Why Happiness, as Such would make a good miniseries

Natalia Ginzburg's short novel from 1973, Happiness, as Such (title in original Italian was Dear Michele; tr. Minna Zallman Proctor) could make a good TV miniseries, and perhaps someone in Italy has done so. It's a story of a family in time of crisis, with a web of complex relationships and dependencies (and idiosyncrasies) and a pretty large cast of characters for a novel this short (160 pp), which actually made surprisingly difficult to read this novel - many times I had to scan through back pages to put a character in context. This difficulty would be alleviated in a film or TV version. In any event, the central relationship of the novel is between the mother and her 20-something son, Michele, a dilettante artist and fringe player on the radical left who makes some really bad, impulsive decisions about his life, leading to dire consequences (which I won't disclose). We also meet the estranged father, on his deathbed, a more successful artist though not in the top tier; we meet a range of siblings plus numerous of Michele's friends, the most important being Mara, who has just given birth to a son who may or may not be Michele's. Mara is the most sorrowful of all the characters, living in poverty and squalor and bounced around from one protector or benefactor to another, whose difficult personality and entitled attitude make her an impossible house guest, crasher, or tenant. For a story so dark, there's also a lot of humor plus some swings at the publishing industry, where pull and predatory behavior determine what gets published and who gets hired. Most of the novel is epistolary, but a few chapters with more conventional narrative help provide context and background that would not sit well in a letter (people don't write to one another to tell what they already know - a purely epistolary novel can't really give us a back story). Of course people don't write letters at all today; in a contemporary setting, the epistolary narrative would have to be abandoned, though that can work, too (see Love and Friendship, the Stillman adaptation of Austen's Lady Susan).