Dear Hollywood,

PLEASE keep your sticky hands off this book. Like the sex and love and satisfaction eluding every one of its slumping characters, it is SO, SO, SO GOOD. I like Denise's cumbersome awareness. I admire Enid's well-hidden ability to change. I understand Gary's unproductive anger at injustice. And Chip, whom I would love as a colleague and despise as a brother, got me to cry over Alfred in a last-minute, down-to-the-wire moment of truth more suspenseful than any shoot-out. They are all aching losers. Their story is a catalog of failed attempts. And they pulled it off. Believe me, Hollywood. YOU will not do it for me. Don't even try.

If you need another scathing examination of the gorgeous misery of the American family, be like Franzen and come up with your own damn idea. Be like Franzen and pull out all the stops, using every aesthetic trick your art allows you to apply to storytelling. (I'm sure after "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Home For the Holidays" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," you've still got it in you.) Just keep your lookist, didactic, money-grubbing hands off this book. It doesn't need you.

Stay away from this book and out of my head. It's graffitied with corrections and there's nothing left for you to correct. I know what the characters look like. I have their voices bouncing off the walls of my brain. I'm hoarding every magnificent description and observation that you would so brutally omit, locking them in the box of Reasons Why I Love Serious Literature. Visual art could not even find the box let alone pick the lock. You can't convey gems like: "It felt uncomfortably intimate, like discovering a warm spot in a swimming pool." So just don't even go there. Turn back now.

I'm begging you.