The nickel was for the movies

The cinephobic novelist who complains to Fitzgerald's tycoon that he will never get the hang of scriptwriting probably wouldn't give a nickel for the movies. Yet with the invention of film, human perception was engaged in a more all-encompassing way than it ever had been by a single art form.

In this ambitious investigation of a previously undefined narrative genre, Gavriel Moses exposes and explores the film novel, a literary text in which cinema provides the thematic, formal, psychological, and philosophical center.

Through close readings of works by the major representatives of the genre - Pirandello, Nabokov, Isherwood, West, Fitzgerald, Moravia, Percy, and Puig - Moses develops a persuasive theory to account for the novels that exploit the central role film has acquired in human experience.