As someone who saw the movie adaptation of Forrest Gump first, I was very excited at the chance to read the novel version of it. The recent adaptations of some of my favorite books have been quite disappointing, and unconsciously I regarded it as a given that whenever a book is adapted into another material such as a movie, it would undoubtedly lack in quality compared to the original counterpart. So when I saw the Forrest Gump as a movie and immediately fell in love with it, I reasoned that I would love the book even more so.
However, when I opened the pages of the novel version of Forrest Gump, I was sorely disappointed. Forrest Gump the movie itself depicts Forrest, the protagonist, going through extraordinary events and meeting with the people and somehow, managing to influence the people around him. There are some far-fetched assertions made in the movie (like how the Elvis's choreography actually originated from Gump's dance) but they are done with taste, with style. Compared to that, the novel just thrusts the ridiculous events at you, demanding you to believe that somehow Gump managed to go into the outer space, live with the Cannibals, befriend a monkey, become a chess champion, and so much more. They compile themselves on top of each other without enough substance beneath it or a stream of plot tying it all together. It sounds like a collection of far fetched jokes running in the extreme.
Also the characters in the novel are very poorly developed, and Jenny, who becomes the main love interest of Forrest in both the novel and the movie, is only dealt with as an actual character in the movie where as in the novel, Jenny only appears to us as a flighty girl who had grown up with Forrest.
As I read through the novel, I was more and more disappointed. The novel was nowhere near as emotionally moving as the movie version. I guess it goes to show, you can never judge a book by its cover.
