A University Professor’s Crippling Writer’s Block and Drug-Fuelled Self-Destruction
Grady Tripp is a pot-smoking middle aged novelist who has stalled on a 2611-page opus titled Wonder Boys. His student James Leer is a troubled young writer obsessed by Hollywood suicides and at work on his own first novel. Grady’s bizarre editor Terry Crabtree and another student, Hannah Green, come together in his wildly comic, moving, and finally profound search for an ending to his book and a purpose to his life.
This is the second of Michael Chabon’s novels that I’ve read – and in a very short time, too. I still have no idea how to review The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which may rank as one of my all-time favourite novels. (Needless to say, it’s not difficult for me to see why it won the Pulitzer Prize.) Wonder Boys, the novel Chabon wrote before Kavalier & Clay, is a rather different novel. It’s nowhere near as long, for one thing – and yet, strangely, it feels far more rambling and unfocused. I enjoyed it a great deal, and zipped through it in just a couple of days. Chabon has a wonderful way with words that can make even the mundane a pleasure to read about.
