Wonder BoysOver Christmas I met a woman named Storm. When she found out I was a writer she became excited and inquisitive. Her therapist, she said, told her she should "reinvent" herself so she signed up for a five-day writer's workshop. She asked me all sorts of questions and I answered truthfully. I told her writing was a great way to find out who you are, and also, a great way to express yourself.Now I come home and find this book "Wonder Boys" on my bookshelf and it's calling out to me" "Read me!" This novel angered me. I felt it was dishonest and made a mockery of fiction writers and the craft of writing. It is the story of a creative writing professor who can't finish his epic novel. The "Wonder Boys" is a novel about writing the Wonder Boys, and takes place over the course of two days in which the protagonist is constantly stoned and/or drunk as he manages to fuckup his entire life (but comes out living happily ever after): He survives his wife leaving him; has his novel rejected by his editor and 20yr old beautiful female student; loses the manuscrpit; gets bit by a dog; is an accessory to several crimes, gets skulled with a baseball bat; gets fired; and has the self-discovery that he is a fraud. After these events, the baseball-bat-wheeling man's wife (who the hero has gotten pregnant) decides to marry him, support him, and get him a new job. How's that for reality? Ironic because a point the author, Michael Chabon, makes is that fiction should reveal truths. I agree with that. If the life of writers is like what Chabon depicts ... well, no wonder the world is so fucked up. This is presented as a comedy. (It was made into a movie.) I didn't laugh once in reading it. I didn't cry once. I found myself only getting aggitated by its stupidity. The author makes a point of being critical of the protagonist's novel because it goes off point and rambles on and on with irrelevant discriptions. I often skipped pages of this novel for that very thing. The same can be said for the characters ... I didn't identify, or like, any of them. There was not a scene in the novel that I felt was authentic.How's this for humor: The editor/publisher is the protagonist's best friend, and gay. He is on the backside of forty. He takes a twenty year old, suicidal, male student (who is the child of his grandfather, who raped his mother) and drugs him; and then uses him for sexual gratification. Then he rewards him by publishing HIS iffy novel and dumps the protagonist's. One reviewer said that this novel was about "... the only things that really matter." I guess what matters is getting published and laid; and that it does NOT matter how one gets to that end, or who gets hurt in the process.
Unfortunately, there's a long history of books set in academia where the protagonist a.) is a professor, b.) is an alcoholic or substance abuser, c.) is having trouble getting it up (it = his writing muse), and d.) is tempted by or tempting to the tender vittles we know and love as co-eds. Given how cliche all of this is, you would think that authors would consider this formula strictly where angels fear to tread, but no.Welcome to WONDER BOYS, Michael Chabon's novel about a washed-up writer slash professor with a weed habit, a book he cannot finish, a bevy of babes (some young enough to be his daughter) to choose from, and a penchant for disaster. The title comes from the behemoth of a novel Grady Tripp cannot finish, but you needn't Wonder why when you see the lifestyle he lives.Of all the books I've read of this ilk, the only one to pull it off with aplomb is Thomas Williams' THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX -- also named after the professor slash alcoholic's book-in-progress. Only, happily, Williams devoted whole swaths of his book to the novel-within-a-novel, which Chabon does little if any of. It wasn't until a hundred pages in that I realized what Chabon was up to. Yes, this was a comic novel. The problem was in timing. As I read, I kept saying how yes, this could be funny, but only in a movie. In book form, the rather ponderous narrative kept slowing the punchlines down, but the visuals -- blessed with the right actors -- could do wonders with this work. I looked it up and found that it was made into a movie with Michael Douglas and Robert Downey, Jr., as Crabapple, Tripp's gay and diabolical editor who is out to seduce one of Tripp's vulnerable students, a wannabe (what else?) writer named James (played by Tobey Macguire in the film I have yet to see). The book lumbers along with set scenes at a seder (Tripp's estranged wife's family) for Passover out in the country and at bars, his pregnant girlfriend's house, and the various buildings of the campus. It would help to like Grady Tripp more, but it's hard to do. Is there anything more pitiful, after all, than a middle-aged man still doing weed? And he's filled with so much self-loathing that you can't help but give him an assist after awhile (with the loathing, I mean).In the end, all's well that ends well, as Chabon chooses the Shakespearean comedy route for his denouement. Again, the violins swell as moviedom tries to sweep the book away. Did he write it with Hollywood in mind? Odd, considering it is a book purportedly "about writers."Not bad, but unsatisfying in the end. To me, the freshman outing called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh remains Chabon's best.
What do You think about Wonder Boys (1998)?
This is the second book I've read recently that involved the main character being an adulterer, impregnating someone other than his wife, and generally being such a screw-up that they wreck the life of anyone who depends on them. But while I hated Rabbit from Rabbit, Run to the point of wishing he was real so I could find him and pummel him with a baseball bat, I actually LIKED Grady Tripp and rooted for him to put down the joint and get his act together. I'd read Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and I liked both those books, but this was the first book of his that I felt a real emotional attachment to the characters. Grady isn't a bad guy. He's just a doofus pothead who has let his love of weed dictate his life. His avoidance of making hard choices has paralyzed him, especially with the writing of his monster novel that has swollen to over 2000 pages because of his inability to decide what it's about. And because he can't stand conflict, he avoids breaking bad news which just draws out all of his problems.Grady's weekend adventures with his talented but weird student, James Leer, while trying to avoid his editor, makes for a sadly funny story about a middle-aged man trying not to hurt the people in his life while not realizing that he already has and now is just running in circles to avoid the fall-out. This could have been a very depressing book, or just another tale of middle aged ennui, but its sad sense of humor and likable characters keep it entertaining.
—Kemper
What does a boa constrictor, a tuba, a transvestite, Marilyn Monroe's jacket, a man called Crabtree, a lot of pot, a car with buttprints and a blind dog have in common? They all crosses Grady Tripp's path in the course of two days where Tripp's wife finds out that he has a mistress and that she is pregnant...So this is no ordinary weekend and Tripp finds himself in one awkward situation after the others. Towards the end, you as the reader finds yourself thinking "figures!" every time something new and weird happens to him. So much bad happens that you are really not surprised anymore - he's just having a really bad weekend.On top of all this he's trying to finish his 2000+ pages next novel called Wonder Boys and that is really not happening either - so not much is looking up for Tripp.This book reminded me of Man gone Down by Michael Thomas in that they both takes place over a few days and our narrator is out of luck and trying to get his life back together. But the narrator in this book experiences rather more weird events than in Thomas's book - maybe in part because he's stoned out for most of the book and therefore can't be said to really make any good decisions at all - throughout the book! And that's what makes this book fun to read.Or fun - well, it's not laugh out loud, slapping your knees fun - but it's amusing - and the last 80 pages or so was amazing. I really liked the book all the way through but the last pages were just so good in tying it all together. Only thing that prevented it from getting a five star rating is that sometimes the language gets in the way. Chabon writes it so well - but a few times I found myself stopping out and re-reading a sentence because it was just so heavy, beautifully written, but heavy. I found myself doing this with Gabriel Marcia Marquez as well but with him it was because it was so beautiful that I had to stop and enjoy it. Here, the language itself stopped me - and didn't further my reading at those points.But putting aside those few places, this was a book I really enjoyed and I'm looking forward to reading more by Michael Chabon.
—Christina
On the surface, Grady Tripp is probably one of the most loathsome individuals I have ever read about in literature—he’s spent seven years on a 2,611 page monstrosity that has gone absolutely nowhere and like his life meandered everywhere, he’s come to the dissolution of his third marriage, he’s carried on an affair for about five years with the married chancellor who is now carrying his child, he’s smoked an entire football field of weed, and yet he can’t seem to cut himself off, and he harbors a certain amount of jealousy for James Leer, a student of his who has managed to finish his novel, while he has not—and yet I liked him anyway, and I couldn’t wait to see what crisis he would manage to find himself in the middle of next. He’s a train wreck, but he’s a somewhat loveable train wreck all the same, because he recognizes that he’s a complete and utter mess, and he has little, if any, hope for redemption.This novel works, because Grady Tripp has a heart. He’s a man filled with misguided direction and false hope, and yet he still continues to go forth and attempt to conquer the world. He may have flushed seven years of his life down the toilet working on a novel that even he knows doesn’t really work, but he still believes there’s an ending out there somewhere for it, and all he has to do is find it. Like the main character, the prose of WONDER BOYS is both elegant and disturbing, and it’s a beautiful read from the first page to the last. And I enjoyed every single minute of it.Cross-posted at Robert's Reads
—Robert
