Summary | Author | Reviews | Generic Discussion Questions
Wonder Boys: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Michael Chabon, 1995
384 pp.
In Brief
Michael Chabon's Grady Tripp is one messed up college writing professor - his marriage is breaking up, his girlfriend (wife of the dean) is pregnant, his marijuana habit is taking over and his editor is just about out of a job. Tripp has published a few moderately successful novels but is strangling his creativity with introspection and marijuana - never finishing a 2,000-plus-page novel called Wonder Boys.
When his editor and best friend, Terry Crabtree, comes to town and spreads chaos, Tripp goes along for the ride. Farcical misadventures dominate, from a picked-up transvestite to a wild ride in a stolen car that contains a tuba and the corpses of a dog and a boa constrictor.
Chabon writes with a wry, vulnerable wit that cleaves open the minds of his wonderful characters while his clean prose keeps the madcap story going so well that you'll want it to never end. (From the publisher.)
top of page
About the Author
• Birth—May 24, 1963
• Where—Washington, D.C.
• Education—B.A., University of Pittsburgh; M.F.A., University
of California at Irvine
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 2001 (for Kavalier and Clay)
• Currently—Berkeley, California
Michael Chabon's latest book is Yiddish Policemen's Union. He is also the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which Entertainment Weekly included on its list of the best books of 2000. This book, Wonder Boys, won universal critical acclaim and was made into a feature film in 2000 starring Michael Douglas. He received his B.A. from The University of Pittsburgh and his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. He lives with his wife and two children in California.
More
In 1987, at 24, Michael Chabon was living a graduate student's dream. His masters thesis for the writing program at UC Irvine, a novel called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was not only published -- it was published to the tune of a $155,000 advance, a six-figure first printing, a movie deal, and a place on the bestseller lists. Mysteries, a coming-of-age story about a man caught between romances with a man on one side, a woman on the other, and the shadow of his gangster father over it all, drew readers with its elegant prose and an irresistibly cool character, Art Bechstein, racing through a long, hot summer.
Following this auspicious debut, Chabon penned a follow-up short story collection, then hit a serious snag. After five years of fits and starts, he abandoned a troublesome work in progress and began work on another novel, a wry, smart book about, natch, an author hoplessly stuck writing his endless, shapeless novel! With 1995's Wonder Boys and its successful film adaptation by Curtis Hanson, Chabon found both critical praise and a wider audience.
In the year 2000, Chabon rose to the challenge of attempting something on a more epic scale. That something was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the story of two young, Jewish comic book artists in the 1940s. Like Chabon's other books, it explored a relationship between two men and dealt with their maturation. But unlike his other books, the novel was grander in scope and theme, blending the world of comic books, the impact of World War II, and the lives of his characters. It won a Pulitzer, and secured Chabon's place as an American talent unafraid to paint broad landscapes with minute detail and aching emotion.
Chabon's ability to capture modern angst in funny, intelligently plotted stories has earned him comparisons to everyone from Fitzgerald to DeLillo, but he has fearlessly wandered outside the conventions of the novel to write screenplays, children's books, comics, and pulp adventures. Clearly, Michael Chabon views his highly praised talent as a story that hasn't yet reached its climax.
Extras
Chabon usuallywrites from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.
He has a side interest in television writing, having written a pilot for CBS (House of Gold) that did not get picked up, and a second one for TNT.Chabon also has an interest in screenwriting; he was attached to X-Men but dropped from the project when director Bryan Singer signed on. Now he is adapting The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for the big screen.
After slaving for five years on a book called Fountain City (parts of which can be read on his web site), Chabon finally decided it was not going to jell and abandoned it. At a low point, he switched gears and began Wonder Boys, the story (of course) of an author hopelessly stuck writing his endless, shapeless novel.
A Feature Interview
(With Book Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2002)
Michael Chabon is watching as his youngest daughter, Ida-Rose, scrambles across the floor of his home in Berkeley, California. At the same time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys is on the phone, discussing the ways he simplified the language for his latest novel, a children's book called Summerland. "I try to opt for the more familiar word, instead of the more complicated, less familiar word," he is explaining, when he suddenly shifts gears from author to father. "Oh, my God," he exclaims. "My daughter just tried to crawl here!"
If it's clear that Chabon is as much a dedicated dad as he is a gifted writer, it's also apparent that he's trying to bridge the gap between those two parts of his life. Summerland, a departure for him in that it was written for a younger audience, is in fact a direct result of the time Chabon has spent as a father who loves reading children's books. One of the great things about having kids, he points out, is being able to read them the stories you once loved yourself. Summerland, an American baseball fantasy, is the kind of book that appeals to kids and parents alike, and Chabon, 38, is one of a burgeoning number of respected, big-name adult authors who have addressed younger audiences in recent novels. Last spring, Joyce Carol Oates published a story for teens that evokes the Columbine tragedy. And Isabel Allende, Carl Hiaasen, Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker will all have debuted young adult books by October. Each tends to carry over the qualities that work in his or her adult fiction: Allende's City of the Beasts is infused with magical realism; Hiaasen has written Hoot, a quirky tale about an eccentric kid in Florida; Gaiman has taken a stab at a horror story; and Barker has concocted a weird fantasy. Francine Prose expects to publish a melancholy science fiction tale for kids next spring, and Toni Morrison is working with her son on an updated fable.
"I promised my grandchildren that I would write a story with all the elements they love: adventure, humor, strong characters, nature, animals, friendship and courage," says Allende, whose previous novels, such as The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna, have evoked mystical themes. City of the Beasts, which is due out in October, is about two children who discover a legendary beast of the Amazon -- a fairy tale that should please the Allende grandkids.
Hiaasen says he just wanted to write a book his 11-year-old stepson could read -- one that wasn't full of the "language, casual dismemberment and gymnastic sex" that tend to mark his darkly hilarious adult depictions of the Sunshine State. However, the idea to write a page-turner for kids actually germinated when Hiaasen was still a young reader himself: "I never forgot the feeling of burning [through] the entire Hardy Boys series when I was in fourth grade -- not being able to stop turning the pages and thinking what a great gig this would be, to be able to write like this."
Writing these books sounds like it was, above all, a lot of fun for the authors. "I found it incredibly liberating because it was like pure narrative, just pure storytelling," says Prose, whose Blue Angel was a National Book Award finalist in 2000. "It's so much fun without the worries." Chabon agrees, saying he struggled through writing parts of Kavalier & Clay but had a blast during his Summer vacation. "It was intensely pleasurable to write this," he says. "I would just long for Summerland. I'd be pining for it."
For the most part, the books have resulted in great fun for readers as well -- Hoot and Summerland are particularly creative stories. And for Chabon, the most important critic is pleased. He says he had a lot of trepidation about presenting the book to Sophie, his seven-year-old daughter. "I was really dreading what would happen if she didn't like it," he says. "There was one sentence I read to her, and [a second later] Sophie said, 'Niiice.' That was the most gratifying piece of criticism I've ever gotten."
top of page
Critics Say. . .
The young star of American letters…a writer not only of rare skill and wit but a self—evident and immensely appealing generosity.
Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post Book Review
[A] wise, wildly funny story…Chabon is a flat—out wonderful writer—evocative and inventive, pointed and poignant.
Shelby Hearon - Chicago Tribune
A beguiling and wickedly smart novel….There is first-rate satirical farce in Chabon's novel but essentially it is something rarer: satirical comedy.
Richard Eder - Lost Angeles Times Book Reveiw
Mixing comic-even slapstick-events with the serious theme of bright promise gone awry, Chabon has produced an impeccably constructed novel that sparkles with inventiveness and wit neatly permeated with rue. The once-promising eponymous ``wonder boys'' are Grady Tripp and Terry Crabtree, friends since college, where they both determined to make their mark in literature. Now they are self-destructive adults whose rare meetings occasion an eruption of zany events. Narrator Grady, a professor/novelist whose unfinished work-in-progress, Wonder Boys, stands at 2000-plus endlessly revised pages, has destroyed three marriages through compulsive philandering and a marijuana habit. Terry is a devil-may-care, sexually predatory editor who has patiently endured Grady's writing block but who tells Grady, when he arrives at the annual literary conference at Grady's small Pittsburgh college, that he expects to be fired momentarily from his job. Grady and Terry, later joined by the campus's newest potential ``wonder boy,'' a talented but mendacious student named James Leer, set in motion a series of darkly funny misadventures. Farcical scenes arise credibly out of multiplying contretemps, culminating in a stoned Grady's wild ride in a stolen car in whose trunk rest a tuba and the corpses of a blind dog and a boa constrictor. All of this affords Chabon a solid platform for some freewheeling satire about the yearnings, delusions and foibles of writers and other folk. Throughout, his elegant prose, breathtaking imagery and wickedly on-target dialogue precisely illuminate his characters' gentle absurdities. The pace of this vastly entertaining novel never abates for a second, as we watch Grady slide inexorably into emotional and professional chaos. Above all, though, this is a feast for lovers of writing and books, with the author's fierce understanding of what Grady calls ``the midnight disease,'' the irresistible, destructive urge of a writer to experience his characters' fates.
Publishers Weekly
Chabon himself is something of a wonder boy; his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, presided on the New York Times Best Sellers list for 12 weeks. Here, his eponymous heroes are Grady, an aging author attempting to write his chef-d'oeuvre, and his randy editor, Tripp.
Library Journal
This is a genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud novel, a sort of "Fear and Loathing in Academia" if you will, but infused with tenderness and a bracing skepticism about our worship of literature. Chabon is known for his glisteningly precise and graceful prose, but he is also blessed with a wickedly imaginative and energetic sense of humor. His second novel takes place during the course of one extraordinarily hectic weekend during which his crazy hero, Professor Grady Tripp, manages to ruin two marriages, cause the death of a boa constrictor and a dog, save a student's life, attend a disastrous seder and a chaotic writers' conference, and lose the only copy of his manuscript. Now don't groan when I tell you that "Wonder Boys" is also the title of the novel Tripp has wasted seven years of his disorderly life on, because this is not your typical, bloodless novel-within-a-novel. It is, instead, a simultaneously hilarious and insightful tale about the Faustian bargains writers make, the fissures the act of writing rends in the wall between fact and fantasy, and, for good measure, the basic absurdity of human endeavors. It's also an uproarious portrait of the artist as self-indulgent fool. Tripp's "wonder boys" are, like Chabon, young writers who achieve instant success. The trick, then, is to maintain it. Whereas his endearingly addled and irresistible hero fails, Chabon, for all his musing on the dark side of the writer's life, is succeeding brilliantly.
Kirkus Review
top of page
Book Club Discussion Questions
Boy, it makes you wonder—there are no questions available for this book.
But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• Generic Book Discussion Questions
• How to Read & Think About a Book
|
|
|
