In Praise of the Unfilmable Novel

I picked up Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise as a younger, more impressionable reader and thought, “Damn, now this is a novel.” I'm sure I was not alone in this; as he was for lots of other folks, DeLillo was my gateway drug for more out there later 20th-century American fiction, from Paul Auster to David Foster Wallace. Yet not once did I think “Gee, I’d like to see this made into a movie.”