Alice Walker and Colm Toibin, and Their Trail of Words
for The New York Times
By PHILIP GALANES JAN. 23, 2016
"One of the special pleasures of movies and plays based on great novels is the way they lead us back to their literary roots. Playing the images and emotions from stage or screen against the ones in our head while reading the original creates a doubled experience.
Make that a triple in the case of “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. Ms. Walker, 71, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her novel in 1983. Two years later, the book — about the abuse and spiritual triumph of a black woman in the sharecropping American South — was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg and featured the screen acting debuts of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.
Twenty years later, the novel became a Tony Award-winning musical, which is now enjoying a Broadway revival and rapturous reviews. Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic for The New York Times, called it “miraculous” and “a glory to behold.”
The acclaimed Irish writer Colm Toibin (pronounced COL-um toe-BEAN), 60, is enjoying a parallel success with his novel “Brooklyn,” about a naïve Irish girl who immigrates to the United States in the 1950s. The film adaptation was released in November to stellar reviews for its moving subtlety. Last week, it received three Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, and has returned Mr. Toibin’s 2009 novel to the best-seller lists.
The writers met for lunch recently at Chez Panisse, the legendary farm-to-table restaurant run by the chef Alice Waters in Berkeley, Calif., not far from where they each wrote much of their books. Over polentina soup and fried sole (for Ms. Walker) and butter lettuce salad and tagliatelle with mushroom ragù (for Mr. Toibin), followed by a moist almond cake with Chantilly cream for dessert, the pair discussed the afterlives of their novels, giving voices to characters who haven’t historically enjoyed them, and their personal quests to find a home in the world..."
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