Wonder Boys
Michael Chabon
N.B. — Several years after the publication of this novel, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a brilliant novel which makes a quantum leap forward from his fine early work and course-corrects the problems noted in the review below.
There's a scene toward the end of Wonder Boys, in which Michael Chabon's fat, fortysomething novelist protagonist, Grady Tripp, takes a fall.
Having already destroyed his third marriage, run sexually amok with both students and co-faculty at the college where he teaches, and having served as an integral element in the unlovely deaths of both a dog and a boa constrictor, Tripp ends up tethered to a sack of intravenous glucose and diagnosed by a Doctor Greenhut as seriously addled, both by drugs and rampant anxiety.
Which is to say nothing of the illness with which his author has afflicted not just Grady, but this entire book: logorrhea. In his second novel, Michael Chabon has a mind-wrenching case of the verbal runs.
Thoughts fall less than trippingly from Tripp's noggin: "I watched a lipsticked cocktail napkin chase itself around an oblong patch of mud beside the door...I reckoned the shade of lipstick on the napkin as Rose Sauvage."
Or how about "Sara, alone in a frail canoe, was drifting nearer and nearer to the roaring misty cataract of motherhood..."
Describing smells—which he does too much—Chabon uses the word "tang" so frequently that a reader might mistake him for an endorsement-rich astronaut.
Wonder Boys, while plumped with existential asides and flashbacks, is set during a single, weekend-long writer's conference at a small Western Pennsylvania college. That the book is set at an event called WordFest and is populated by aspiring scribes and their blocked-up mentors is no mistake. Wonder Boys is a WordFest, Chabon's great spumes, geysers and cataracts of language coating all the characters and all the action with an aqueous sheen.
The work glistens. But it doesn't listen. Save for its last twenty pages, in which Chabon manages to tenderly sum up enough melancholy, heartache and desire to fill a whole novel by a lesser writer, Wonder Boys offers the same flip, sassy tone throughout. Whether describing marital infidelities, a madcap Passover seder attended mainly by Korean-born Jews or old friends reunited in soul-searching, Chabon always seems to be playing with the English language like the string on a trick yoyo. He focuses less on matching appropriate words to his action than on following each verbal flourish with an equal or superior one.
Granted, there may be some ironic intent in Chabon's crafting a novel about out-of-touch writers in language that is so high-flown as to be out of touch with what it describes, but however impressive his loop-the-loops, they don't qualify Wonder Boys as art.
From a verbivore's perspective this book is a heck of a rollercoaster ride, but it doesn't approach a fine evening of theater. Chabon generally shows the sharp brass of a once-acclaimed but largely forgotten wit like S.J. Perelman without the subtlety and three-dimensionality of a contemporary comic master like Tom Stoppard.
The one writer Chabon most consciously evokes is Vladimir Nabokov, who is both mentioned by name and paid tribute to through a character called Q, who lectures the WordFest congregants on the subject of the doppelgänger in literature. Q is clearly drawn from Clare Quilty, an essential shady presence throughout Lolita.
Aspiring to the heights of Nabokov&mdas;who was 56 when he wrote Lolita—while still at such an early point in his career, Chabon, 31, not only overreaches with his penchant for wordplay but also seems to abandon elements of his writing which are distinctly his own.
In his bestselling debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon used swells of billowy language to describe the grandiose dreams, hopes and dilemmas of characters in their late teens and early '20s. His puffed-up, twisted, balloon-animal sentences hit the mark perfectly when describing the self-involved hugeness of post-adolescent angst and sexual discovery.
There was a similar appropriateness, although nicely pared down to match the form, in Chabon's second book, the short-story collection, A Model World, especially in delineating the emotions of a 13-year-old boy in the book's sequence of stories about the Shapiro family.
In Wonder Boys, though, Chabon is trying to get his lexicographer's grip around middle-aged academia and, for the most part, it slips away from him. The same air of comic romp that can fill a novel about 21-year-olds is not appropriate when dealing with folks in their forties. Until awfully late in the game, Chabon fails to convey the weighty sense that his story's actions are no lark for the characters involved: marriages, careers and mental health are on the line.
When he finally does stop flipping characters and subplots around like balls in a pachinko game and lets the weight of his situations come to bear on his writing style, Chabon delivers a wonderful, elegaic finale. Tripp folds his failed manuscript into a paper boat and sets it asail amid a torrential storm that has held itself at bay until the very end of the WordFest activities. Two marriages are definitively ended and a new union agreed upon. The phrases grow shorter and more pointed. The sentence structure becomes less flexible than Jim Carrey's face. One stops laughing at wacky cartoons and comes to care about real people.
In Wonder Boys, this transition arrives too late. Yet the book is an overdue reminder of Michael Chabon's power and potential. He is still a newcomer to the WordFest, his career in its earliest stages.
