Wonder Boys: A Novel
by Michael Chabon
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael ChabonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-12-15
ISBN: 0312140940
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Wonder Boys: A Novel
Book Review: "Why did you keep writing this book if you didn't even know what it was about?"
Summary: 4 Stars
In this farcical send-up of academia and the writing life, author Michael Chabon focuses on forty-ish author Grady Tripp, an aptly named writer/professor who is so often stoned that after seven years he has written two thousand pages of a book that is not even close to being finished. Grady's book, Wonder Boys, is much like his life--lacking in focus, fixated on the moment, and completely empty of goals or a sense of direction. His third wife has walked out on him; he's been having an affair with the Chancellor of the college where he teaches, and she is now pregnant; his editor is pressing him for a final draft of his unfinished book; and his publisher and everyone at the college are wondering if he will ever duplicate the success of his first novel.
As the novel opens, Grady "saves" one of his students, James Leer, from a possible suicide attempt, but his "mentoring" of James leads to hilariously absurd disasters for both of them. Grady's editor, the tuba-playing transvestite "girlfriend" who accompanies him, a collector of memorabilia from the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, and the violent owner of a car that Grady was given to settle a debt, further flesh out the wacky characters and keep the reader amused and laughing almost non-stop.
As the weekend progresses and Grady's personal life further unravels, he finds himself driving around with the transvestite's tuba, the Chancellor's fatally shot malamute, and an equally dead ten-foot boa constrictor in the car's trunk. Scenes in which he tries to prevent the trunk from being opened are worthy of the Marx Brothers.
The dialogue is snappy, the narrative speeds along, the word play and humor never flag, and the satire of academic life and the world of writers shows the stamp of familiarity and the author's own offbeat sense of perspective. A grand farce which carries the bite of satire, Wonder Boys avoids the arch self-consciousness of so many novels of academia and comes across instead as pure, unadulterated fun. n Mary Whipple
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