For the writer, there is no signifier of creative frustration more potent than an unfinished book, which makes the predicament of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) all the more poignant. Hunham, we learn, won’t even commit to a full book, just a monograph, though he hasn’t managed to finish one of those, either. A monograph is, he claims, “like a book, only shorter,” which prompts Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) to witheringly respond, “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”
Yet Hunham still has a little spark in him, as we learn later in the movie, when an old college frenemy asks after his project and he proclaims, with puckish reluctance, that it will be titled “Light and Magic in the Ancient World.” Will he ever write it? Maybe not; but in the Imaginary Book Oscars, you don’t have to.
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