a story more interesting? Couching it in a larger story. Historical and biographical context can deepen our enjoyment of a story. You don’t have to know jack about an author’s life, time, or place to appreciate their novels, but it might give you more footholds as you venture in. This is precisely why I often include something of the author’s story in my reviews of classic novels; it ups the interest level for me, and (I assume) for many of you.

As long as the added context illuminates the story instead of eclipsing it, Lewis probably wouldn’t complain. More importantly, neither will you. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that you have to slog through a history of Regency England to enjoy Pride and Prejudice. But you might want to ask ChatGPT a few questions about it. And if you’re taking a stab at Jane Eyre, ask it about English boarding schools during the period. The bits about Lowood likely came right out of Charlotte Brontë’s own time at boarding school.

And I’d bet money Lewis met Eustace Scrubb at school.

5. Amplify Your Engagement

Take notes. Scribble in the margins. Diagram the relationships between characters. See if you can plot the storyline on a graph. Keep a commonplace book to capture quotes. Externalize your thoughts about what you’re reading on a page or screen. Here’s an example from when I was reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island a few years ago.

This extends the point about a dialogue; it also makes reading more multisensory and enjoyable. A book is a machine for thinking and feeling, and if you want to rev it up, you have to actively engage it. It just so happens this creates a positive feedback loop; the more you engage, the greater the reward. This kind of engagement ends up generating the sort of intrinsic enthusiasm and motivation that carries you through a book—and onto the next one. (Lewis would, for what it’s worth, approve.)

As critics fret we’re losing our capacity for sustained reading, this also presents one way rebuild it. We strengthen our attention through use. Every scribble, every underline is a rep. Go for another.

To heighten engagement, also consider re-reading. We’re never done reading great books. The classics keep speaking, and our ears and hearts take different shapes as time passes. That’s true over years and decades. It’s also true over days. After I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, I immediately re-read it—twice. I did the same with Endo’s Silence and The Samurai. Give me a few more years and I’ll dip into Lewis’s Till We Have Faces again. I can’t keep my mind off that one.

Lewis approved this tactic as well. “I can’t imagine a man enjoying a book and reading it only once,” he penned his friend Arthur Greeves in 1932.

Re-reading a book is just like listening to a piece of music again. You don’t get everything on the first pass. You have to listen again—to see how a theme developed, to catch the echoes, and to understand how the resolution takes you full circle.

6. Read to Someone You Love

I was talking with my dad a while back. He’s an English teacher and has been his entire professional life. He’s 82 and still teaching. He’s taught Romeo and Juliet more times than I abandoned The Brothers Karamazov—times twenty. “You really need to read it aloud,” he told me, “to hear the rhythm of the language.” Shakespeare was meant to be heard, but there’s merit in reading aloud almost any text. Verbalizing dialogue brings it to life and helps you more fully inhabit the characters. It also has noted benefits for retention.

But let’s say you feel goofy reading aloud to yourself. No worries! Read to someone else—your spouse, your kids, roommates, anyone who will listen.

One of my favorite activities each day is reading to my daughter before bed. That wasn’t always the case. For a while there I struggled to read the oversized illustrated children’s books with trite little morals. I reached a point where I would have preferred to scoop my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon than read one more. So I stopped. When Naomi was five, I said it’s time to graduate to some books better suited for big girls. And we jumped into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then The Wizard of Oz. It’s life to me—and her. I can’t wait till I read her Pinocchio.

She loves the more involved stories, and I love that we’re getting to experience these stories together. We just finished Lewis’s The Silver Chair the other day, and now we’re neck deep in Grace Lin’s When the Sea Turns to Silver. And think about how much incredible stuff hovers above us at the horizon! Hopefully, she’ll come to love reading and carry the affection through the rest of her life. And taking a moment to share these stories, my time, and my voice is one more way I get to express my love for her.

You can find support for all of the above tips and methods in cognitive research and various studies. But that’s beside the point. You can just give one or two a try. Find an easy classic to get started, read it with a friend, throw a few puzzlers at an LLM, try matching the book to the season, do some fun research, scribble and take notes, and share your voice with someone you care about.

The broad decline matters—same with schools, curricula, and screens competing for the marginal time that might otherwise go to reading. But some of the best answers begin at the scale of us: one reader, one book, one conversation, one kid squirming at the other end of the sofa at a time.

Reading can be a chore, but that’s mostly a choice. To one degree or another, that’s true about the reading crisis as well.

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Christopher Tolkien was famously unhappy about Peter Jackson’s adaptations of his father’s masterwork, The Lord of the Rings. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me,” he told Le Monde. “There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”

I’m tempted to dismiss his reaction as overwrought, but I get it: I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the final installments of Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. One was too much. People who first encounter a book and later view the movie often report disappointment. Want to signal your letdown? No problem: “The book was better” produces a few thousand results on Etsy.

Same But Different

Other times we see the movie and then go back to the source material, hoping to deepen our experience, usually assuming the book will prove superior. It doesn’t always: I still recall my teenage disappointment when finishing Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson and encountering—gasp!—no pirates. Most of the drama in Walt Disney’s film depended on the threat of seagoing brigands. Wyss had no use for them, and his novel proved correspondingly boring (to my adolescent self) as a result.

Similarly, I read David Morrell’s First Blood around fourteen after seeing the movie. In the film, John Rambo’s friend and former commanding officer in Vietnam, Sam Trautman, helps bring the rogue vet into custody. Not so in the book where Rambo barely remembers Trautman and dies at his hand, Rambo’s head—spoiler alert!—blown off with a shotgun.

Sylvester Stallone couldn’t stomach the idea of Rambo dying and changed the ending. He also transformed Trautman’s character to forge a stronger bond and limited Rambo’s body count to a solitary, accidental death; both revisions humanized Rambo and lowered the bar for viewer sympathy.

But even if an author and filmmaker share the same sense of a story, movies force changes upon the source material.

We sometimes forget how radically books and movies differ as media. Jumping from one to the other requires significant adjustments. Narration and character development must change, same with the amount of material capable of inclusion. To successfully make the leap, elements—including pivotal plot lines, characters, and the like—must be left out and others altered to fit, some utterly transformed.

These dynamics compound when directors and authors have divergent visions for the stories they tell. What compelled an author to write a book may have little to do with what later attracts a director to the project. As a case study, I submit P.D. James’s 1992 dystopian classic The Children of Men and its 2006 adaptation by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón.

Starting Place

In James’s imagined future, a sudden infertility crisis affects the entire globe; one day, as a character explains, the maternity ward’s upcoming schedule was simply blank. No more children. The privileged status of the final generation, named Omegas, manifests in a sense of superiority, antisocial tendencies, and violent criminality. In their twenties as the story begins, some of the Omegas roam the countryside in dangerous gangs.

As depopulation takes hold, governments collapse and reconfigure. England finds itself ruled by a small council, a benign dictatorship—though not as benign as it might seem. Criminals are rounded up and exiled to the Isle of Man, where the unlucky survive under savage conditions. Foreign workers are exploited for cheap labor but prevented from settling. And the elderly are manipulated into mass euthanasia events to relieve their burden on the state.

A small dissident group with Christian sympathies, the Five Fishes, opposes these and other policies on moral grounds but struggle to make their case. They contact Theo Faron, an Oxford professor of Victorian history who once temporarily served as counselor to his cousin Xan Lyppiatt, England’s not-so-benign dictator. No longer serving Xan and the council, Theo resists involvement but eventually agrees to help. Then a member of the Fishes turns up pregnant, and Theo finds himself joining the group, becoming a fugitive as they flee to protect the fate of this miraculous child.

Cuarón’s film mostly retains these elements but transforms them all. He didn’t care how true his movie stayed to the book; he never even read it.

A Tale Transformed

Comparing the characters between the book and movie reveals the most significant changes. Cuarón overhauled them all for the screen, along with their motives and relationships, radically transforming the nature of the story.

Start with strongman Xan Lyppiatt. He’s a key character in the novel but completely absent from the movie. Cuarón had no use for him. Wanting to tell the story of a faltering democracy, he didn’t need an authoritarian autocrat. Out came the eraser. Cuarón and his screenwriters then penciled in Nigel, also presented as Theo’s cousin, a nonthreatening bureaucrat who helps Theo secure travel papers when needed.

Theo changes from an Oxford historian to a onetime political activist turned lowly state functionary with a desk job and an alcohol problem. In the book he’s divorced, his marriage the second casualty after his child dies of his negligence in a small but gut-wrenching accident. In the movie he’s similarly unattached from his wife, but this time their child has died in a pandemic. And his ex?

Julian co-leads the Five Fishes in the novel, someone unknown to Theo until she attends one of his classes and then seeks out his help with Xan. In the movie, Julian still leads the Fishes, but now she’s Theo’s former wife, recruiting him to get papers from Nigel. And why do they need those?

Someone’s pregnant in both the book and novel, but it’s not the same woman. In both versions, Theo becomes transfixed by the job of keeping the woman safe, but from whom? You guessed it: That’s changed too.

Xan pursues Theo and the mother in the book, hoping to aggrandize for himself whatever political gains come from controlling the first human birth in over two decades. Sans Xan, that threat changes in the movie. Now it’s the Fishes who want the child for themselves.

Without Xan, who stands in for the baddie? In the novel, the Anglican priest Luke serves as spiritual leader for the Five Fishes; he’s Julian’s calm confessor, a relationship that leads to a momentous sexual indiscretion. In the movie he’s Julian’s hotheaded and treacherous lieutenant—nothing priestly about him in the slightest.

This change radically alters the trajectory of the story. With Movie Theo taking the role of Julian’s husband, there’s no need for Rolf, her husband in the book; like Xan, he’s simply dropped while Movie Luke assumes all of Rolf’s irrational, impulsive traits. In the movie, Theo overhears Luke plotting his death and the Fish’s plan to use the child to inspire an antigovernment uprising.

Theo tells the mother and the pair take flight, attempting to make contact with the Human Project, a slightly mythic group of scientists trying to crack the infertility problem. James had no need for the Human Project in her novel; Cuarón and his screenwriters invented it for the movie.

What Jasper Tells Us

While in flight, the fugitives hide away in a forest retreat with Jasper. In the book, he’s a marginal character, Theo’s old prof who asks for favor that Theo selfishly denies. Movie Jasper is, on the other hand, an old hippie, a friend and mentor to Theo, hunkering down in the woods and growing weed on the sly after quitting his career as a political cartoonist.

Jasper takes on a larger role in the film because he forms the moral core of the story. Not only does he provide a hiding place for Theo and the mother, he also stands between them and the Fishes when they’re found, providing a chance for escape while he pays with his life.

In the book Julian occupies the moral core with Theo gradually moving her direction, his moral transformation finding expression in both his actions and several diary entries James includes in the narrative. Having no access to that kind of interiority in the movie, Cuarón gives Theo’s transformation a different shape, expressed primarily in his self-sacrificial commitment to mother and child—a commitment cemented by witnessing Jasper’s defiant act of self-sacrifice.

The overhaul of Jasper’s character underscores the ways in which stories change—in fact, once certain decisions are made in the process, must change—to successfully move from page to screen. As the Odyssey brouhaha illumines in neon, viewers and critics won’t always approve: “They weren’t true to the book!” Perhaps. Any one of those changes might affect the import of the story. But such changes are inevitable. If it bothers you that much, stick with the book. I don’t curse Peter Jackson; I just ignore him.

In Cuarón’s case, he had access to a screenplay that more closely followed James’s book but rejected it and, as mentioned, refused to even read the novel. After reading a brief synopsis of the book, Cuarón began to see a story he wanted to film. But it wasn’t James’s story, only the premise and repurposed elements from it.

As critics have pointed out—for instance, Christopher Orr in The Atlantic and Anthony Sacramone in First Things—Cuarón’s editorial decisions muted the Christian aspects of James’s novel. Would those have played well on screen? Possibly, but maybe not. Regardless, that’s not the movie we got. Maybe someday we will; as either version of the story remind us, there’s always room for hope. (For what it’s worth, I happen to enjoy both versions.)

What about you? I’d love to hear about your take on adaptations, good and bad. Who’s done it well? Who’s done it poorly? Leave your comments below.

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