Philip Roth Versus the Movies

In February, 1987, Hanif Kureishi was thirty-two and on his way. “My Beautiful Laundrette,” a South London love story for which he wrote the script, had been such a success on British television that it was released in cinemas. Pauline Kael had declared the film “startlingly fresh,” and a follow-up—“Sammy and Rosie Get Laid”—was days away from production. None of this meant anything to Philip Roth. Alongside the scripts, Kureishi had also written some short stories. After reading just one of them, Roth sent the young writer a letter. “If you don’t mind my saying so, I have a feeling you can give us your world more powerfully in fiction than in films,” he wrote. He added that verbal precision seemed to him more lasting than the pictorial kind, and—“peculiarly”—more precise.