Dear god, we need a sequel to this?

I should confess that I had a very curious reaction to Charles Webb’s THE GRADUATE: I hated it. Nay, I despised that book. Odd, because I had a fairly neutral reaction to the movie, but somehow in prose format, Benjamin Braddock came off as this whiny, good-for-nothing layabout who thinks he can win the girl of his dreams by stalking her and peppering her with stupid questions and not get the hint when she keeps telling him to go away. I was supposed to relate to him? I suppose the answer is yes, if “relating” equates to “wanting to slap him silly every second paragraph.”

So with that bias in mind, I must say that this news completely underwhelms me:

Ever since Elaine fled

the altar, leapt aboard a bus and rode off into the sunset with

Benjamin nearly 40 years ago, fans of The Graduate have been asking one

question: what happened next?

Plans
for a sequel to the film – starring Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross and
Anne Bancroft as the predatory Mrs Robinson – have become part of
Hollywood mythology. Now the speculation can finally be put to rest:
the sequel has been written.

Home
School picks up the narrative several years later. Benjamin is now a
father who, scarred by his own education, decides to teach his children
at home. He has not, however, entirely escaped his past, as the
seductive spectre of Mrs Robinson looms once again.

But
the agonising wait is not over for devotees yet. Charles Webb, who
wrote The Graduate in 1963, has declared that Home School, which he
completed two months ago, will not be published until after his death.

He
explained that when he sold the film rights for The Graduate , a
contract clause stated he also signed away the rights to its
characters, meaning that any follow-up could be turned into a film
without his consent. He claims he offered to work with the rights
owner, the French media company Canal Plus, on a big-screen version of
Home School but was rebuffed, so he now intends to leave the novel to
his sons in his will.

‘It
would be devastating to publish the book and then be a bystander and
watch a mediocre movie made of this story,’ Webb, 65, told The
Observer. ‘I guess I was naive to think it was an obvious thing we
would all agree on.’

The film rights owners wonder why Webb’s being so pessimistic, but grand gestures aside, he has a point. Even if it means that should I have the misfortune to read this book whenever it’s published, I’ll want to slap Benjamin Braddock all over again.

(link from Bookslut)