Wonder Boys: A Novel

Very well written in the style of Chabon, interesting characters and a concise and not abrupt resolution. I don't personally speak Pittsburgh, but I was able to follow what was going on even though I am not familiar with the various landmarks and streets that Chabon describes. A very quick read and I found it very satisfying with the characters easy to imagine.

Normally, when one views a movie based on a book, one is struck by how much of the book was lost. In this case, having seen the film first, I was struck by how little the book added to the movie. "Wonder Boys" is an easy read, and it's fun, and it does add some material to the movie, but it doesn't really seem to have anything important to say.

At some point, in every Chabon novel, the beauty of his writing stops me dead in my tracks. If my wife or daughter or random stranger is within earshot, I fight the urge to grab their attention and recite the last amazing sentence that I've read. I can thin
k of no other writer that should be trusted with a fifty word sentence.

Saw the movies Mysterys of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, the latter is a favorite. Both films took liberties with the story, the books ring truer, are much less sanitized than the films and resonated more during the read. Glad I took the time to take a closer look at the characters and various subplots touched on by the film. Both books were hard to put down once I was invested in the first 50 pages. I'll likely check out more Chabon novels in time.

I saw the movie several times before reading the book, and there wasn't much extra to be gained from the story. In fact, this is one of the extremely rare cases where I enjoyed the movie more. It was an exceptionally good movie, and the plot, characters and even the dialogue were faithful to the book. It's still a good book. Michael Chabon is a great author.

It's not that "Wonder Boys" isn't wonderfully written. Mr. Chabon definitely has a way with words. His prose is fantastic, his characters are well developed, the story line is complete...

...it's just...

...I guess I know enough 30/40-something year old men in extended adolescences who party too much, get high too often, and are self destructive that I really couldn't get into a fictional account of their shenanigans. It was like reading a bad biography of grown American men. I found myself being annoyed by the hero, so much so, that I couldn't pay attention to the storyline.

Not only that but the Chancellor decides to divorce her husband to marry the hero because she's pregnant from their 5 year affair. I understand that she was in a loveless marriage and her and her husband did not have sex for years but... *sigh*...marrying a man because your going to have his baby is not the smartest thing. This would be the hero's forth marriage. At the end of the book he doesn't sound happy with his life and seems to just be going through the motions. He doesn't even call his son by his first name, just "the kid", "my son" and doesn't even mention him often. I found it awfully damning

I was quite excited to be reading a Pulitzer Prize winning author in what he described as his "magnum opus": I was sincerely disappointed. For most Americans this "Wonder Boys" would be a mediocre or perhaps for the non-discriminating, optimistic, fundamentally nice readers it is a decent book but for those of us who seek literature and enlightenment this is not the book to read. This book sheds light on Michael Chabon's shortcomings as his uninteresting, unsympathetic characters exhibit their banal traits within an even more trite and just plain stupid plot. If you have time to read this book enter this endeavor knowing what your getting into or take my advice and don't take the gamble that you might enjoy this.

Michael Chabon always awes with his use of language and, especially, his facility for metaphor, simile, and imagery. To say he's a gifted writer is a deep understatement. "Wonder Boys" exhibits those skills on almost every page: motherhood as a canoe nearing the precipice of a cascade; an umbrella opening like a spider's legs; a writer who "disappeared into the fastness of impregnable failure"; or "a sober man at a party is as lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven." I wish I could write one sentence like that.

But, for all its charms, "Wonder Boys" ultimately is disappointing. I guess it works as a satire of the college literary world. It has memorable madcap adventures of a type that any of us would be thrilled to encounter. But the novel is empty; there's nothing really believable or interesting in the book. Everyone feels like a caricature --- sexy undergrad girls falling for aging professors, repressed homosexuals ready for their first encounter, beautiful-but-cold older women, drunks too drunk to shoot straight, and other drunks always ready with a quip.

The main character, Grady Tripp, is perhaps the least believable of all. In the 72 hours or so in which the novel takes place, he gets stoned a half-dozen times and downs innumerable varities of alcohol, and then drives around Pittsburgh and the nearby countryside, more or less without incident. During this time, he also writes and edits his complex, 2000-page novel. And he maneuvers among his wife, lover, a potential new lover, a visit by his best friend, and a promising student novelist. The fact that the book chronicles a turning point in his decline -- a classic "bottom" -- doesn't really redeem the hard-to-believe scenario.

Also, there are so many books that mine the same territory and in the same way that it feels superfluous to have someone as great as Chabon spend his time on this turf. I look forward to reading (and re-reading) Michael Chabon's works that explore more unusual worlds.

Highly disappointing. After The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay I had a fairly sizable appreciation, goodwill and interest towards Michael Chabon, and didn't wait long before obtaining another of his works. This novel, however, was rather weak, failing to make any of the same sense of wonder, energy or interest. Rather it shows the over-familiar formula of an author struggling with writer's block and the process of writng. He also has a pattern of serial infidelity and assorted dysfunctional relationship.

I have to ask why. Why does Chabon expect me to be invested in the story, when he makes the character unlikeable and overly bound to archetypes? When he uses main elements already done before, and done more imaginatively? What was the mental process that lead to such a bland setup and underwhelming narrative? The meta element common to Chabon's other writing reappears, then, but in a far less unique or interesting format. Perhaps the most encouraging thing about this work's failure is that it occured earlier in Chabon's career, and perhaps it reflects an ongoing process of refinement for his literary direction. It's still a poor choice, and it makes me more skeptical about the wider literary investmnet. I don't think this is the same case as Number9Dream, where I couldn't disengage my perception from the shadow of Mitchell's earlier success but it was still a competent work. Here, there are real and fundamental problems.

It's not entirely a bad book, being engaging enough to go through and having a number of amusing incidents. On the whole, however, it delivers a very limited amount of insight, and the more one moves from individual lines and scenes, the emptier and less compeling the experiment seems. By all means an author can give us nothing but failrues for characters, throw the environment into despair, destroy the whoel world with their imagination. There needs to be more point to it than the kind of liftless failure Chabon offers up here.

Worse than: The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Better than: Secret Son by Laila Lalami

Michael Chabon and I have a rocky relationship. I was introduced to Chabon with his towering achievement, `The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' and I was immediately moved to label him one of him favorite authors. Yes, I made that call after one read, but I still stand behind the belief that that one novel is a masterpiece of modern literature and one of the best novels of the past decade. I rushed out to the bookstore and snatched up all of his novels because I just knew that I would be smitten with them all. Then I read `Mysteries of Pittsburg' and found myself kind of angry. It was just like how I felt when I read `Men in the Making' after reading `The Wake of Forgiveness' (still one of my favorite Vine finds). The difference between the two was night and day and it made me reassess everything I thought I knew about how I felt about that particular author. `Mysteries of Pittsburg', Chabon's first novel, was such a mediocre mess and it was so lazily written and thrown together and just went nowhere and really if it weren't for Chabon's obvious knack for stringing words I would have hated it.

Needless to say, my confidence in Chabon was shaken, but it wasn't destroyed. I still believed that there was a good author in him and I knew that what he achieved with `The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' could NOT be a fluke. So, while on vacation last month I decided to indulge in a respected Chabon classic; `Wonder Boys'.

I'm on the fence with this one.

I'll say that I read `Wonder Boys' in one sitting. I was on a plane that lasted ten hours and I just completely blew through this book. Chabon has such an ease about his writing that it is easy to fall into every page, even if you aren't thoroughly impressed or even interested in where he is heading with it. That was what it was like for me with `Mysteries of Pittsburg'. I could care less and yet I didn't think about putting it down because the pages kept turning so fluidly. `Wonder Boys' is nowhere near the disappointment I felt while scarfing down his debut novel, but I must say that I was shocked to have it take a turn I found amateurish and unnecessary. I understand Chabon wanted to build tension, but the twist in the end concerning the car was just dumb and took me out of the faux high I was getting from breezing through his entertaining prose.

Written in a true `black comedic' fashion, `Wonder Boys' tells the story of a pot smoking writer turned Professor named Grady who is suffering from writers block and has been attempting to follow up his success with something substantial for far too long. He is obviously running out of time to do so. In the meantime, he's fantasizing about a student, cheating on his wife with a married woman and trying desperately to fix a slew of mistakes made by a kleptomaniac student with sparks of talent and a bizarre home life. The cast of characters are all rather intriguing, especially Terry Crabtree, Grady's agent. James Leer is a bit of a conundrum (his character has so many interesting parts and yet the never really come together) and the women in Grady's life never show much depth. Still, they present pieces to a puzzle that ultimately help make up Grady as a whole and make him one of the more interesting people in modern literature.

Chabon is good at what he does; writing. He spins his web of words remarkably well. I couldn't put this down. I still believe that the ending was a mess and the subplot concerning a stolen car was just sloppy and took away from the rest of the book. Still, it wasn't enough to make this a bad read, and it was a definite step up from `Mysteries of Pittsburg' (this being his sophomore novel). I will certainly read every other Chabon novel, since I have them all on my bookshelf. Besides, he's such a good writer that I'm bound to enjoy reading them all, even if I don't really like them.

Wonder Boys seems like a semi-autobiographical novel. I'm not saying it is one, just that it seems like one. And not autobiographical in a life story sense. But just in the sense of a rambling, aspiring writer who doesn't know what to write about figuring that he might as well write about a rambling, aspiring writer who can't stop writing. It's not bad. The prose is quite good, the narrative engaging, and the characters well-developed. Still, I wonder if Wonder Boys is simply an act of catharsis. I don't know. It feels like a novel specifically written for writers by a writer.

The entire novel takes place over just one weekend with a whirlwind of events. It is WordFest at a university and Professor Grady Tripp can't seem to successfully finish his next novel after having already published one highly regarded piece. What do you do if you are facing the dreadful possibility of being a has-been? Drink, get high, cheat on your wife, become over-involved with your students, and well, I won't mention the dog. It's one crazy event after another. On the whole, the novel is a fun and entertaining read, mostly because Chabon is a pretty good storyteller.

Sometimes I'm reluctant to read multiple works by the same author because I'm afraid that all the books will be the same. Luckily, that wasn't the case here. I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay last year, and well, there couldn't be two more different novels. I'm shocked that these two books are written by the same author. Wonder Boys feels intimate and slightly uncomfortable, whereas Kavalier and Clay is epic and grand.

If you enjoyed the movie, this novel is almost exactly what you have seen--with the addition of a LOT MORE characterization, craziness, and cringe-worthy plot happenings. I was surprised at how well the movie portrayed the novel after reading this. So, if the movie entertained you, if the characters on screen drew you in, you kind of HAVE TO read this novel. The movie is an appetizer compared to this feast.

The one thing I kept asking myself is, "Why am I reading this?" The characters are so flawed and the plot so smooth that it sometimes feels like a Sunday drive through the mountains. Nothing terribly shocking happens, but the lives of these characters are so much like our own and yet so awkwardly different that one just has to see what will happen next.

Frankly, I think it is Chabon's writing style that achieves this readability. It is an easy read in which you are never aware of the author, always peeking over the shoulders of the characters, and always just curious enough to turn the page.

Good stuff. BUY IT.

I struggled to finish this book, in fact was bored with it almost from the first page. I was determined to read it all, as I cannot stand when people leave reviews that say "it was so bad I couldn't finish it". To me, if you don't finish a book then you cannot fairly review it. This is one book that I wish I had forgotten about the rule I made for myself, as it was horrible forcing myself to read 350? pages of this drivel.

The plot of this book was nothing special. A guy is wasting his life, has an epiphany due to a near death occurrence, and straightens out and lives happily ever after. There are many "spoiler alert" reviews that will give you much more detail of the plot if you really want to find out more about this book. Be fair to yourself--if you are going to read those 4 and 5 star reviews, be sure to read all the 1, 2 and 3 star reviews as well.

When I finished this book, which took forever, I then read the author's biography and found that he is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I did not understand how someone who won a Pulitzer Prize could write such a bad book that actually was turned into a movie.

I decided to read reviews about the book, trying to figure out just what in the world I was missing. This is apparently one of Michael Chabon's first novels, written when he was 26 and apparently this book is meant as satire about the world of Academia in journalism studies. One reviewer likened it to Cheech and Chong.

Only then did I "get it"...as there was nothing funny about this book at all in my opinion. I found nothing even remotely amusing--but then, I don't find anything funny about Cheech and Chong either.

The author could have easily done away with about 1/2 of this book and not lost anything...in fact he would have saved his readers a lot of pain. Not only is there page after page of meaningless description, page after page of debauchery, the use of pretentious words that seem to be put there only to impress you with the author's vocabulary (and some of the words are not even in the dictionary), but there are also multiple punctuation errors. The author has a bad habit of either not putting in quotes when a person speaks or "opening" the quote and then never closing it.

Surely by now, this author who is now a Pulitzer Prize winner realizes that his first book is pure trash. If I were him I would be ashamed to still have it out there in print. He may have been proud of it when he was 26, but I will bet if he went back and read it now, he would throw it away. Just as in this novel, where the main character's book blows away in the wind, and he loses 7 years of unfocused and meaningless work, I wish this book too had been lost in a similar manner.

You will see many 4 and 5 star ratings from folks, and I just cannot understand why. This is a poorly written and thoroughly boring and confusing book, with phrases ad nauseum that really don't mean anything.

One reviewer suggested that just as the protagonist in this book was writing an awful book due to excessive pot consumption, and that this book was probably written under the same conditions. I have to agree with that reviewer. It is as if the entire book was written by someone who was stoned and putting down words that did not make sense, just for the sake of putting down words. Paragraph after paragraph of nonsense.

Just as people who are "stoned" often say meaningless things that they think (at the time) are profound, and talk endlessly about meaningless subjects, so does Michael Chabon in this book.

I would suggest this author pull this book from the store, as reading this book as my first time experience with this author does not encourage me to read anything else of his. He may indeed have written some excellent novels, but this book doesn't want to make me try to find out. Reading this one was entirely too painful.

Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon
Four Stars

Every time I read something by Michael Chabon it both depresses and uplifts me. Depresses, because I realize just how far I need to go as an author, and uplifts because I see what he can do with the English language. These are the same feelings I have when I read Pat Conroy and James Lee Burke. While our styles could not be more different, I readily admit I'm envious of his God-given talent, and theirs.

Wonder Boys is a delightfully funny and poignant story of a boozy, pothead, author who fears his best work may be behind him and who has been stuck trying to finish the book he started seven years ago. To make matters worse, the hero is, by his own admission, a serial adulterer, though not completely without morals. He steadfastly tries to resist the attentions of of a female student, who is smitten with him. His life is futher complicated because his marriage is falling apart and his mistress has announced she's pregnant. The mistress is the chancellor of the college where he teaches and her husband the dean of his English Literature department. To make matters worse, his best friend and editor is due to arrive and champing at the bit to read the novel he's been toiling away at, our hero having told him it was finally finished. He may have been drunk at the time.

As a character study this is a wonderful book. I wish Michael would turn them out more quickly. But he's probably tired lugging around the Pulitzer Prize he won for "The Amazing Adventures of Cavilier and Clay."

Anyone who doesn't read this fine novel is missing a bet. The pace is excellent and the writing fluid and evocative.

Robert Daniels

Like much modern literature, Wonder Boys has moments of elegant, even beautiful, wordsmithing amid a morass of unrealistic characters and events that are interesting but not involving (sort of like a car accident). Chabon has talent as a writer, but like many novelists, he can't sustain characters without making them distasteful or unreal, nor can he sustain plot without becoming episodic and silly. Wonder Boys is a novel about a novel that has beauty and a novelist who has talent, but both fail because they lack heart. Clearly, Chabon is either completely self-referential or equally clueless (I hope the former). The novel is so self-consciously literary, so consumed in mistaking its overcrammed quirkiness for being memorable, it is at times unreadable. But just as the reader gets sad as a bassoon, Chabon delivers a beautifully composed line or an elegantly timed quip. This probably would have been a good short story, but it's a mediocre novel.

In this farcical send-up of academia and the writing life, author Michael Chabon focuses on forty-ish author Grady Tripp, an aptly named writer/professor who is so often stoned that after seven years he has written two thousand pages of a book that is not even close to being finished. Grady's book, Wonder Boys, is much like his life--lacking in focus, fixated on the moment, and completely empty of goals or a sense of direction. His third wife has walked out on him; he's been having an affair with the Chancellor of the college where he teaches, and she is now pregnant; his editor is pressing him for a final draft of his unfinished book; and his publisher and everyone at the college are wondering if he will ever duplicate the success of his first novel.

As the novel opens, Grady "saves" one of his students, James Leer, from a possible suicide attempt, but his "mentoring" of James leads to hilariously absurd disasters for both of them. Grady's editor, the tuba-playing transvestite "girlfriend" who accompanies him, a collector of memorabilia from the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, and the violent owner of a car that Grady was given to settle a debt, further flesh out the wacky characters and keep the reader amused and laughing almost non-stop.

As the weekend progresses and Grady's personal life further unravels, he finds himself driving around with the transvestite's tuba, the Chancellor's fatally shot malamute, and an equally dead ten-foot boa constrictor in the car's trunk. Scenes in which he tries to prevent the trunk from being opened are worthy of the Marx Brothers.

The dialogue is snappy, the narrative speeds along, the word play and humor never flag, and the satire of academic life and the world of writers shows the stamp of familiarity and the author's own offbeat sense of perspective. A grand farce which carries the bite of satire, Wonder Boys avoids the arch self-consciousness of so many novels of academia and comes across instead as pure, unadulterated fun. n Mary Whipple

Grady Tripp, pothead , college professor and general lothario faces the mother of all weekends. Its the Wordfest; his friend and publisher Crabtree is coming to take a look at "The Wonder Boys"; Tripp's novel that's been seven years in the writing. Its just that the book-like his life-is a complete mess, and things start heading for a crash when he gets tangled up with James Leer, a student of his....
This is basically just another mid life crisis novel, so it needs to have pace humour and incident to make it stand out, and 'Wonder Boys' delivers on all these fronts, reminding of Malamud's 'A New Life'. Its shy of being a great book, but having avoided Chabon for a long time, this novel has made me want to read more of his work. I can recommend this as a good intro to the world of Michael Chabon.

A couple of years ago, on the recommendation of my stepson, I read Michael Chabon's prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, one of the most remarkable, inventive and entertaining books I've ever read. Fearing disappointment, I waited a couple of years before tackling another Chabon novel--settling on "Wonder Boys", having read about it in here.

Working from a much narrower perspective than the sweep of time and place in "Kavalier", Chabon focuses "Wonder Boys" on a single weekend in the life of shambling, dissolute English professor Grady Tripp. Still, over the course of that weekend we meet his wife (a Korean adoptee), his editor (a homosexual recreational drug user), his student (an insecure liar), his roommate (a voluptuous Utahan), his lover (dean of the college), his lover's husband (a high end memoribilia collector), his wife's Jewish-Korean family, a transvestite, a tuba and an unfortunate dog. A short, but telling backstory describes Tripp's childhood idol, an aging and depressed horror writer who roomed in the house where Tripp grew up. In the interests of space and time, we don't get to meet many of the characters in the "novel within the nove", also "Wonder Boys", a 2600-page opus that finds Tripp less than half-way through his plot outline with just a few hours left to satisfy his editor. The characters interact, the plot twists, and wackiness ensues--symbolized by the contents of the trunk of Tripp's aging Galaxie 500. The ending seemed a bit romanticized, but at least it's unexpected, given all that takes place to get there. Chabon's style is just short of complete farce, making the story highly entertaining, yet still riding on the fringes of believeability. I don't think I read it quite as fast as Tripp and company lived it, but I needed more sleep than they did, it would seem. A solid four-star read. I'll tackle Chabon's other Pittsburgh book some day and look forward to whatever he writes as a followup to "Kavalier".

Grady Tripp, narrator of Chabon's funny and frantic second novel, is a fortyish writing professor mired in the swamp of his latest novel, a 2,600-page mess called Wonder Boys, and wrestling with a serious attack of mid-life panic.
The story takes place over the course of WordFest weekend, an annual Pittsburgh writer's festival put on by Tripp's university. The event's main attraction, a famous author identified only as "Q.," bemoans and celebrates his "doppelganger, a malignant shadow who lived in the mirrors and under the floorboards and behind the drapes of his own existence, haunting all of Q.'s personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world." This mischievous double would pop up occasionally "to ensure that human misfortune...continued unabated in Q.'s life. Otherwise, of course, there would be nothing to write about."
After his opening speech, Q. is never again seen in anything but a state of alcoholic catatonia. But Tripp finds much to sympathize with in this speech, calling his own version "the midnight disease."
Tripp's own role at the festival is nebulous and seems to consist mostly of providing entertainment for his old college chum, current editor and flamboyant homosexual Terry Crabtree, who arrives towing a transvestite he met on the plane, but soon dumps her in favor of Tripp's darkly tormented and talented student James Leer.
As the festival opens, Tripp is terrified Crabtree will demand to see his novel. At 2,600 pages it has five unsuitable endings. And his third wife, Emily, has left him - although it takes him a full day to absorb the signs, having consigned them to paranoia generated by his perpetual marijuana fog. When his girlfriend, Sara, the college chancellor, tells him she is pregnant, thereby issuing an ultimatum on their relationship, Tripp dives into the bourbon he had forsworn four years earlier.
In a haze of pot and alcohol he spots his possibly suicidal student James Leer with a gun and takes him under his wing. Tripp is no stranger to suicide demons - his own father was a suicide as was the first writer he ever knew, and the first he ever plagiarized. Hoping to distract Leer, Tripp leads him deep into the chancellor's house, into her bedroom and her husband's closet where his prized memorabilia collection is housed, including the jacket Marilyn Monroe wore when she married Joe Dimaggio.
Sara's guests leave and Tripp and Leer are alone in the house. Tension and inevitable disaster loom over the audacious comedy of the scene.
When the chancellor's dog comes snarling, Tripp is attacked and bitten. "I was afraid, but not too afraid for it to occur to me that dying torn to pieces by blind, mad dogs had a certain mythic quality that might work well in the section of Wonder Boys...."
And the roller coaster ride is begun. Leer's little gun goes off and the dog is dead. Tripp loads the dog into his trunk and heads off to tell Sara. But he can't quite. Things get worse and he consumes more pot, more bourbon. Lies to the police, grabs James Leer and abandons WordFest, heading off to join Emily's family for the Passover Seder, then turns back to confess all to Sara, chickens out - no surprise - and resumes his pursuit of Emily and a family to belong to. Seeing Emily, he is again unable to get a morsel of truth to pass his lips and resorts to using family members as chancy go-betweens.
All of this manic and downwardly spiraling activity is conducted amidst a monologue of what it has meant to consciously cloak oneself in the writerly personna and, after everything, to face the specter of failure. Tripp and Crabtree are the old "wonder boys," running uphill to stay that way, while James Leer is the newest "wonder boy" with a passable novel in his knapsack, a made-up identity and a whole baggage of self-loathing and despair. In James, Tripp sees himself but even his attempts to rescue Leer are formless and misguided.
Tripp returns to WordFest in time for its finale and his own nadir of self-destruction. Although images and prospects of suicide haunt the narrative, there is never any expectation that Tripp will choose that fate. He loves life, he just doesn't like the present version much.
His approach to relationships and events is an often contradictory mix of guilt, self-preservation and a writer's reflective curiosity. He's addicted to the sensation of pot which "makes me feel like everything already happened five minutes ago." He's a collector of interesting people. Emily, a Korean refugee, is the adopted child of a Jewish couple whose biological son died in an accident. Emily is as self-contained and austere as Tripp is sloppy. Which doesn't mean she hurts any less.
Tripp follows her, not so much with any idea of resuming his marriage (he's already anticipating a dalliance with the 20-year-old student who lives in his house), but to recollect her odd and endearing family and introduce them to James. These rather chilly motivations are, however, well wrapped in layers of emotional yearning. Sara is a woman with a well-constructed life, carefully built up a step at a time with education, career advancement and prudence - until, having accomplished her goals, she falls in with Tripp. Tripp, naturally, is hoping she'll decide on abortion, although he'd never say as much to her.
Chabon's writing is sharp, barbed and appealing, as contradictory as his hero. His images are crisp and complete, offering boldly sketched characters which come near but never succumb to caricature. Tripp, though he shouldn't be, is likable and the reader roots for him to get out from under the weight of his novel as if it's that and not himself which prevents a fresh start.
Chabon enjoys his contradictions. Academia is staid and stuffy, childish and wild. It's at the heart of Tripp's life but remains on the fringes of the novel. The tone is melancholy while events are antic. Tripp revels in sensation for the sake of something to write about and is so overcome by sensation he cannot write coherently.
And while the story of male mid-life crisis is not new, Chabon's voice is entertaining and thought-provoking. Amidst all the humor and bite is a meditation on what it means to strive too hard to be a writer. Although perhaps it's not anything quite so stuffy as that.

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.

I've become convinced that Michael Chabon is our greatest contemporary American author at the moment. It was his outstanding novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, that planted such a seed in my mind, but it is his older novel, Wonder Boys, that cements such a notion.

Wonder Boys is about a nearly over the hill author who's been stuck on his novel of the same name for seven years. It's become a behemoth of a novel, with no end in sight. His marriage is falling apart, just as several of his others did, and he is a habitual substance abuser. To make matters worse, the woman he's having an affair with, who also happens to be his boss, more or less, at the college he teaches at, has just alerted him that she's pregnant.

Oh, but there's so much more to talk about with this novel! His homosexual editor has come to town, demanding a finish to the epic novel, while an alienated student of his named James Leer has proven that he just may be the next big thing in the world of authors, if he doesn't kill himself first.

As heavy as this sounds, this book actually has many, many funny moments.

This is the magic of Michael Chabon. When I read his works, I'm not conscience of reading; instead, it's as though I'm peeking in on peoples' lives as they actually unravel. Chabon is the master of blending plot with characterization, something that is much harder to do than it sounds.

Will our protagonist, Grady Tripp, finish his novel? Will he mend his marriage while somehow doing the right thing about his pregnant mistress? Will he ever kick his drug habits? Will he appease his editor and save both their careers? Will he nurture the student he doesn't think much of at first, James Leer, into the next great American author? Well, there's only one way to know, so I have to ask you to read the novel. But, let me ask you this question: What would the answer be to those questions in real life?

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant

on a recent trip to guatemala, i finished another book too quickly, and realized i couldn't stomach the long flights home without a book. so i found my way to a large bookstore that had a few shelves of english titles. this book caught my eye, since i'd read chabon's the yiddish policeman's union, and knew he won the pulitzer prize for the amazing adventures if kavelier and clay (which i still need to read, at some point). wonder boys is about a pot-smoking, burned out professor/fiction writer (with some moderate success in his past), who can't seem to finish his current novel (currently at 2600 pages, and only about 40% through his intended storyline). the lead character takes a young, conflicted writing student under his battered and malfunctioning wing, simultaneously corrupting him and promoting him to his first book deal. the whole thing takes place in a couple days, and is a snapshot of a guy who makes continual bad choices and doesn't have the stones to own up to them; that is, until the partially-redemptive ending, where there's at least a hint of phoenix-like resolve emerging from the complete pile of ashes he's made of his life). a bit depressing, to be sure, but still well-written.

Beautifully written, "Wonder boys” is highly amusing, tragic and melancholic. The protagonist skates many times on very thin moral ice (for me, putting the dog in the bed was unforgivable). And throughout the book, his ultimate fate is equally precarious. Overall, I found the book to be very moving. Quite saddening towards the end, but the final denouement was beautiful.