Wonder Boys

Every other Michael Chabon novel that I have read has started out so slow that I've abandoned it for months at a time, but ultimately has been profound and moving and made me feel like I have a place in the universe. Wonder Boys did the opposite. Despite it's easy readability, Wonder Boys made me feel hated, like the world for which it's written or is found funny is a world that is antithetical to people like me.

About a quarter of the way through, I realized that I'd seen and hated the movie. That added to the feel of the novel, to be honest – this is a novel about people using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate the sort of depression that comes not from any sort of psychopathology, but rather the reasonable self-loathing if you're the sort of dick to do idiotic things while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Not surprisingly, this becomes a downward spiral of totally unsympathetic assholes continuing to do idiotic things then self-medicate further, then become more of a self-absorbed asshole who does even more idiotic things. I read the book with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, anticipating how things could possibly get even worse. Knowing the specific form the devolution takes from watching the movie added to the ambiance, so to speak.

So why two stars? The second star comes entirely from a Passover seder scene that is laugh-out-loud funny. Fights over what to put in the second seder plate space for bitter herbs (or even how to pronounce “Chazeret”) are reminiscent to every Jewish home and also to what I love about most Chabon novels. It was like a breath of fresh air (before that, too, became another drug-using, drunk-driving, pet-killing rampage)

Michael Chabon was a young phenom, publishing his debut novel when he was only 25. He found himself stuck when he tried to pen his follow-up, though, and from this experience he found the inspiration for what became his second book, Wonder Boys. The novel tells the story of Grady Tripp, a one-time literary wunderkind who's published two books to both critical acclaim and popular success but has gotten completely mired in his third. Tripp works as a professor at a small liberal arts school in his native Pennsylvania, and his life is a bit of a mess when we meet him. His agent, who has also been his best friend since college, is coming into town to talk about his book, which he is nowhere near finishing even though he's written over 2,000 pages. An odd but talented student, James, is exhibiting strange behavior. His wife, the third Mrs. Tripp, has just apparently left him. And his mistress, who is the dean of the college and who is married to the head of Tripp's department, is pregnant.

It makes for a wild weekend, as Grady tries to keep his agent from actually reading his manuscript in the hopes that he can figure out what to actually do with it, keep track of James, who turns out to be a bit of a pathological liar and compulsive thief, attend a seder dinner with his in-laws (with James in tow) to see if he can patch things up with his wife, and figure out what to do about his mistress's pregnancy. There's also a running plotline about the car Tripp is driving, which he won in a poker game and might actually be stolen, and Tripp's crush on the young student that rents out the basement in his house and is never seen without her red cowboy boots. In the end, somehow, improbably, it all turns out about as well as it could have.

I don't even necessarily think that's a spoiler there, because there is a movie version out there of this book and it's fairly faithful to the text, though it does cut out some plot threads while giving others greater weight. The movie bombed, though I actually quite liked it myself, and I honestly think it might work better in some ways than the book...mostly for its willingness to purge extraneous details. Chabon's a wonderful writer with a great sense of how to tell a story and clear, insightful prose, but there was really just too much going on here. Too many characters, too many “side quests” (so to speak), too much detail...it feels cluttered and starts to strain the bounds of credulity. How much weird stuff, after all, can happen to one guy over the course of one weekend?

While I've loved the two books of Chabon's that I've read before, this one just didn't resonate with me. I think part of it was let-down, because what I've read from him before has been so good that I had very high expectations going in, and part of it is that I'm just not in a place where stories about overgrown man-children are especially charming to me. The thought of the amount of emotional labor a person like Tripp pushes onto the women in his life because he can't be assed to get himself together is enraging, so I actually kind of hated him. Comedy-of-errors-style plots like this one aren't my cup of tea either. I think my lack of connection with this book is as much about me and my preferences as it is about the book itself, though, so while I can't recommend it, I'm not going to affirmatively suggest avoiding it either. If reading this has made you think that this sounds like a delightful narrative, you'll probably like it. If not though, skip.

“Sara would read anything you handed her–Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet–at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house–reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania–and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”

“Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.”

“It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.”

It's a wonder that Grady Tripp even managed to write fiction at all being that he was so preoccupied with smoking weed and seducing his colleague's wife. I really enjoyed this novel. The relationships between Professor / Writer Grady Tripp and his self-loathing student James Leer and his horny editor Terry Crabtree were wonderfully developed and their adventurous weekend was told with humor and verve. Male friendships are simple yet complex yet simple things and Chabon has a gift of peeling back the layers that bond them. Chabon can really turn a phrase although occasionally he can be long-winded. Every once and a while, I found myself thinking, “Come on, get on with it, man.” Then Chabon would knock my socks off with the next paragraph. All in all, a fun read.