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. ( )

Can't say I liked this book very much. I did not like the characters at all. What a bunch of druggy, boozey crazy losers. It's well written but I just couldn't get into it. Disappointing. ( )

Normally, I don’t particularly like novels about writers. I think it’s taking the adage, “Write what you know,” to an extreme. Who would want to read about writers except other writers?

This novel is the exception. It is an excellent book about writers, all kinds of writers, and the community they build for themselves with their editors and their readers, and the imaginary worlds they inhabit so much of the time. The novel chronicles the events of one weekend: WordFest, a literary festival held at the small college where Grady – a disaffected, failing writer who yet cannot stop writing – teaches. Things quickly snowball out of control, one event leading to another inexorably but beyond Grady’s ability to slow down or steer. In fact, it’s all quite similar to the novel he’s currently working on, a 5,000-page monster he’s been writing for five years now, with no end in sight. Events become so outrageous that it’s impossible to distinguish reality from the feverish, pot-induced imaginings of Grady’s interior world, the one where all writers actually live most of the time. And we, the readers, don’t really care what’s real or not. It all works for us. ( )

http://mentatjack.com/2009/07/14/revi... ( )

Easily one of the most under-rated books I've read. ( )

Thus far, my least favorite Michael Chabon. Which is not necessarily a bad review. Was it written with a screenplay in mind, though? ( )

My favorite of his books, even though I read it after the movie came out and then couldn't help but picture Michael Douglas and Katie Holmes. Otherwise, love. ( )

I really wanted to dislike Wonder Boys. I even tried to dislike it. I mean, here it was a book about writers (barf) by Michael Chabon (barf) who kind of gives me the willies (I think it’s the hair). Despite all that, Wonder Boys still crawled into my heart.

So we’ve got pot-smoking, wife-cheating, never-ending-novel writing Grady Tripp and the weekend from hell. His editor comes into town for writerpalooza or something and brings along a drag queen. Grady’s wife has also chosen that day to leave him and Grady’s mistress, the chancellor of the university he teaches at, also decides to tell him she’s pregnant. Oh and Grady also managed to thwart the suicide of his gifted-oddball student James Leer who steals a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe. Also, the chancellor’s dog is killed.

Full Review: http://www.minnesotareads.com/2009/02... ( )

I was expecting something a little better than this. Maybe I need to be a man to understand this book better, but I couldn't figure Grady out. He's pretty great at abandoning the women in his life, he smokes too much pot, and he can't seem to finish his novel. He's not a bad man. He's just not very likeable due to his actions.

I thought the book had a few funny moments where I actually laughed out loud, but Grady was too much of a mess and it was a huge distraction. Does he get his act together at the end of the book? It's hard to tell, really.

Michael Chabon's beautiful writing is as always a pleasure to read. I just didn't care for his main character. ( )

The first time I tried reading this novel--thrust upon me with great exhaltation by a writer-friend--I flipped through a dozen pages and then gave up. The time wasn't right.

This time I read it in its entirety in two sittings. Grady Tripp is such a colossal plane crash of humanity that it's impossible to look away, even as Chabon continues to pull charred limbs and dismembered teddy bears out of his past. Tripp, bluntly, is unlikeable: a philandering, hopeless pothead with minor literary genius long since spent.

His sidekick-cum-editor, Terry Crabtree, is barely better, an opportunistic hedonist wreckless with the psyches of others. Not that hedonism is a given evil, but in "Wonder Boys" Chabon makes it flinch-worthy; Tripp doesn't even bother keeping an eye on his libido. Anything just kind of goes.

"Wonder Boys" is a yarn of Tripp and Crabtree's weekend at a literary festival at Tripp's college (he is, somewhat inexplicably, a professor, based on a long-ago string of novels--he can't write anything now to save his life). The narrative spins out in a blur of molested youth, drugs, the combination of the two, and their mostly unpleasant after-effects. It's enough to make the reader feel hungover and queasy.

In between these groggy episodes are some good reading. Tripp's run-ins (they don't end well) with pets are slapsticky hijinx, but ultimately hilarious. His perhaps ill-advised impulse trip to his in-laws' homestead at Passover to (maybe?) try to save his imploding, farcical marriage (his mistress is pregnant) is a tapestry of misfit individuals and neuroses--perhaps the highlight of the novel.

Chabon leaves me feeling sticky and confused at the end. It's like sitting in a bar during daylight hours: I can only see the stench and the dirtiness and feel the throbbing headache, while the characters are the ones who got to have all the fun. ( )

Over-aged pothead won't grow up in time to save his 3rd marriage, but he does have potential. And it's very well written. ( )

Chabon’s use of language is so good sometimes it makes me sick. The trick is to not drop the Nabokovian word bombs too often so that readers are hiding in the subway and not out in the open where they can be flattened by their perfection. Jerk. The movie really followed this novel pretty closely except for the excised Passover scene, which on film may have seemed too much like a Woody Allen (back when he was good) piece. ( )

http://nohablo.vox.com/library/post/w... ( )

I'm embarrassed to say, I do like the film much better. The Korean adopted sister in the middle (thankfully excised from the film for bagginess) was ... well, bordering on racist caricature is a nice way of putting it. Still, hilarious delirious writing. ( )

I wish I had encountered this book before I saw the movie adaptation--which turns out to be surprisingly faithful. Sadly, just as Jack Nicholson will forever be, like it or not, the person whose face I picture when I read The Shining, Michael Douglas and Frances McDormand kept stealing into my brain as I read Michael Chabon's excellent book. Not that I don't love these actors, but I prefer to come to a book half-blind and able to conjure up faces and landscapes, overcoats and sidewalks from just the clues the author provides. As for Chabon's prose, he has a knack for inventing memorable characters, turns of phrase, and unexpected images. My only beef? While his similes are fantastic, he relies too much on them sometimes. ( )

In another writer's hands, all the wacky hijinks might have distracted from the main plot, but Chabon knows how to add humor AND make it relevant to the storyline. The characters were imaginative but believable and the way the plot unfolded felt just right. ( )

The story ostensibly centres on Prof Grady Tripp's attempts at completing his increasingly out of control follow up novel of the title, Wonder Boys; yet as is not surprising with Michael Chabon, as well as an interesting plot, it is very much about characters and relationships. Central here, in addition to Grady himself, are his editor Terry Crabtree and young student James Lear, something of a loner, as well as host of other divers characters including Grady's pregnant mistress, an adoring female student, a transvestite, a dead dog and a tuba.
The real beauty of the novel is the interaction between the various characters. Grady and carefree drug reliant Crabtree are long standing friends and this clearly comes through. Crabtree has a crush on the Grady’s mysterious student, the unreliable James; Grady's beautiful student tenant has a crush on him; and Grady's third marriage is coming to an end while he pursues his mistress, the college Chancellor. His failing marriage does not prevent visiting his wife’s family for Thanksgiving, and taking along James. The relationship between Grady and James is particularly well drawn; while seemingly a little detached from James, it is clear from Grady's actions and the superbly written lengthy dialogues between the two that Grady cares about James.
No one comes out of this shining, the individual characters do have their redeeming features, it would be a mistake to right them off as insincere, and one cannot help be drawn to these people for all their human failings.
Wonder Boys is very funny, enjoyable and at times moving, but above all it is the beauty of Chabon's writing that makes it an absolute must read. If you’ve seen the film you must read the book, there are, not surprisingly, differences.
( )

While I thoroughly enjoyed it, this is my least favorite Chabon book. It meanders quite a bit. In any case, it features one of my favorite settings... Pittsburgh. ( )

To the extent that “Wonder Boys” has a plot, it is that Grady Tripp is in trouble. Not any dire peril, mind you, just the trouble middle-aged people may find themselves in when they’ve been reckless in their personal and professional lives. His wife is leaving him, his mistress (married to a colleague) is pregnant, and his second novel (to follow his critically-acclaimed first novel) is due and has been due for years. He’s also saddled by a student of his going through his own period of intense angst, and is fending off the amorous advances of another student. Considering that he describes himself as fat and unattractive and that he constantly comes across as whiny, it’s amazing that any of these people ever had anything to do with him.

Over the weekend where everything comes to a head, Tripp’s basic reaction to all of this is to smoke as much pot as possible and run around hoping that his problems won’t catch up with him. They eventually do, of course, at which point everything wraps up ridiculously quickly and neatly. It all has to do with the pages of his unfinished novel blowing away and his finally leaving behind the tuba case dumped on him by the transsexual friend-of-a-friend to whom he gave a ride in the early chapters. It’s that kind of literary novel. We’re not here for the plot, we’re here for the literary prose (excellent), the character study (presumably excellent, but gosh I don’t want to know this person) and the obscure symbolism (did I mention the dead dog?)

The literary quality is phenomenal. I think that the biggest continuity problem in the whole book is the fact that it’s written in the first person. If this guy can create beautiful metaphors such as “I tried to wire myself into the armillary sphere of their family life,” why is he essentially a failed novelist? Basically, on the strength of his narration, you have trouble reconciling the fact that he’s so fundamentally a loser. Still, this book is an amazing illustration of literary quality. If it also reminds me that it’s not worth it to read about whiny loser protagonists in books with no plot unless the prose style is terrifically first rate, let that simply be a higher recommendation for the literature fan. ( )

"The Wonder Boys" is supposed to be the Great American Novel; I speak of course of the book within the book that lies at the heart of this work.

I read this having first seen the film - a mistake, on every occasion, because the characters didn't fit the description. I also prefer the way the film ties up loose ends left dragging in the original - I prefer the short black guy reconciling his differences with the narrator, and I prefer that the whole Jewish dinner is discarded. One dead animal is enough - too is just carelessness. ( )

Michael Chabon is a Writer; what's more, he's a Writer that reminds me why I'm a reader. I don't love his books for their stories (although they range from better-than-average to excellent) or for his characters (although he's quite skilled at creating those as well). I love his books because they contain these amazing nuggets of Writing, not hidden but just waiting to catch you out and take your breath away when you realize how perfectly he's captured a moment, or a scene, or a sensation, or an emotion in this wonderful twist of language that you only wish you could have created. So... Wonder Boys took a while to draw me into its plot (which miraculously is honest and credible for all of its absurdity), its characters were full-bodied if not particularly sympathetic, and I can't put my finger on exactly what caused me to like it so much other than the sheer enjoyment of reading his writing. ( )