The Peculiar Life of Thomas Penman

"It’s a coming-of-age novel set in coastal England, filled with wonderful scenes and wonderful characters. The main character is a little kid with a poop problem. The first pages are about him getting over his obsession with leaving excrement in public places. It couldn’t sound less appealing but it’s so well done. The rest of the novel is more standard fare. The kid’s got this great relationship with his grandfather, a World War II veteran whom he communicates with via morse code even though they’re a half-building apart. He tries to teach himself key-making for the sole purpose of breaking into his grandfather’s copious pornography collection. There are parents at war with each other, and a girl he’s trying to get to know. It’s a beautifully done exploration of what’s funny and what’s not about adolescence. Robinson wrote screenplays for films as serious as The Killing Fields , but he also wrote and directed Withnail and I which may be one of the funniest movies ever made. He just recently wrote and directed a new Johnny Depp movie called The Rum Diary , based on the Hunter S Thompson book . The big difference between writing for readers and writing for the screen – aside from the fact that you get paid a lot better for one than the other – is that when you’re writing a book or a Casual for The New Yorker , you’re the author. People can like or not like it, but generally the final product is within your control. When you’re writing movies or television you are, at best, the person who is helping someone else get written what they want to get written. At worst, you’re like a monkey trained to type. You’re not the author – not legally or in any other way. The studios own the copyright. Writing for Hollywood can be fun and it can certainly be rewarding, but when you write a book it’s your book. If you write a movie, unless you’re the writer/director and you have a certain amount of clout, it’s not your movie – even if the idea for a movie is yours. I had two original ideas which were made into movies. One was Duplex , directed by Danny DeVito with Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore. The other was I Love You, Beth Cooper, based on my novel, which Chris Columbus directed. If either of those movies had been wildly successful, they would routinely be referred to as “Danny DeVito’s Duplex ” or “Chris Columbus’s I Love You Beth Cooper ”. The authorship is just not yours, even though both started with my completely original creations. Everything is doomed, isn’t it? Is there any medium now that they’re not saying is doomed? Music is dead, magazines are dead, newspapers are dead. It is true that there used to be a lot more printed humour writing. Every magazine ran it and many newspapers even had a humour columnist. In The New York Times , for a long time, Russell Baker basically did a humour column. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter At the same time, today you have a huge amount of humorous content on television and online. When I was a little boy, the only topical humour you would hear would be from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show . Now, every night there are six of those guys (all guys) doing jokes off the news. And then you have all of these websites that take a humorous look at the news. For short comic fiction, The New Yorker is the only place left that runs it and Woody Allen is right – they used to run 2,000-word-long humorous stories, now they almost never run more than a thousand. So that limits the kind of piece that can get in there. My first piece that got into The New Yorker was 1,500 words long. It’s unfortunate, but things change. Then again, we didn’t have iPads when I was a kid and now I have an iPad. So maybe it’s even."