While it may be a cliche to say there is nothing new under the sun, just like movies and television, novelists are drawing their inspiration from older material or real people.
Some of these "inspired by" novels I'll never have the time to read, and that does not bother me. Pride and Prejudice alone must have nearly as many imitators as there are Sherlock Holmes pastiches. One of the most successful was Bridget Jones' Diary. It even inspired a new genre in chicklit, although I thought Helen Fielding's portrayal of an updated Mrs. Bennet was at least at successful and interesting a storyline as that of Bridget and Mark Darcy (Fielding actually was inspired by her crush on Colin Firth in the BBC version, and who can blame her?). Others seem to follow the lead of the ultra-steamy genre read The Bar Sinister by Linda Berdoll.
And this isn't the first time Austen has inspired a entire new genre or subgenre. The Regency stories by Georgette Heyer owed their wit and wordplay as homage to Dear Jane, and spawned thousands of romances with several published every month on a regular basis for years.
Edith Wharton is another author much admired whose work is not left alone. Published this month is Francesca Segal's The Innocents, a retelling of The Age of Innocence. Peter Carey's Jack Maggs is Great Expectations from Magwitch's point of view. Zadie Smith's On Beauty pays tribute to E.M. Forster's Howards End. "Only connect" indeed, as Rembrandt scholar Howard Belsey flounders, his wife Kiki is far too good for him and the Kipps are, well, all over the place. Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and newly named Orange Prize winner The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller owe their inspiration to what survives of Homer.
Not that these "inspired by" works or even borrowings are new. Much of Shakespeare consists of retold tales, after all.
And then there are the novels based on real people. Just this year, Ann Beattie used Pat Nixon as a springboard in her recent novel Mrs Nixon, which was roundly panned, and the late First Lady was one of the real people in Thomas Mallon's Watergate. Curtis Sittenfield's American Wife is loosely based on Laura Bush. Both T.C. Boyle and Nancy Horan wrote about Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and Loving Frank, respectively. Boyle also has written about real people John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle.
Earlier this year, Paula McClain wrote about Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson, in The Paris Wife. McClain said she was inspired by Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.
Apparently these are the exceptions, according to a recent article at Salon.com in which today's literary writers are inspired not by the bard and the ancients, but by their peers. Considering how codependent the world of MFA's and literary journals appears to be from the outside, perhaps there is a point here.
However, this Dartmouth computerized number crunching does not, as article author Laura Miller notes, take into account the difference between inspiration and similarity in language. So, back to the "inspired by" school of new publication.
I am ambivalent about the overall merit of "inspired" by novels. Perhaps what works better is to decide whether a new novel is a pastiche or merely a retelling of something already done, or whether it is an original work that builds on the foundation of a literary heritage that goes back thousands of years and that should include all the world's written treasure, not only the works of dead white men.
The former makes me wonder why an author wouldn't write something of his own instead of only doing a rewrite. The latter, however, has the potential to become another layer in the complexity of literary culture.
Although our society is fractured these days into demographic targets and various channels, the stories we all know are foundational to civilization, to the search for our better selves even as we acknowledge and explore our failings and less than stellar ambitions. The shared knowledge, the wanting to look at a foundational story from different viewpoints and vantages, the changing of conventional wisdom are ways in which humanity makes its progress vibrant while acknowledging its shortcomings.
Next week, more exploration of this basic idea as it applies to A.S. Byatt's recent release, Ragnarok.