50 Book Challenge #7: Love Monkey by Kyle Smith. I can’t begin to talk about this book without first sharing my reasons for reading it. Last year there was a tv show, cancelled swiftly, called Love Monkey starring Tom Cavanaugh (whose work I’ve loved since his previous tv show, Ed—why isn’t that on DVD yet? He's also J.D.'s brother on Scrubs.) which was based loosely on this novel. I say “loosely” because having finished the book, the only things it had in common with the television show, which I enjoyed a lot and found to be far more innovative and culturally conscious, were the main character’s name (Tom Farrell), two ancillary characters in the novel who play much bigger roles in the tv show (and are substantially changed in translation themselves, for the better) and the NYC setting.
The novel is about an awkward schlub who can’t get a regular girlfriend, pines over the girl who cheats on her boyfriend with him (but only when there’s something substantial for her to get out of it; he’s apparently blind to how badly she, Julia, plays him through the whole novel) and messes up every other male-female interpersonal relationship he has by shitting where he eats, as the saying goes. Smith’s lead character comes across as incredibly shallow and vapid, but self-aware and spineless. He has a token black caricature friend whose only role is to show Farrell just how oversexed and stereotype-fitting he is. I could go on about the deficiencies of character, but I won’t bore myself further. I do have another gripe though, and that’s that the book climaxes with the 9-11 attacks but they really don’t do anything for the book except place it in a specific time. The attacks don’t change any of the characters or plots substantially and just give the writer, through his character, an outlet for finding places to make mockery of the event.
Clearly someone somewhere read the book and enjoyed it enough to make it a tv show. Somewhere along the line they changed it a lot in order to make it a viable tv show. In the oddest turn of all, the tv show was far superior to the original text. Unfortunately, aside from me, and the actors’ mothers, it was probably only watched by fans of the book who checked out quickly when they noticed all the changes.
Top 5 Movies or Television Programs Superior to the Book They're Based On:
1. Superman 1 and 2 (and yes, they're one movie to me)
2.Love Monkey
3. V for Vendetta (I really didn't like the comic and the movie was more relevant to me as an American than the anti-Thatcher undercurrent of the comic)
I can't even think of a 4 or 5 right now; that's how rarely it happens
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