David Thomson, the British film historian and author of more than 20 books, has published a new collection of essays titled A Sudden Flicker of Light with Allen Lane on 7 July 2026. The book returns to a question that has threaded through his career: why does American cinema insist on redemption when the literature it adapts often refuses it?
The film that flopped but lingered
The opening essay centres on Ewan McGregor's 2016 adaptation of Philip Roth's 1997 novel American Pastoral. The film was a commercial disaster, earning roughly a tenth of its budget, and it vanished quickly from theatres. Yet Thomson and his wife, discovering it years later on a streaming service, found it profoundly moving. He praises its "unstressed sadness" and its portrait of a decent New Jersey family undone by the Vietnam era. McGregor stars alongside Jennifer Connelly as parents whose daughter, played by Dakota Fanning, overcomes a stammer only to embrace radical terrorism, bombing a post office and killing a bystander. The father, once a golden athletic hero, disintegrates without collapsing.
Thomson notes that the screenplay by John Romano, a veteran of Hill Street Blues and the Coen brothers' Intolerable Cruelty, omits great swathes of Roth's 423-page novel. He argues the cuts serve the film's urgency, allowing it to reach in a single shot what Roth takes three pages to convey. He suggests Roth's stature may have left editors reluctant to trim his prose, resulting in a "claustrophobic" density that the film avoids.
Novels, films and the long-form alternative
The essay widens into a meditation on the old truism that great novels make poor films while pulp fiction yields cinematic gold. Thomson cites the failures of Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby against the triumphs of Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly and The Graduate. He argues that television has upended this calculus. The 1967 BBC The Forsyte Saga demonstrated that a novel's full narrative could be honoured on screen, a precedent that evolved into epics such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Babylon Berlin and Ozark, series that function as novels on film, rich in social texture and minor characters.
American optimism as insecure performance
What distinguishes American Pastoral, in Thomson's view, is its refusal of melodramatic resolution. The father anticipates his death before it arrives, and the film ends in a hushed poignantness rather than a tidy closure. Thomson reads this as a revelation: American optimism is "desperately insecure", a positive-thinking scam that cannot face failure. He connects this to the political slogan "Make America Great Again", asking what "again" refers to, slavery, exploitation, anonymous crowds, and contrasts it with an aspiration to "decent ordinariness" aware that most lives end in failure, poverty and anonymity.
"American optimism is so desperately insecure. As if we all guess quietly that the recommended positive thinking is a scam."
Hemingway and the Hollywood massage
Thomson illustrates the tension between literary rigour and cinematic seduction with Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. The 1937 novel is hard, clipped and unsentimental; the 1944 Howard Hawks film, starring Humphrey Bogart and introducing Lauren Bacall, is a "travesty" of the book despite William Faulkner's involvement in the screenplay. Yet it becomes a "glorious film: a screwball fantasy about courage, wit and sexiness". Hemingway fumed but kept the money. Later adaptations, such as The Old Man and the Sea with Spencer Tracy miscast as a Hispanic fisherman, only deepened the pattern of Hollywood ruining his work.
Novels waiting for a thoughtful director
Thomson lists several major novels he believes deserve a filmmaker as considered as McGregor: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (once coveted by Jack Nicholson), Joan Didion's Democracy, Reynolds Price's Kate Vaiden, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime. He acknowledges the counter-argument that literature will outlast cinema, but insists film's capacity for piercing feeling in a split second means the "American Imagination" would mature if it admitted more dismay alongside its thrill for immediate impact.
A European counterpoint
The essay turns to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), which opens by calling itself "the saddest story ever told". Though English, much of it unfolds on the Continent with an American character. Thomson praises the 1981 BBC adaptation for capturing the novel's lethal irony but argues a new film is needed for "our nausea now", one that leaves viewers unclean and disturbed. He suggests that books offer a chance to be left in "shocked awareness of what it is to be left alive", a sensation American cinema rarely permits.
Thomson's career spans biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Esquire and Slate. With A Sudden Flicker of Light, he continues to ask whether a culture that demands happy endings can ever honestly confront its own history.