If you are writing a screenplay, or writing a novel that you want metamorphosed into a screenplay without undue consternation on the part of the screenplay writer, I imagine that issues of plot pacing, dialog and symbolism take greater, or at least qualitatively different, importance than for a garden variety novel. Or maybe not. Take the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men: devastatingly brutal and true to the eternal bleakness of McCarthy’s prose, and yet the novel does not read like a screenplay while the screenplay, to the extent it is possible, plays out like a novel—with the subtle symbolism, the scathing beauty and naked judgement. The book and the movie are different stories.Is David Joy’s novel (out this month), The Line That Held Us, written for the screen? His website suggests that he or at least those in charge of managing his online presence and/or promoting his work are certainly open to discussing the possibility. This sounds snarking but is not meant to be: I saw Michael Crichton interviewed at the LA Festival of books in the early-mid 2000’s and when asked about why he thought so many of his books were made into successful movies, he deadpanned: “I just figured out that I was good at writing commercially appealing material.”Joy’s third novel is set in rural North Carolina amongst folks who might call themselves—if/when whites deploy the pejorative as a badge of honor—rednecks. Family and church and hunting and chaw and pickups and all that. Joy lives there and thus has some first hand knowledge of remote Appalachian communities and feels granted (is granted, I guess) license to wax. I haven’t read anything else he’s written and so don’t know if this is familiar ground. The pictures on his website seem designed to portray Joy as one of the characters in his book. There’s even a picture of him with no shoes on. A truck. A tractor. Tattoos. A—not hipster—beard.The website’s trying to hard to sell the bona fides of a writer whose prose sells itself, as literature and compelling narrative fiction and, why the hell not, screenplay fodder. Joy knows what Busch heavy is and uses the term without f@#king explaining it. He knows that when you crack a beer and take a quick swig there’s foam on your hand you have to shake off. He knows and relates with simple matter-of-factness—again, not explaining—that when you drop in a plug of Kodiak, some sticks to your fingers. There are some lines in this book so lean that could be lifted right from McCarthy, like, “early morning blushed a stand of poplar yellow with fall,” or “a hard frost bit the beautiful that spring,” or describing a flush of birds from a field as a “rising bruise.” I would have liked more of this throughout, but this novel marries an eternal truth with plot that is compelling and characters that are not caricatures, no small feat and evidence that Joy is someone to watch.