As You Wish: the Book

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 87
William Goldman, The Princess Bride

You know the story: Farmboy Wesley falls madly in love with Buttercup, mistress of the mansion. So he ventures to sea, seeking his fortune, promising to return, and is lost. Bereft, she promises to marry a haughty, self-absorbed prince, who has ulterior motives. The classic movie, directed by Rob Reiner, with a script by Goldman himself, captures the plot point-for-point.

But unless you’ve read the original 1973 novel, you don’t know the story that comes between the plot points. Goldman, who started as a novelist, found eventual fame and a lucrative career as one of Hollywood’s top adaptations men, writing scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives, and All the President’s Men. He also found profound frustration turning other people’s prose into workable screenplays.

Goldman’s novel has two running stories. The main one is a classic fairy tale of love, swashbuckling, and loyalty versus betrayal. But in italicized passages salted throughout that fairy tale, an angry voice, putatively Goldman’s own, describes his deep frustration trying to extract this story from a tedious, slow-moving, talky “classic” by a bohunk European author, S. Morgenstern.

According to this frame story, Goldman’s grandfather used to read The Princess Bride to young Goldman whenever the boy got sick. As an adult, he wanted to share that experience with his son, whom he describes in scornful, derisive terms. But when he finally manages to acquire a vintage copy of Morgenstern’s long out-of-print classic, he finds it a brick-like mass of incomprehensible prose desperately trying to be “art” for the literati.

Both S. Morgenstern and the personal life Goldman describes are entirely fictional; yet so detailed and specific is Goldman’s writing that, to this day, I occasionally encounter people who believe Morgenstern’s original novel exists somewhere. The version we know is supposedly abridged, keeping Morgenstern’s best scenes, driven by action and dialog, and excising his tendency to lecture the audience.

William Goldman

Goldman plays off the frustration readers often have, when wanting to go back and read the original novels Goldman adapted for the screen, to discover that books are slower, talkier, and less energetic than movies. In making his adaptations, Goldman has to aggressively chop exposition and thoughts, keeping the focus on the external. In novels, authors and readers think, but in movies, screenwriters and actors have to move.

Therein, though, lies the irony. Goldman started out as a novelist, and fell into screenwriting only accidentally; his earliest novels were critically lauded but not much read. He, like most writers, knows intimately the difference between writing for the page and screen. His frame narrator is passionately disgusted at how novelists love to lecture the audience. He hates this so much, in fact, that he lectures the audience about it.

Like many of the best novel characters, like Huck Finn or Elizabeth Bennett, Goldman’s frame narrator reveals much about himself that he doesn’t realize he’s sharing. He wants to share an experience of childlike wonder with a son whom he openly hates. (Goldman has two daughters but no sons; this novel began with bedtime stories he once improvised for his girls.) He expresses his love of Morgenstern by savaging his text. He loathes talky narrators so much that he narrates talkatively about them.

While the fairy tale has been cleansed of anything resembling introspection or symbolism, Goldman’s frame narrator unspools his autobiography and describes the adaptation process in exactly the wordy, self-involved manner he decries in others. This voice is so deaf to his own chastisements that he becomes hilarious. Like Goldman’s comic characters (Vizzini comes to mind), he’s funny because he doesn’t understand himself.

As noted, Goldman wrote the screen adaptation himself. Fittingly, his talkative frame narration made poor screen content, and vanished entirely, replaced with the scenes featuring Fred Savage and Peter Falk. This alternate frame story has a gentler tone, as Fred Savage becomes mature enough to accept the kissing scenes he originally hated. Goldman’s original frame story is much more bitter. Goldman’s frame narrator never learns from himself, or his story.

Movie fans discovering Goldman’s novel for the first time might be surprised by how bitter and unsentimental this book is. Yet decades later, it remains the most lucrative and beloved novel in Goldman’s bibliography, and has never gone out of print. Reiner’s 1987 movie, produced after a decade of development hell, makes a good companion piece, and audiences should enjoy them in parallel. But Goldman’s novel is fascinating and hilarious on its own, and a treat for smart, dedicated readers.