there was a pretty girl i once knew who was an English major. i told her about Robert Penn Warren, poet laureate and author of one of my favorite books, All the King’s Men. she wasn’t familiar with the name but scoffed at the author because he had a “pretentious three-part name.” i had never heard such a thing before since i thought that authors usually go by whatever their names were or whatever they were comfortable calling themselves. Robert Penn Warren sounded harmless enough for me, and i couldn’t imagine where this pretension was coming from.

on Tuesday, i sat at my cubicle and stared at the monitor as my computer generated cashflows for an ABS CDO (asset-backed securities collateral debt obligation). just few days before, i had picked up Native Speaker, written by Chang-Rae Lee, off of my bookshelf and begun re-reading parts of it. midway through the third chapter, i realized that Native Speaker would make a great film. i wondered how i would go about adapting the screenplay and even went as far as to imagine who would play the part of Henry or Lelia in the film. i went as far as to begin planning my future weekends to devote to the project of adapting the novel. so when i sat in front of my computer watching numbers count up slowly, i decided to email the author, the Princeton professor, Chang-Rae Lee.

in the email, i briefly mentioned my own film experience and how i would love to adapt Native Speaker into a delicate screenplay. and i also let loose the fan in me, letting him know how much i appreciated his work. i also told him that, like himself, i too was in finance right out of undergrad, although i wasn’t sure if this was the path i would continue to take. i finished off by saying that i loved to write and continued to do so almost daily. i told him that cashflows were being generated behind the email box i was writing to him. i sent it and stared blankly at the monitor for another few minutes.

today, he replied. although short and definitely a polite “no” to my screenplay idea, it was a nice feeling to receive something from an author i admired so much. how many times had i felt his narrative partly telling my own life story? if anything, i was inspired to write more.

Thanks for your thoughtful, and kind, note. I appreciate your interest
but unfortunately those rights [for the screenplay] are already spoken for,
and so you’re out of luck. I do want to say that I appreciate your interest in
the novel, and hope that you’ll continue to work through those long, long
nights of number crunching — as you suspect, I felt similarly all those
years ago, sort of just biding my time. Good luck with the work.

Best wishes,
CRL

and i thought how funny it was that he signed his named that way – three parts.

for your reading pleasure, i found this extensive interview of CRL in which he discusses all his novels to date as well as other questions, such as the media’s comparisons of him to Kazuo Ishiguro (which he doesn’t seem to like too much).