Chabon's Wonder Boys Romps Through the Absurd

Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

Villard Books, 368 pp., $23.00

Every neurosis known to man and Freud is shared by the two dysfunctional writers who hurtle through the obstaclecourse plot of Wonder Boys. Grady Tripp, who narrates the novel, has produced no new books in the seven years that he has taught creative writing at a small Pittsburgh college. Instead, he spends his time smoking huge amounts of marijuana and churning out thousands of pages of his own novel, also called Wonder Boys, which he knows he will never finish. James Leer, one of Grady's students, is twenty years younger but no less screwed up. An awkward loner and closeted homosexual, James has an obsession with Hollywood suicides that nearly leads him to blow his brains out.

Out of this delicious collection of personality flaws, twentysomething sophomore author Michael Chabon contructs a wildly comic, manically paced novel, combining slapstick comedy and a clever satire of academia with an ongoing meditation on the peculiar life of the writer. Chabon's light touch allows him to present the most absurd situations, and the most open sentimentality, without a trace of awkwardness.

The action takes place on the weekend of the local college literary conference, "WordFest." The trouble begins at a party at the home of the English department chairman, Walter Gaskell, whose wife Sara is Grady's mistress.

At the party, he meets up with a despondent James, who kills the Gaskells' dog with the pistol he brought to use on himself. He also manages to make off with Walter's prized possession, the jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe at her wedding to Joe DiMaggio. Throw in the fact that Grady's wife left him that morning, and that Sara has just revealed that she is pregnant with his child, and you have a pair with some serious problems.

As the plot progresses, Grady fails to solve any of his problems, but his goodnatured confusion is winning, and we can't help but develop a real affection for him. The devastating effects of his irresponsibility on his wife, his mistress and his agent are clear enough, but it is also clear that Grady has nothing but good intentions. His general predicament is mirrored in the fate of his bloated masterpiece; despite all his ideas and plans, he just can't bring anything to a successful conclusion.

There is only one person who Grady does not fail, and that is James Leer, who as a fledgling writer excites his protective instincts. Grady and James share what Grady calls the "midnight disease" of the writer, a sense of their own strangeness that isolates them from the world. This dark side of writing is introduced in the person of Albert Vetch, a hack horror writer whose suicide Grady witnessed as a child. Vetch floats over the book as a symbol of the true artist, the estate to which Grade aspires: "He was the first real writer I knew, because he was the first to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye, lucid with insomnia even in the daytime."

While the midnight disease is one of the novel's main preoccupations--it begins with the memory of Vetch, as if everything that follows is an elegy on the dark fate of the write--it is probably the least successful element of what is essentially a comic story. Chabon's strength is his witty, graceful, delicately absurd style, and his attempt to turn his comic creations into bearers of a secret curse does not come off. Grady remains a Rabelaisian "minotaur," too devoted to sex, marijuana and adventure ever to seem suicidal; even James is more quirky than disturbed.

But when Chabon drops the midnight disease and simply shows us Grady as a lonely and loveable guy, he produces some wonderful scenes, both hilarious and genuinely touching. In the novel's finest section, Grady visits his in-laws' Passover Seder in a fruitless attempt to win back his wife, Emily. Emily is one of three Korean orphans adopted by a suburban Jewish couple, Irv and Marie, and this improbable family becomes for Grady the warm, loving home he desperately needs.

The whole scene is overtly sentimental, but Grady's emotion is described unselfconsciously so that we don't resist it: "I was seized with a powerful longing to put my arms around [Irv], to brush his rough cheek against mine, to sit down and eat the bread of affliction with him and with Emily and with all of the Warshaws. They weren't my family and it wasn't my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get."

The loving, knowing observation of Grady and his world is the novel's greatest strength. When he does not attempt to philosophize, Chabon pulls off his comic stunts with grace, and we can't help but applaud. Wonder Boys is a successful and clever second novel, and it leaves us looking forward to Chabon's third.