Substack Take-Over

By Kyra's husband

Rod Lurie here. Kyra is out of town this week so I’m hijacking her Substack. I have a few things to say about The Great Mann.

So, here I was, November 13th 2021, with my wife Kyra on our normal Saturday hike to visit the location where my son's ashes were spread. It's an uphill thing, a mountainous thing, and it's a bit of a workout. Our dog Potus loves it because she's fully loose and gallivants with impunity. We always talk and yammer on these sojourns except for the frequent times that I am huffing and puffing on the steeper sections (Kyra can make the ascent like a mountain goat). We have had many memorable conversations here in what is a kind of holy trek for us. But on this particular day we had a milestone talk. She was telling me about a wealthy, African American neighborhood that existed here in L.A. in the 1940s that she had just learned about and found inspiring. Then, with casualness, tossed out her idea for her next novel.

"It's a 1940s, Black version of The Great Gatsby".

And that quite literally stopped me in my tracks. It was the best concept I had ever heard from her. I am in the film business and we call these "duh" ideas. Notions so brilliant that it's amazing nobody had ever come up with it before: Veep. The Sopranos, Sinners. Love is Blind. This was the first time that she had come up with anything "high concept." It was a fully adrenalizing moment for me. For Kyra there will still a million questions to be asked and answered before she could even turn on her computer. But I knew it. I just knew that she had hit on something extraordinary. There would be publishers vying for it and studios bidding on it.

Well, the book is finished, it is awaiting its release on June 10the from Crown. The LIBRARY JOURNAL, says that THE GREAT MANN is "almost as brilliant as Gatsby" itself. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a rave to me. BLOOMBERG NEWS has listed it as one of the best books of the summer.

But even now, I am gobsmacked by the book, the idea behind it, and how much MORE it is than when Kyra nonchalantly told me what it would be.

Now, if we are being honest, we need to mention that F. Scott Fitzgerald's book has inspired many spin-offs in the past. Mostly they are attempts to tell the story from the point of view of one of the characters. There have been novels about Jordan and Nick Carraway, for example One could even argue that Baz Luhrman's film version tried to give a very modern feel to the story even though it is set in the same era. He did through music, extreme flourish in the camera, and major movie star casting.

Then other filmed versions never really strayed in story or time from the book. (there was a 1926 silent version that was "lost".

There were also versions with Alan Ladd and Robert Redford. There was a little seen adaptation made in 2000 with Mira Sorvino as Daisy).

But THE GREAT MANN takes things several steps further. It has kept Fitzgerald's essential storyline while, at the same time, knocking it off its axis. Look, THE GREAT MANN is most certainly a Black book and there's probably no whiter an American classic than THE GREAT GATSBY. But by setting the book twenty years later and in a Black community Kyra has not just given this book a new set of characters and circumstances... she also has introduced an entirely different literary theme. This one isn't so much a treatise on capitalism as it is a treatise about communities. And unlike so many books about African-Americans it's not a guidance book to white Americans on how they should view their black neighbors, it's about how African-Americans see themselves. It's about pride. It's about history. So, yes, we get all the romance, the tension, and a fucking great ending (a major diversion from the Fitzgerald, by the way), but we also get a celebration of achievement from this community.

In other words, here was an "interpretation" book that has a purpose far beyond and even sometimes at odds with the original.

I was witness to every word that Kyra wrote. Okay, that is not quite true... because she usually had the door closed and God help the poor soul that enters her space when she is on a writing roll. But, I certainly was with her over this span of time as I have been on so many of her works. This time it was different. The purpose was heightened, the need to deliver was magnified, the anxieties that come with the uncertainties were more epidermic than ever before. That is what happens when you bring art with a mission.

And that's why, in the end, this was not a "duh"idea after all.