Wonder Boys

This was almost a hard book to read. I kept looking at the cover where it says,” Winner of the Pultizer Prize” wondering if the wrong cover was on the book.All of a sudden, it clicked. This IS a great and wonderful book of a Lost Weekend that ended much differently than the movie.I was sorry when it ended. I want more, actually.By digest a bit, I mean cherish the best of it.I never dreamed I would read a Pultizer Prize winner, let alone enjoy it. The wildness takes you by your throat into the wild world of Grady Tripp, and you know youʼll read it again, savoring parts maybe skimmed the first time. Life has changed. Wonder is everywhere, if you look.I end this by saying Grossman ended up doing a Good Thing.

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 bothered 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.

I loved the movie this book was based on, but the book did not enchant me. I think the movie did a better job with the lead character, supporting characters, main themes, and ending. I can see why the book inspired the movie, but it would have been better if it was in reverse. I found a lot of the book to be cliched and self-indulgent.Here is what I liked about the novel: the great dialogue and imagery of Pittsburg, the tie-in between Tripp and the first writer he ever met, Crabtree and the way homosexuality was handled. The wonderful way Tripp, Crabtree, and Leer made up stories about strangers! I seriously thought only my friends, family, and me did that. I, like Tripp, will tell a total stranger a boldfaced lie just to see the reaction on his/her face and if I can pull it off. It must be a mark of fiction writers.Here is what did not work for me: the lead protagonist, Grady Tripp (a grating trip-funny uh?)is not likeable, but that would not have been a problem if the author had explained why Tripp was such an unlikeable fellow. Why was Trip so immature? I actually did not care enough about him to want to know why he was an immature middle-aged jerk. That is a big problem for Chabon, because it is told in first person point of view, so all the reader has is Tripp's view of the story. The novel would have worked better with a third person point of view. If the novel wanted to get really interesting, telling it from Crabtree, Leer, or Hannahs' narration would have given more nuance and texture. Tripp's first person narration was just too self-indulgent and uninspired.There were some questionable plot points too. Oh God, did Tripp have to be a pothead that went to Berkeley? That is so beyond cliched. There are so many other colleges he could have attended, but of course that would have been too original. The whole episode of Tripp's Jewish/Korean wife and in-laws was not needed. Get it? Korean kids raised as Jews-funny huh? I felt that whole section and the pet snake were just filler pages that gave nothing. Also, how did Tripp and Sara, his married mistress, know Tripp was the father of her kid? Was she not sleeping with her husband, Walter,as well as Tripp? Tripp never asks her if the kid is his, but I sure would have. They had been carrying on an affair for five years and Tripp makes it known he still desires his estranged wife Emily, so obviously these two were still sleeping with their respective spouses. That was so illogical to me that I had to reread it to see if I missed something. Of course Walter is Tripp's boss, because that is just the way these books write themselves.I wanted to give this book four stars, because I do like the way Chabon writes, yet had to settle on three. This book had a lot of potential, but the stoned Berkeley educated writer who never grows up is not new. To work with cliches of this magnitude, the writer has to approach the story with some originality and Chabon fails this and just trots out the tripe. As was stated in a previous review, it does read like a novel from a writers' workshop. A novel that needed a kind, but honest critique.

The dialogue is witty and entertaining.

With this 1995 novel (his second) Michael Chabon demonstrates in spades his talent for creating a wryly comic, touchingly intimate world for his first-person narrator, the confused, frustrated and weed-addicted academic and author, (the ironically-named) Grady Tripp. Chabon takes us on a highly entertaining and eccentric journey in which his protagonist experiences writer’s block with his own epic Wonder Boys novel, whose title is used as a metaphor for the frustrated imaginings of Trip’s own aspiring literary students, in particular the troubled teenager, James Leer. Well-drawn, intriguing characters abound here, including Tripp’s gay publishing friend, Terry Crabtree, and the two loves of Grady’s life, estranged wife Emily and his lover and married college chancellor, Sara Gaskell. With Wonder Boys Chabon is operating on a smaller, more intimate, scale than (arguably) his piece-de-resistance The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay or the recent, more oblique, but highly inventive, Moonglow. Indeed, I would liken Chabon’s style and character portrayal here to the likes of Richard Russo and Richard Ford who, as two of the finest recent American writers evoking small-town life in modern-day USA, can be no bad thing.

Wonder Boys is for me easily Chabon's finest novel. In his second novel he has managed to creates an engaging and entertaining world following the trials and tribulations of a washed up author over the course of one crazy weekend featuring a crazy assortments of people and events. Despite some of the somewhat surreal and crazy elements of the plot he manages to create a believable story and characters I actually cared about.For me Wonder Boys is Chabon's one real success and one of my favourite novels of all time. I loved this novel so much that I've tried to read all of his other novels but none reach anywhere the perfection that is Wonder Boys. Since Wonder Boys Chabon has unfortunately fallen into the trap that so many American writer's seem to fall - trying to write the next "great american novel". This seems to involve writing self important novels with depressing arcs that try to win prizes. Wonder Boys is light years ahead of his critically acclaimed Kavalier and Clay (which is frankly over long, depressing and has a very silly plot).

Wonder Boys is one of Chabon's most likeable stories. Every character is fatally flawed in just the right way to make all adventures and mishaps interesting without being cringeworthy. If you have heard about this author and want to start reading some of his work, I would recommend Wonder Boys or perhaps Mysteries of Pittsburgh.However, this paperback edition is so completely horribly stylized that if you love books not only for their content, but also as a product, please find a different one. The spine is week and the cover illustrations are horrible. Most of the text on the book is just blurbs that tell you nothing. The illustration of the dog is wrong (it has the bullet hole in the wrong place) and the typeface is horrible.I know, this may be a strange warning for an Amazon review. But the book is so well known that if you visit this page, you probably already know if you want to buy this or give it to someone. In both cases, find a better edition and enjoy a great novel without becoming annoyed.

The novel was recommended to me by a colleague who enthused. I had thought that this might be because of their aspiration to teach in a university - looking for the role model. So, the narrator is not the role model that I'd recommend. I still find tales of reckless over consumption of alcohol and drugs, and surviving, improbable, despite Keith Richards. And in the first two chapters, I did not like this man at all. I thought that I could see what was coming. I did not anticipate a hugely entertaining read, and to become involved in this (slightly) literary freak show and its protagonists. I particularly enjoyed the sensation of knowing that the author had anticipated my view, interest, scepticism, recognitions of terchnique and genre characteristics. Must tell my colleague, and read more Chabon.

I give this book four stars because it wasn't on par with Kavalier and Clay in terms of plot. Still his artistry with metaphor and language is most definitely present. If you enjoy reading a sentence over and over simply for the beauty of it's construction, Chabon is the way to go.