One of my all-time favorite books. ( )

One of my all-time favorite books. ( )

One of my all-time favorite books. ( )

I can say without exaggeration that Michael Chabon is one of the greatest writers alive today. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner, a man who has made the restoration of genre fiction's reputation his personal quest, and one of my personal heroes. "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" is one of the defining literary masterpieces of this decade.

We all start somewhere, though, and "Wonder Boys," the tale of one weekend in the life of a washed-up creative writing professor named Grady Tripp, is only Chabon's second novel. This early in his career, he had clearly mastered the art of the good sentence, and of the good paragraph. The average page in "Wonder Boys" is an aesthetic pleasure, marked by a wonderful balance of dry wit and genuine emotional passion. Example:

I saw that Sara, alone in a frail canoe, was drifiting nearer and nearer to the roaring misty cataract of motherhood, and that she now believed I was right behind her, in the stern, madly paddling. I searched for my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawlspace under the house. I was appalled to see, after five years' exposure to the unstable isotopes of my love, how many of her hopes Sara Gaskell still entrusted to me; how much of her faith there remained for me to shatter.

What he had not yet mastered was the art of stringing these gemstones into a larger story, particularly a story worthy of them. "Wonder Boys" is a meandering, inconsistent voyage through a strange weekend in Grady Tripp's life, a story not quite sure of what it wants to be. Kerouac is mentioned as an explicit influence, and the forced zaniness of the weekend echoes Hunter S. Thompson. But Chabon is too maudlin a writer for these madcap adventures to feel real; he is at his best when describing Grady's collapsing life, his realisations that he is a failure, his desperate attempt to find a way out of the hole he has dug for himself. He is at his worst when throwing tubas, boa constrictors, and dead dogs into the mix in an attempt to inject some crazy adventure into a book that simply doesn't need it.

Oh, by the way, Mike. WE GET IT. YOU ARE A JEWISH JEW WHO PRACTICES JUDAISM. MOVE ON. ( )

So even though the one and only Chabon novel I’d read up to now was a choked mish-mash of styles and genres, I liked the actual writing well enough to try another one. Maybe working to a plot isn’t Chabon’s strength. I’ve seen it before with other authors; presented with an outcome they must produce, they lose it and flail all over the place. Given a purview that only requires them to weave a story without a goal, they do much better. I think Chabon falls into this class of writer.

This is the story of a weekend in the life of Professor Grady Tripp; washed up writer, inveterate pot smoker, serial husband, cheater and grand procrastinator. We’re dropped into the action with the distinct feeling that nothing we’re told or shown is in any way out of the ordinary. Weekends involving attempted suicides, stolen memorabilia, mistress pregnancies, dead dogs, drag queens, divorce proceedings, lost 7-year manuscripts, and tubas are what pass for normal in the life of Grady Tripp.

Given an array of options like that, Chabon does an admirable job of staying focused. It could have turned circus-like and disjointed easily, but didn’t. He does this by homing in on Grady and his interactions instead of giving us a view of Grady through others. Although I’d like to have been shown exactly why people hang around with this loser, it would have diluted the story too much. By focusing on Grady from his own perspective, we get a sense of the man as he perceives himself. It is distorted, not only by a person’s natural inability to see himself clearly, but also by his pot-addled brain.

No wonder Grady can’t finish anything. He’s stoned almost 24/7. He thinks he’s going along through life, greased, slipping through the world unnoticed, ineffectual. He thinks his actions don’t resonate with others as much as they do for him. It’s only when others become disruptive; like little dams along the stream of his life that he really interacts with them. And he can only do so by enveloping himself in a cloak of marijuana.

Now, after years of bumbling non-production are the consequences coming home. The promised and much lauded masterpiece is still unfinished and he believes that somehow during this weekend, he will choose one of the five endings he has written and be able to present his visiting editor with a finished product. He also believes he can reclaim his recently decamped wife Emily, keep the status quo with his mistress Sara, rescue his student James from self-destruction and hang onto his misspent youth. Deluded is not a strong enough term for what Grady is.

The writing is excellent. Chabon finds just the right words and has some brilliant turns of phrase. Good timing and punch lines made me laugh out loud a few times. What could have been a complete downer of a story is lifted by this and made light. He gives us a proper ending, but somehow I got the impression that it wasn’t going to stick. That Grady would never straighten himself out. Thinking of him shambling about in this same way when he’s 50 or 60 could be a sorry thing indeed, if Grady didn’t see it as negative. He seems accepting of his shortcomings and fine with the fact that he doesn’t really control his own life. He’ll continue to churn out half-realized novels and think he’s using his time wisely. What the hell, if it works for him. He doesn’t have to know he’s an endless source of amusement and instruction. ( )