I tend to find that books with a unique narrative 'voice' lose something when they're adapted. Sure, you can take the best quotes and have characters repeat them or stick it in some voice-over, but you're still going to lose what made the book special in the first place.
With On the Road, there's a rhythm and flow to the words that's hard to replicate in film. The writing is really poetic.
I think a better example is Catch-22. I enjoyed the film. It did a good job of portraying the absurdity of war. It was funny. But it wasn't half as funny as the novel because there's so many ways that Heller plays with language so much via repetition and contradiction, like in the excerpt below.
'Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a longlimbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.
Whereas something like The Godfather or A Song of Ice and Fire are easily adapted into film/TV because the focus is predominantly on story and not writing style. They aren't written in any kind of special way.
(One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a great example of an adaptation of a uniquely-written book, but it could only do it by moving a lot of the focus away from Bromden).
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