[.ca] Wonder Boys (ISBN 1857024052)

Wonderful "Boys":
Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon deftly avoided the sophomore slump with "Wonder Boys," a followup to the unique "Mysteries of Pittsburgh." A wickedly funny and weirdly satirical novel, this is the story of a writer's frenetic midlife crisis, and the looming whale of a book that overshadows everything he does. Grady Tripp (a "wonder boy") is a onetime-lauded author who is slowly being sucked down into the quicsand of his 2000-plus-page book "Wonder Boys." The middle-aged professor is standing in the wrecks of two marriages, a stagnant career, and a pregnant married mistress. Amid his rapidly deteriorating life, he befriends a morbid young student, James Leer. Not to mention his endangered agent Crabtree, who hopes that "Wonder Boys" will salvage his career. Things go rapidly awry when James and Grady are looking at a jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe. Suddenly a blind dog attacks Grady, and James shoots the dog. Grady sneaks the dead dog out of the house, unable to tell his girlfriend the truth. The sudden disappearance of the jacket, the death of the dog, and the sudden deterioration of Grady's personal life all mesh together... Chabon litters "Wonder Boys" with references to pop culture and high culture, the literati and Marilyn Monroe in the same breath. The result is even smarter than either alone would be. And despite the label of a "cool" writer, Chabon's elegant prose proves that he's more than just a wonder boy. Grady may be suffering from a hideous case of writer's block (although the result is that he actually writes too much), but Chabon clearly wasn't. He manages to grab hold what could have been a horrendously silly caper, and turns it into a wry work of art. His writing is sharp, bright and full of little points like a pinecone. Grady is not a likable guy -- he's a coward, a philanderer, and he's in the throes of a very ugly midlife crisis. But he seems real, and somehow appealing. The flamboyant gay editor Crabtree and the death-obsessed James are nice supporting characters -- Crabtree and Grady are the "wonder boys" of the past, and James is the wonder boy of tomorrow. The supporting cast -- including a perpetually sozzled author, a sultry transvestite, and a sultry boarder -- add plenty of extra flavor. Clever and incisive, "Wonder Boys" is a vivid look at aging, writing and the academic life. In his second fantastic novel, Chabon proves that he's no wonder boy -- he's just a wonder.

Tripp's trippy trip through Pittsburgh's academic underworld:
Grady Tripp--professor, pothead, philanderer--is not all that likable; the type of egotistical pretender who rarely examines his own feelings, "an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house." But, then again, none of the cast of characters who comprise his limited universe and massage his enormous ego are all that admirable: his underperforming and pliable editor, his suicidal and mendacious star student, his two-faced and newly pregnant mistress, his credulous and demoralized Jewish Korean American wife, his bubbly and flirtatious boarder. What makes Chabon's novel so wonderful is not that you'll meet characters you'll admire or like or identify with--you won't, one hopes--but that, even though it's a satire of academic life, this horde of misfits is so thoroughly believable. And it's one of the funniest books I've read: a protracted comedy of errors and pure boneheadedness. Several years late with his fourth novel, Tripp plays host to his editor, who has arrived for a college symposium on writing and who hopes that Tripp, against all odds, has completed his long-promised magnum opus. With the help of their wayward companions, the undynamic duo collect in Tripp's 1966 emerald green Ford Galaxie 500 convertible: a dead blind dog, a tuba, a rather hefty bag of marijuana, a boa constrictor, a jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe, 2,611 manuscript pages of an unfinished (and unfinishable) novel, an assortment of pharmaceuticals--all of which are pursued through Pittsburgh by a street tough packing a German nine millimeter. It's a Peter Bogdanovich farce for the literary set. On top of its ludicrous yet somehow plausible plot, Chabon flaunts an enviable ability to construct perfectly crafted sentences and drolly concise depictions, sprinkled liberally with references to highbrow and lowbrow culture from the last century. About a voracious reader: "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." About a free-spirited sister-in-law: "...it would certainly be typical of Deborah to decide that the best possible way of preparing for a family Seder was to drink Manischewitz and lie around half naked reading 'Betty and Veronica.'" Chabon is a writer's writer whose prose can distract critics and colleagues to a begrudgingly awed full stop. Fortunately for readers, however, he aims his novels at a much broader audience.

Infuriatingly Wonderful:
It's hard to summarize why this book is as good as it is. Mostly, I think, it stems from the narrator's tone which mixes a gloom that things will never be what they were along with a playfulness in accepting that the past is gone. The crux of this novel is the sliding manner of the relationships between the narrator - a faded author named Grady Little, his publisher Terry Crabtree, and their student/protegée James Leer - whose suicidal exterior and studied eccentricity masks an acute talent for writing fiction. The power struggles the three engage in during a drunken writer's convention at the University of Pittsburgh result in a complete reversal of fortune for two of the three main characters (who are the titular Wonder Boys), and a general change of lifestyle for the third. Also in the mix of this frothy book are an obsession with old Hollywood starlets, a dead dog, a divorce, a pregnancy, and a transvestite clutching a tuba case. When I finished reading Wonder Boys, I was torn with admiration for Chabon's accomplishment and bitter jealousy that someone can write such a book and I can't. I won't pretend that everybody will like this novel - I can picture many of my friends disliking it. But I stand by its merits: brilliantly funny and sad, and capturing its milieu of faded academic glory superbly.

D.A.R.E.:
So, first things first: Chabon is, right now, simply the world's best living writer of English prose. The only really fair question to ask given this fact is how _Wonder Boys_ stacks up against his other work. Answer: it lacks the sheer jaw-dropping magnificence of _Kavalier and Klay_, but it's a step forward from both _The Mysteries of Pittsburgh_ and the short stories. There are at least three dozen chokingly funny one-liners, the plot is an utterly ingenious picaresque, and the hero, Grady Tripp, is totally believable. I've had friends who were similarly gifted but who used just enough pot or booze to cause their lives to spin that little extra bit beyond their control, and Chabon shows this happening with surgical and unsentimental precision, without ever sacrificing the novel's lightness of tone. I saw the movie first, and think this was a mistake, although it does have many charms. There's a lovely pair of performances by Tobey Maguire and Robert Downey Jr. Also there's a wonderful scene near the end, involving a retired boxer and a jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe, that's not in the book at all - surprising, given how sweet and apt it seemed to me to be in the film. But one only gets to witness the slow disintegration of Tripp's literary talent from the inside (so to speak) in the novel, and Tripp's drug use is also treated as being just a cuddly and insignificant eccentricity in the film, in that way that Hollywood people foolishly prefer to think of such things. The novel is much more of a cautionary tale, and a far superior work of art as the result.

A thought provoking and addictive work or literature:
In Michael Chabon's best work yet, he demonstrates his remarkable ability to write. This novel, though racy at times is not only entertaining, but relevant and semi-educational. From pot-smoking authors, to pill-popping publishers, to dedicated students, and slightly insane students, with a nice jewish family at the end, this book truly does touch on everything. I would definately reccomend it, even thought it does have a few flaws. Towards the end, a variety of bizaare twists left me confused, and I didnt quite understand the ending. I also feel that the blatant drug use, was a little excessive, seeing as almost every character was intoxicated at some point. This is definately a five-star book.