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Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys
Ebook410 pages7 hours

Wonder Boys

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this ebook

The “wise, wildly funny story” of a self-destructive writer’s lost weekend by a Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author (Chicago Tribune).
A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp must finally confront the wreckage made of his past decisions.   Mordant but humane, Wonder Boys features characters as loveably flawed as any in American fiction.   This ebook features a biography of the author.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 20, 2011
ISBN9781453234105
Author

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels – including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union – two collections of short stories, and one other work of non-fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.

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Reviews for Wonder Boys

Rating: 3.938517996742671 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Again, this is Chabon, one of the greatest writers of fiction there ever was..He writes effortlessly but what insight and how he makes us engage..excellent!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My first of Chabon's books, I found it mostly fun and only a little tedious. He offers some good similes that describe a subtle moment or thought and the characters are outlandish but still believable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Marvellously witty with wonderfully charming characters.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    There was so much of this book that I forgot over the years and now remember why I loved it so much. I like the fact that, given my current situations, I related a lot to Grady Tripp than I had in my previous run through.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is one of those rare books in which subtle humor works better than comic hijinks. Chabon obviously has a talent for creating deep, meaningful characters and it shows here. While reading this book, you can feel the desperation that Grady Tripp feels or the apathy and confusion of James Leer. The story also moves along at a steady clip. The humor in this book is not so much in the actions of te characters, but the situations they find themselves in. Overall, a great effort by Chabon.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    the story of a weekend lit fest and all the shit that can be crammed into it. There's a dead dog, a transvestite, angry writers, and more.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure."The book's hero, Grady Tripp, is a forty-ish novelist and married writing teacher at a Pittsburgh college. Grady had some moderate success as a writer in the past but has spent the last seven years struggling to finish a 2000+ page magnum-opus called "Wonder Boys" because he basically has no idea how to end it. Grady lacks discipline, is always looking for an easy fix and as such his life is spiralling out of control caught up in a triumvirate of drugs, booze and love affairs. He is regularly either drunk or stoned, he is cheating on his third wife, Emily, with the college chancellor, Sara Gaskell, whose husband, Walter, is the chairman of the English department.Most of the story takes place over the course of one long chaotic weekend when Grady's long-time editor, Terry Crabtree, arrives in town to attend a literary festival called Wordfest. Grady takes Crabtree carousing in the hope of conning him into believing that his novel, for which he has been paid a hefty advance. is almost finished. Over the course of the weekend Grady finds out that Sara is pregnant, and after a series of bizarre scrapes involving amongst other things, a transvestite, an Alaskan malamute, a boa constrictor and a tuba virtually loses everything including his life.On the face of it Grady Tripp doesn't seem like a particularly appealing hero but I ended up almost feeling sorry for him. He can't bear growing older, in losing the sense that he is the next 'wunderkind' to hit the literary world, he hates being seen as a 'senior' role model, he wants to cling on to his youthful extravagances for as long as he can. In that I can see myself and many other middle-aged men. Grady's lovers even appear to encourage his wild extravagances rather than try to curtail them. Perhaps because it was that wild abandon that attracted him to them or perhaps he has become a sort of surrogate for their own middle-ages. "It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.""Wonder Boys" is filled with memorable lines and images. Grady is an interesting literary character, thoughtless rather than outwardly cruel, equally I can recognise many of his hopes and fears, his flaws and foibles. Now whilst I didn't actually laugh out loud it did at least make me smile on more than one occasion. However, that all said and done I found this book little more than a series of 'shaggy dog stories' and therefore an OK piece of escapism rather than a great one. Chabon is certainly an author whose works that I will keep an eye out for in the future."I'm a man who falls in love so easily . . . that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. I've run through three marriages now, and each time the dissolution was my own fault, clearly and incontrovertibly."

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Chabon writes like a handful of drugs. And gives the reader a hangover.

    But every writer one day must record the night terrors: writing courses, workshops, editors, seminars, and the novel that won't finish. Along with the effluvia of life: ex-wives, dead dogs, Passover, pregnancy, transvestites, and young writer-groupies.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm pretty sure I'm not the only reader who got to about page thirty in this one and exclaimed "Oh, no! Somebody wrote what they knew!" But maybe we shouldn't be too annoyed at another book about a creative writing professor at some American university. Even chefs have to talk about what they're doing for lunch, and even architects have to sleep somewhere. I might as well get on with it and say that I think that while there a lot of reasons to dislike it -- not the least of which is following the most frequently abused piece of advice given to new writers -- "Wonder Boys" is actually a pretty good read.There are other issues here, too. The book's got lots of drug use, some fairly inappropriate interactions between literary professionals and students, and a sometimes unbearable main character aging ungracefully out of his manly-man "drink, publish and party" phase. Readers who find any of those things obnoxious are encouraged to give up on this one at any time. The book's fairly masculine vibe isn't helped by the fact that said writer is about to be left by his third wife, which doesn't, of course, stop him from sleeping with somebody else. But somewhere in here there's also a very perceptive meditation on the connection between the stories authors write for a living and the lies they sometimes tell others and the compulsion to write in itself, something the author refers to here as "the midnight disease." "Wonder Boys" is also made more bearable by the fact that it's not an example of privileged Ivy League navel-gazing: It takes place at what sounds like a third-tier institution and, if anything, works surprisingly well as a love letter to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a town that's gotten its share of bad press. The affection and concern that our putative hero, Grady Tripp, shows for James Leer, a talented if troubled student of his, seems genuine, and his life seems to have had a life that has taken some genuinely strange turns. We see him attend a Seder with his soon-to-be former family, which is composed of equal parts American Jews and Korean adoptees. To Chabon's credit, this could have been played for fish-out-of-water laughs or for its sheer weirdness value, but Chanon chooses not to do that. These unlikely Asian Jews seem both believable and sympathetic, and are shown to be leading lives that are as chaotic and difficult as Grady's. This extended sequence was perhaps my favorite one in the book: over a Passover in rural Pennsylvania, we watch a family simultaneously hold it together and fall apart. As might be expected of a book that's all about writers, "Wonder Boys" feels a bit overwrittten at times. There were certainly simpler ways to get this story told. But Grady's take on the writing life is both funny -- he describes one of his students writing "teenage drug jazz." And "Wonder Boys" also has a lot to say about relationships between writers: I enjoyed its surprisingly melancholic take on Grady and Terry's relationship, a portrait of a long-term male friendship in continuous, and perhaps permanent decline. I don't know if I would have picked Michael Douglas to play Grady -- he lacks what I imagined to be Grady's imposing physical stature -- but you'd swear that the pale and slightly mumbly Tobey Maguire was born to play James Leer. As for Robert Downey Jr., we might or might not be able to call his performance as the desperate, substance abusing Terry Crabtree acting. I could have done without at least half of the dead animals we see in "Wonder Boys," but perhaps you've got to let authors write their own books, even if, like Grady, they're stoned more than half the time and can't seem to keep it in their pants. This one can be entertaining in places and trying in others. For better or for worse, it's such a uniquely American story that Brit-centric readers should be forewarned. But it's still mostly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I first read Chabon when his The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was nominated for a sf award, but I think I might have seen the film adaptation of Wonder Boys before that. What am I saying? I have spreadsheets containing this information. I can check… So: I watched Wonder Boys on 4 June 2001 and read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union on 15 March 2008. I did indeed watch the film before reading any of Chabon’s novels. Anyway, having now read Wonder Boys, I want to rewatch the film. Argh. The one thing that struck while reading the book was that most of the film’s cast had been badly-chosen. The narrator is a failed writer of GRRM-proportions who teaches creative writing at a Pittsburgh university. He was played by Michael Douglas. His gay agent was played by Robert Downey Jr. And troubled student James Leer was played by Tobey Maguire. None of them really fit the characters has portrayed in the novel. Which is basically about a weekend at the university during a writing festival, in which the narrator’s wife leaves him, his lover, the chancellor, tells him she’s pregnant, Leer steals the chancellor’s husband’s prize possession, a jacket worn by Marilyn Monroe and shoots their dog, and… well, shit happens, in that sort of slowly inevitable One Foot in the Grave way that ends up in farce. And overshadowing it all is the narrator’s current WIP, which shares the novel’s title, and which he has been working on for seven years, has grown to gargantuan proportions and he will likely never ever finish. Literary professors/authors whose lives are slowly, and comically, unravelling is pretty much a genre on its own, and is seen by many as emblematic of literary fiction as a whole. I disagree, of course. The only people who think lit fic is all middle-class professors lusting after nubile students, disappearing into a bottle, failing to finish their magnum opus, etc, are the people who generally only read genre and almost certainly have not read widely in literary fiction/literature. I’m still not sure what to make of Chabon’s work – this novel is a bit of a bloated cliché and he has a tendency to drop the odd bit of over-writing into his prose, but there’s a curious personality that shines through, one that’s keen to experiment with the stories he tells, and there’s something very likeble about that.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of those books in which I experienced the movie first. In fact, I don't think I was even aware of the book before seeing "based on" in the film's credits. Picked up the book at a used/wholesale book store some time afterwards, and have been sitting on it since. As I am currently trying my best to focus on my many owned but unread books, figured it was past time to give this one a go.And I enjoyed it as much as I did the movie. There is something, to me, about reading about other writers and their struggles, be they real or fictional. When dealing with my own perceived inadequacies, it's nice to know that other writers go through that as well. There are times I feel like I should just let go of some of my older projects instead of continuously holding on to them in the hope that they finally lead somewhere.There is just so much going on in this story. There's Tripp and his seven year attempt at a novel that still has no end in sight, his oldest friend Crabtree who enjoys a good time even with the looming specter of possible unemployment, Tripp's estranged wife who has left right as the novel opens, his female student slash tenant with a massive crush on him, his Holden Caulfield wannabe student with problems, his mistress who also happens to be the Chancellor of his school, her husband who also happens to be Dean of his department, and their blind dog with homicidal tendencies towards Tripp. Put 'em all in the same pot and watch them stew, bring to a boil.I did try to remember the movie as I read, and certain parts did come back, but it's been so long since I've seen it that it's hard to remember everything, along with what may or may not have changed. About halfway through this read, I went and picked up a copy of the movie on DVD, as the desire to rewatch it grew stronger as I read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I still remember sitting down with this book for the first time, excited and thrilled, knowing only that I was readying another book from the author of Cavalier and Clay. Swaying back and forth over the first hundred pages, one second entranced and the next revolted, hating the main character and yet captivated by this train wreck of a man, until eventually I quit battling against the incessant pull of this book and just dove in. Of course, this novel delves in Chabon's prodigious vocabulary, and occasionally lingers almost too long over simple moments, but these are the traits Chabon's work which either draws you deeper into the story or repels you, but for myself the luxurious language intoxicates rather than disgust.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Well, the third reading of this book left me less impressed than the first two. I don't know if it's changing times, or age, or what, but this time Grady Tripp REALLY annoyed me. It especially annoyed me that he stole somebody's tuba, hauled it around in the rain, and then abandoned it. I just kept thinking of some poor musician, arriving in Pittsburgh for a gig only to find that there's no trace of his tuba because some pothead has stolen it and driven it around for several days before leaving it on the street to get ruined. I'm pretty sure I found that absurdly hilarious the first time I read it, so I might have matured a little since then.

    Anyway, it also bothered me this time that in all the driving around and the huge cast of characters, nothing really happens. Or actually, a lot of things happen, but they have no relationship to anything else that happens. I never got any real sense of any of the other characters--why is James so weird? What happened to Hannah? What would ever interest Sara or Emily about a person like Grady? And why does Grady seem so much older than 41? But at least it doesn't end the way the movie does; the ending of the movie drove me UP THE WALL. All I can imagine is that some test audience wanted a happier ending than the book seems to have.

    I guess the previous two times I read this book and loved it I was in a different state of mind, with different opinions of what makes a good book. I still liked it well enough to read it three times, though. That must mean something, right?

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    So you know that bit of Chekhovian wisdom about the gun? It occurred to me over and over again throughout the reading of this book. Every element Chabon inserted into this story goes off sooner or later in one way or another, including the boa constrictor. I can’t say that the progression of the plot is predictable, but I want to say something almost like that and in the most positive way; a page and a half before every new tragedy in the inexorably unraveling life of Grady Tripp you can begin to see something coming, you can watch how Chabon’s facsimile of fate and chance conspire to bring about one travesty after another. It’s a virtuoso performance of plot-craft. But, as I’ve discovered over and over in Chabon’s writing, the real gem isn’t the plot (though it’s impeccable), it isn’t the prose (though it’s beautiful), it isn’t concept (though it’s interesting), it’s his characters. Now, I’m not normally a reader who loves literature for the characters most of all, and I tend to read with disbelief only partially suspended, but Chabon’s characters become real to me. I audibly gasp, I laugh out loud, my jaw literally drops; I read portions of this book pacing in my kitchen with my wife occasionally asking if everything was okay, and me wanting to answer “how could it be, with all that stuff in Grady’s trunk?!” It doesn’t even matter that Grady kind of sucks, that he’s a terrible person; I still feel for the guy, still root for him. This book is highly recommended to that kind of reader whose reading is a symptom of a half-smothered, stillborn, frustrated ambition to write. I know you’re out there.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's a wonder that Grady Tripp even managed to write fiction at all being that he was so preoccupied with smoking weed and seducing his colleague's wife. I really enjoyed this novel. The relationships between Professor / Writer Grady Tripp and his self-loathing student James Leer and his horny editor Terry Crabtree were wonderfully developed and their adventurous weekend was told with humor and verve. Male friendships are simple yet complex yet simple things and Chabon has a gift of peeling back the layers that bond them. Chabon can really turn a phrase although occasionally he can be long-winded. Every once and a while, I found myself thinking, "Come on, get on with it, man." Then Chabon would knock my socks off with the next paragraph. All in all, a fun read.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Saw the movie, read the book, needed to read a review to remember some of the plot, didn't jog a memory of entertainment or wonder at either movie or book. I guess it was ok.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    17 of 75 for 2015. It took me a while to get through Chabon's book. He comes highly recommended, so I was looking forward to this, but I found myself slogging through lots of marijuana enduced paranoia, sleepless nights, and all the things I don't like about academia. Grady Tripp is a trainwreck waiting to happen, who somehow manages to slide through the worst things life can throw at him--most of which are of his own creation. Not a book I'd care to pick up for a second read, although it is well enough written that I kept after it till I finished the whole thing, which puts it above Kathryn Ann Porter's Ship of Fools which I just couldn't bring myself to read. Curiously, the opinion of two different readers of Tripp's magnum opus, which gives its name to Chabon's novel, is I read enough of it. Well I read the whole thing. And now it's over.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Very middle of the road. Thus a solid three stars. The book was full of cliches about writers - substance abuse, sexual antics with co-workers and co-eds resulting in multiple marriages thus depicting the writer as a "hopeless romantic", a Hunter Thompsonesque weekend with a gay man, a suicidal genius and a tuba (insert any three Fellini type items here). At the heart of the book, a story about writers block and a seven year endeavor about a book going nowhere. Best friend as indulgent editor means the money kept pouring in without any product flowing out. And on, and on and on. The Talking Heads wrote a song about this book before it was written. It was called "The Road to Nowhere."Harsh words? Maybe so. But lately, I have been wondering what the Pulitzer committee is thinking because I have read a few books from prize winning authors and have been gravely disappointed. There were however a few things about the book I enjoyed and those salvaged the book from one star all the way back to three.There is some beautifully written prose. Some sentences, some paragraphs. There were times I read and re-read those parts and just enjoyed basking in how good they were. Chabon uses some beautiful words that aren't used often, if at all, in literature. Although that was done clunkily and unevenly, it was great fun as a vocabulary building exercise. I also felt that at some point, this became a story. When that shift occurred, I was caught up in wanting to finish it even though I didn't particularly like it. I wanted to finish it because I actually wanted to find out what was going to come of the characters. There really wasn't one I cared about deeply or empathized with, it was more the idle curiosity of an onlooker than the active investigation of a participant. I have another book of his sitting in the pile and I intend to read that one too. But I will give myself time between the books to give the next one a fair chance. I will cleanse my palate by reading a bunch of stuff completely unconnected and then return to Mr. Chabon, refreshed and hopefully untainted. I think this may be a book you either love or hate. I personally felt....meh.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I swore, after reading Herzog, that I would never read another novel about middle-aged academics in crisis. However, by the time that I figured out that the middle-aged academic narrator of Wonder Boys was in crisis, I couldn't put the book down because I had to find out what happened to the tuba.I'm really glad I couldn't put this down because this turned out to be a great Passover novel. Will the first-borns be saved? Will Tripp (the middle-aged academic) be able to stop wondering around the wastelands of Pittsburgh? Will he be able to give up the flesh-pots of Egypt for the hope of life in the promised land? Those are the questions that keep the novel moving forward. In addition, there is a scene with a Seder that was one of the funniest things I've read in a long time (and I've been to some amusing Seders in my time,)

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Here's a story that I experienced the movie version first. I loved the movie, each and every time I have watched it. The book is very good and easier to keep up with the story's pot smoking (puff for puff) than it has been for me and the movie.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I am reading this book for my book club.When reading a book for a book club, I always think of the person who suggested it and ask myself,why did they like this book? I wasn't a great fan of this novel, finding both the story and main characters tedious and obnoxious. However, this being said, I do applaud Michael Chabon's ability to create characters so devoid of any redeeming qualities, that the reader is naturally compelled to continue the story to see what is the end result. The story line wavered between the believable and unbelievable. Mr. Chabon's use of pragmatic prose enhanced the story's credibility. But the 'madcap' adventures shared by the protagonist, as well as his writing slump of 7 years (and 2000 pages) pushed the boundaries for me.I didn't like the story and would not recommend it to anyone but that is based on storyline alone. In terms of author's ability as a writer and story-teller, then yes, the novel is worth reading.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Good writing as usual, just not as gripping as his later stuff
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Pitch. Perfect. Novel. Not just a good novel, but the first to crack in to my top 10 in a long time. HIGHLY recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel was simply excellent. I thought long and hard about how else I would describe it, but excellent is what I kept coming back to. Some stories excel with plot, others with the characters, and others with the beautiful writing; this novel has all three in spades.

    First, to the plot. One of the first things writers are told they must do with their stories is keep ratcheting up the tension until the climax. Some writers do this well, while others get distracted by some scene they've conjured up in their head and simply cannot let it go, despite the fact that it meanders and bores the reader. Chabon here takes an incredible situation and just keeps making it more and more tense until its inevitable release. There is honestly not a single scene I would have changed or altered, because all of it works so marvelously to keep the pace of the novel moving. And beyond tension inducing, the plot is absolutely hilarious. Tubas, blind dogs, a manuscript thousands of pages long, a man with an invented and entirely fictional backstory as a jockey...all of this dots Chabon's landscape. I was constantly wondering how in the heck this series of insanely funny events was all going to resolve itself, and when it did, it felt perfect.

    And then there's the characters of Grady Tripp, James Leer and Terry Crabtree. Grady Tripp is perhaps the best self destructive protagonist I have ever encountered. Grady smokes too much pot, makes incredibly questionable decisions on a near constant basis, is practically never sorry for the end results of these decisions and is almost always making excuses for himself. At the same time, Chabon makes you feel sympathetic for Grady, and when things quickly unravel, you somehow feel sorry for him. I recall several times thinking that if I ever knew Grady Tripp in real life, I would judge him harshly for his wasting of every chance and for his impossible pursuit of his id's every desire. But somehow, you just can't help but root for the guy. James Leer is another terrifically conceived character; his obsession with Hollywood, his inability to tell the truth, his talent (or lack thereof?), and his attention seeking behavior while simultaneously trying to avoid the limelight all make for a complex and deep person. Finally, Terry Crabtree, a mischievous man with a love-hate relationship with Grady, rounds out a trio of excellent subjects. The women of the novel are likewise wonderful, but perhaps because they are not nearly as driven to reckless stupidity I didn't find them nearly as entertaining.

    Finally, the writing is some of the best prose I've read in awhile. I may have driven my Goodreads friends a little crazy over the last few weeks with the sheer number of quotes I've noted from the book, but I was struck by how Chabon was always able to find just the right words to describe the situation or convey the sentiment in a way to make my heart soar or plummet.

    In short, for me this was a masterpiece. A hilarious romp through one crazy weekend with unforgettable characters and wonderful prose, I think that I'll stick with my word of praise for the novel: excellent.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Extremely disappointing. I really enjoyed The Yiddish Policemen Union and Kavalier & Clay, and had high expectations for Wonder Boys. Unfortunately, the book didn't deliver. It's supposed to be a satire, but the prose tries too hard. Sentences are belabored, even more convoluted and wordy than Chabon's usual style, which is saying something). And worst of all, the story just isn't interesting. I couldn't get an emotional connection with no character -- they're all so bored and messed up (in boring, mundane ways) that it really didn't click.

    I tried -- honestly. I rarely ditch a book midway through, but I couldn't bring myself to finish this one. Maybe it picks up after the middle, but the first half just wasn't worth it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Not too long ago I read a novel which had characters that were unlovable who staggered through unlikable lives that resolved in some redemption. It was a critical favorite. I rated it as a piece of whale dreck. Wonder Boys has unlovable characters who stagger through unlikable lives that resolve in a slightly higher level of redemption. This is a book I thoroughly enjoyed. What's the difference? Well, I'm not going to spend any more time on what was wrong with that other book. Instead, let's talk about why this book works. Chabon has an incredible storytelling skill. He brings us into the lives of the characters (even unlikable characters such as those introduced in this story) and entertains us as we watch them continue to mess up their lives, even as they are trying their darnedest to straighten them out.And that is why it is different. At the core, these people are trying to be better than they are, or they accept themselves for what they are. And, as they try to better themselves, we are thoroughly entertained. I mean, how can you not enjoy a story where three of the major talismans are a tuba, a dead dog, and a dead snake?This is yet another novel about an author (don't writers get tired of writing about writers – but let's not quibble – Chabon makes it work) – this time one who has been writing forever on a book that seems to be trying to rival The Dark Tower or Game of Thrones in length. We join this author as his life falls apart (a wife who is leaving him, a recently pregnant mistress, a significant marijuana "addiction", and a publisher screaming for that final draft). And then, just like every Disney ride you ever saw, something goes horribly wrong. Well, not that horrible, just entertainingly horrible.Chabon seldom disappoints, and that continues to be the case in this novel.Yeah, these are unlikable people. But we like them in spite of our (and their) selves.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Michael Chabon's antic, exuberant tale of two days in the life of Grady Tripp, middle-aged, potsmoking, failed novelist. With a crazy cast of memorable characters and the astonishing prose that only Chabon can produce, the novel, while achingly funny, also delivers the pathos of failed ambitions and failed love.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Funny at times and an unpredictable adventure, but I found the protagonist hard to sympathize with. Chabon's writing is smooth but also seems a bit pretentious.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The story ostensibly centres on Prof Grady Tripp's attempts at completing his increasingly out of control follow up novel of the title, Wonder Boys; yet as is not surprising with Michael Chabon, as well as an interesting plot, it is very much about characters and relationships. Central here, in addition to Grady himself, are his editor Terry Crabtree and young student James Lear, something of a loner, as well as host of other divers characters including Grady's pregnant mistress, an adoring female student, a transvestite, a dead dog and a tuba. The real beauty of the novel is the interaction between the various characters. Grady and carefree drug reliant Crabtree are long standing friends and this clearly comes through. Crabtree has a crush on the Grady’s mysterious student, the unreliable James; Grady's beautiful student tenant has a crush on him; and Grady's third marriage is coming to an end while he pursues his mistress, the college Chancellor. His failing marriage does not prevent visiting his wife’s family for Thanksgiving, and taking along James. The relationship between Grady and James is particularly well drawn; while seemingly a little detached from James, it is clear from Grady's actions and the superbly written lengthy dialogues between the two that Grady cares about James.No one comes out of this shining, the individual characters do have their redeeming features, it would be a mistake to right them off as insincere, and one cannot help be drawn to these people for all their human failings. Wonder Boys is very funny, enjoyable and at times moving, but above all it is the beauty of Chabon's writing that makes it an absolute must read. If you’ve seen the film you must read the book, there are, not surprisingly, differences.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked the opening, loved the seder scenes with Emily Warshaw's family, thought the ending went on far too long and unbelievably, couldn't understand why anyone would ever be attracted to the main character, thought the last couple of lines were lovely.

Book preview

Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon

THE FIRST REAL WRITER I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn. He lived at the McClelland Hotel, which my grandmother owned, in the uppermost room of its turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a stoop-shouldered wooden suit rack that once belonged to my father. Mr. Vetch’s wife had been living in a sanitorium up near Erie since the deaths of their teenaged sons in a backyard explosion some years earlier, and it was always my impression that he wrote, in part, to earn the money to keep her there. He wrote horror stories, hundreds of them, many of which were eventually published, in such periodicals of the day as Weird Tales, Strange Stones, Black Tower, and the like. They were in the gothic mode, after the manner of Lovecraft, set in quiet little Pennsylvania towns that had the misfortune to have been built over the forgotten sites of visitations by bloodthirsty alien gods and of Iroquois torture cults—but written in a dry, ironic, at times almost whimsical idiom, an echo of which I was later to discover in the fiction of John Collier. He worked at night, using a fountain pen, in a bentwood rocking chair, with a Hudson Bay blanket draped across his lap and a bottle of bourbon on the table before him. When his work was going well, he could be heard in every corner of the sleeping hotel, rocking and madly rocking while he subjected his heroes to the gruesome rewards of their passions for unnameable things.

As the market for pulp horror dried up in the years after the Second World War, however, the flecked white envelopes with their fabulous New York addresses no longer appeared so regularly in the Belleek tea tray on my grandmother’s piano; presently they ceased to arrive altogether. I know that August Van Zorn tried to make an adjustment. He changed the settings of his tales to the suburbs and laid a greater emphasis on humor, and he tried, without success, to sell these tame and jokey pieces to Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Then one Monday morning when I was fourteen years old, of an age to begin to appreciate the work of the anonymous, kindly, self-loathing man who’d been living under the same roof as my grandmother and me for the past twelve years, Honoria Vetch threw herself into the swift little river that flowed past the sanitorium, through our town, down to the yellow Allegheny. Her body was not recovered. On the following Sunday, when my grandmother and I came home from church, she sent me upstairs to take Mr. Vetch his lunch. Ordinarily she would have gone herself—she always said that neither Mr. Vetch nor I could be trusted not to waste the other one’s time—but she was angry with him for having declined, among all the empty Sundays of his life, to go to church on this one. So she cut the crusts from a pair of chicken sandwiches and set them on a tray along with a salt-shaker, a white peach, and a King James Bible, and I climbed the stairs to his room, where I found him, with a tiny black-rimmed hole in his left temple, sitting, still slowly rocking, in his bentwood chair. In spite of his fondness for literary gore, and unlike my father, who, I gathered, had made a mess of things, Albert Vetch went out neatly and with a minimum of blood.

I say that Albert Vetch was the first real writer I knew not because he was, for a while, able to sell his work to magazines, but because he was the first one 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. In any case he was, now that I consider it, the first writer of any sort to cross my path, real or otherwise, in a life that has on the whole been a little too crowded with representatives of that sour and squirrelly race. He set a kind of example that, as a writer, I’ve been living up to ever since. I only hope that I haven’t invented him.

The story—and the stories—of August Van Zorn were in my thoughts that Friday when I drove out to the airport to meet Crabtree’s plane. It was impossible for me to see Terry Crabtree without remembering those fey short stories, since our long friendship had been founded, you might say, on August Van Zorn’s obscurity, on the very, abject failure that helped crumple the spirit of a man whom my grandmother used to compare to a broken umbrella. Our friendship had itself, after twenty years, come to resemble one of the towns in a Van Zorn story: a structure erected, all unknowingly, on a very thin membrane of reality, beneath which lay an enormous slumbering Thing with one yellow eye already half open and peering right up at us. Three months earlier, Crabtree had been announced as a staff member of this year’s annual WordFest—I had wangled him the invitation—and in all the intervening time, although he left numerous messages for me, I’d spoken to him only once, for five minutes, one evening in February when I came home, kind of stoned, from a party at the Chancellor’s, to put on a necktie and join my wife at another party which her boss was throwing that evening down in Shadyside. I was smoking a joint while I spoke to Crabtree, and holding on to the receiver as though it were a strap and I stood in the center of a vast long whistling tunnel of wind, my hair fluttering around my face, my tie streaming out behind me. Although I had the vague impression that my oldest friend was speaking to me in tones of anger and remonstrance, his words just blew by me, like curling scraps of excelsior and fish wrap, and I waved at them as they passed. That Friday marked one of the few times in the history of our friendship that I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him again; I was dreading it.

I remember I’d let my senior workshop go home early that afternoon, telling them it was because of WordFest; but everyone looked over at poor James Leer as they filed out of the room. When I finished gathering all the marked-up dittoed copies and typed critiques of his latest odd short story, shuffling them into my briefcase, and putting on my coat, and then turned to leave the classroom, I saw that the boy was still sitting there, at the back of the classroom, in the empty circle of chairs. I knew I ought to say something to console him—the workshop had been awfully hard on him—and he seemed to want to hear the sound of my voice; but I was in a hurry to get to the airport and irritated with him for being such a goddamn spook all the time, and so I only said good-bye to him and started out the door. Turn out the light, please, he’d said, in his choked little powder-soft voice. I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together. I left James Leer sitting there, alone in the dark, and arrived at the airport about half an hour before Crabtree’s plane was due, which gave me the opportunity to sit in my car in the airport parking garage smoking a fatty and listening to Ahmad Jamal, and I won’t pretend that I hadn’t been envisioning this idyllic half hour from the moment I dismissed my class. Over the years I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. I had one fragrant ounce of Humboldt County, California, in a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment of my car.

Crabtree walked off the plane carrying a small canvas grip, his garment bag draped over one arm, a tall, attractive person at his side. This person had long black curls, wore a smashing red topcoat over a black dress and five-inch black spikes, and was laughing in sheer delight at something that Crabtree was whispering out of the corner of his mouth. It didn’t appear to me, however, that this person was a woman, although I wasn’t entirely sure.

Tripp, said Crabtree, approaching me with his free hand extended. He reached up with both arms to embrace me and I held on to him for an extra second or two, tightly, trying to determine from the soundness of his ribs whether he loved me still. Good to see you. How are you?

I let go of him and took a step backward. He wore the usual Crabtree expression of scorn, and his eyes were bright and hard, but he didn’t look as though he were angry with me. He’d been letting his hair grow long as he got older, not, as is the case with some fashionable men in their forties, in compensation for any incipient baldness, but out of a vanity more pure and unchallengeable: he had beautiful hair, thick and chestnut-colored and falling in a flawless curtain to his shoulders. He was wearing a well-cut, olive-drab belted raincoat over a handsome suit—an Italian number in a metallic silk that was green like the back of a dollar bill—a pair of woven leather loafers without socks, and round schoolboy spectacles I’d never seen before.

You look great, I said.

Grady Tripp, this is Miss Antonia, uh, Miss Antonia—

Sloviak, said the person, in an ordinary pretty woman’s voice. Nice to meet you.

It turns out she lives around the corner from me, on Hudson.

Hi, I said. That’s my favorite street in New York. I attempted to make an unobtrusive study of the architecture of Miss Sloviak’s throat, but she’d tied a brightly patterned scarf around her neck. That in itself was a kind of clue, I supposed. Any luggage?

Crabtree held on to the blue canvas grip and handed me the garment bag. It was surprisingly light.

Just this?

Just that, he said. Any chance we can give Miss Sloviak here a lift?

I guess that would be all right, I said, with a faint twinge of apprehension, for I began to see already what kind of evening it was going to be. I knew the expression in Crabtree’s eye all too well. He was looking at me as though I were a monster he’d created with his own brain and hands, and he were about to throw the switch that would send me reeling spasmodically across the countryside, laying waste to rude farmsteads and despoiling the rural maidenry. Further he had plenty more ideas where that one came from, and if the means of creating another disturbance fell into his hands he would exploit it without mercy on this night. If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one. What hotel is it?

"Oh, I live here, said Miss Sloviak, with a becoming blush. That is, my parents do. In Bloomfield. But you can just drop me downtown and I’ll get a cab from there."

Well, we do have to stop downtown, Crabtree, I said, trying to demonstrate to all concerned that my traffic was with him and that I considered Miss Sloviak to be merely a temporary addition to our party. To pick up Emily.

Where’s this dinner we’re going to?

In Point Breeze.

Is that far from Bloomfield?

Not too far.

Great, then, said Crabtree, and with that, he took Miss Sloviak’s elbow and started off toward Baggage Claim, working his skinny legs to keep up with her. Come on, Tripp, he called over his shoulder.

The luggage from their flight was a long time in rolling out and Miss Sloviak took advantage of the delay to go to the bathroom—the ladies’ room, naturally. Crabtree and I stood there, grinning at each other.

Stoned again, he said.

You bastard, I said. How are you?

Unemployed, he said, looking no less delighted with himself.

I started to smile, but then something, a ripple in the muscle of his jaw, told me that he wasn’t joking.

"You got fired?" I said.

Not yet, he said. But it looks like it’s coming. I’ll be all right. I spent most of the week calling around town. I had lunch with a couple of people. He continued to waggle his eyebrows and grin, as though his predicament only amused him—there was a thick streak of self-contempt in Terry Crabtree—and to a certain extent, no doubt, it did. They weren’t exactly lining up.

But, Jesus, Terry, why? What happened?

Restructuring, he said.

Two months earlier my publisher, Bartizan, had been bought out by Blicero Verlag, a big German media conglomerate, and subsequent rumors of a ruthless housecleaning by the new owners had managed to penetrate as far into the outback as Pittsburgh.

I guess I don’t fit the new corporate profile.

Which is?

Competence.

Where will you go?

He shook his head, and shrugged.

So, how do you like her? he said. Miss Sloviak. She was in the seat beside me. An alarm clamored somewhere, to tell us that the carousel of suitcases was about to start up. I think that both of us jumped. "Do you know how many airplanes I’ve boarded with the hope in my heart that my ticket would get me a seat next to someone like her? Particularly while I’m on my way to Pittsburgh? Don’t you think it says a lot for Pittsburgh that it could have produced a Miss Sloviak?"

She’s a transvestite.

Oh, my God, he said, looking shocked.

Isn’t she?

"I’ll just bet that’s hers, he said. He pointed to a large rectangular suitcase of spotted pony hide, zipped into what looked like the plastic covering for a sofa cushion, that was emerging through the rubber flaps on the carousel. I guess she doesn’t want to have it soiled."

Terry, what’s going to happen to you? I said. I felt as though the alarm bell were still reverberating within my chest. What’s going to happen to me? I thought. What’s going to happen to my book? How many years have you been with Bartizan, now anyway? Ten?

It’s only ten if you don’t count the last five, he said, turning toward me. Which I guess you weren’t. He looked at me, his expression mild, his eyes alight with that combination of malice and affection expressed so neatly by his own last name. I knew before he opened his mouth exactly what he was going to ask me.

How’s the book? he said.

I reached out to grab the pony-skin valise before it passed us by.

It’s fine, I said.

He was talking about my fourth novel, or what purported to be my fourth novel, Wonder Boys, which I had promised to Bartizan during the early stages of the previous presidential administration. My third novel, The Land Downstairs, had won a PEN award and, at twelve thousand copies, sold twice as well as both its predecessors combined, and in its aftermath Crabtree and his bosses at Bartizan had felt sanguine enough about my imminent attainment to the status of, at the least, cult favorite to advance me a ridiculous sum of money in exchange for nothing more than a fatuous smile from the thunderstruck author and a title invented out of air and brain-sparkle while pissing into the aluminum trough of a men’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed—three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town are born, grow up, and die—and I’d started to work on it at once, and had been diligently hacking away at the thing ever since. Motivation, inspiration were not the problem; on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it.

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half dozen times. And yet for all of those years, and all of those words expended in charting the eccentric paths of my characters through the violent blue heavens I had set them to cross, they had not even reached their zeniths. I was nowhere near the end.

It’s done, I said. It’s basically done. I’m just sort of, you know, tinkering with it now, buddy.

Great. I was hoping I could get a look at it sometime this weekend. Oh, here’s another one, I bet. He pointed to a neat little plaid-and-red-leather number, also zipped into a plastic sleeve, that came trundling toward us now along the belt. Think that might be possible?

I grabbed the second suitcase—it was more what you’d call a Gladstone bag, a squat little half moon hinged at the sides—and set it on the ground beside the first.

I don’t know, I said. Look what happened to Joe Fahey.

Yeah, he got famous, said Crabtree. And on his fourth book.

John Jose Fahey, another real writer I’d known, had only written four books—Sad Tidings, Kind of Blue, Fans and Fadeaways, and Eight Solid Light-years of Lead. Joe and I became friends during the semester I spent in residence, almost a dozen years ago now, at the Tennessee college where he ran the writing program. Joe was a disciplined writer, when I met him, with an admirable gift for narrative digression he claimed to have inherited from his Mexican mother, and very few bad or unmanageable habits. He was a courtly fellow, even smooth, with hair that had turned white by the time he was thirty-two years old. After the moderate success of his third book, Joe’s publishers had advanced him a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in order to encourage him to write them a fourth. His first attempt at it went awry almost instantly. He gamely started a second; this novel he pursued for over two years before giving it up as fucked. The next try his publisher rejected before Joe was even finished writing it, on the grounds that it was already too long, and at any rate not the kind of book they were interested in publishing.

After that John Jose Fahey disappeared into the fastness of an impregnable failure. He pulled off the difficult trick of losing his tenured job at the Tennessee college, when he started showing up drunk for work, spoke with unpardonable cruelty to the talentless element of his classes, and one day waved a loaded pistol from the lectern and instructed his pupils to write about Fear. He sealed himself off from his wife, as well, and she left him, unwillingly, taking with her half of the proceeds from his fabulous contract. After a while he moved back to Nevada, where he’d been born, and lived in a succession of motels. A few years later, changing planes at the Reno airport, I ran into him. He wasn’t going anywhere; he was just making the scene at McCarran. At first he affected not to recognize me. He’d lost his hearing in one ear and his manner was inattentive and cool. Over several margaritas in the airport bar, however, he eventually told me that at last, after seven tries, he’d sent his publisher what he believed to be an acceptable final manuscript of a novel. I asked him how he felt about it. It’s acceptable, he said coldly. Then I asked him if finishing the book hadn’t made him feel very happy. I had to repeat myself twice.

Happy as a fucking clam, he said.

After that I’d started hearing rumors. I heard that soon after our meeting, Joe tried to withdraw his seventh submission, an effort he abandoned only when his publisher, patience exhausted, had threatened him with legal action. I heard that entire sections had needed to be excised, due to aimlessness and illogic and an unseemly bitterness of tone. I heard all kinds of inauspicious things. In the end, however, Lead turned out to be a pretty good book, and with the added publicity value of Joe’s untimely and absurdist death—he was hit, remember, on Virginia Street, by an armored car filled with casino takings—it did fairly well in the stores. His publishers recouped most of their advance, and everybody said that it was too bad Joe Fahey didn’t live to see his success, but I was never quite sure that I agreed. Eight solid light-years of lead, if you haven’t read the book, is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.

Okay, sure, Crabtree, I said. I’ll let you read, I don’t know, a dozen pages or so.

Any dozen pages I want?

Sure. You name ’em. I laughed, but I was afraid I knew which twelve pages he would choose: the last twelve. This was going to be a problem, because over the past month, knowing that Crabtree was coming to town, I had actually written five different final chapters, subjecting my poor half-grown characters to a variety of biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths and happy little accidents of life, in a desperate attempt to bring in for a premature landing the immense careering zeppelin of which I was the mad commander. There were no last twelve pages; or rather, there were sixty of them, all absurdly sudden and random and violent, the literary equivalents of that windblown, flaming airfield in Lakehurst, New Jersey. I aimed a cheesy smile at Crabtree and held it, for just a minute too long. Crabtree took pity on me and looked away.

Check this out, he said.

I looked. Wrapped, like the two suitcases, in heavy, clear sheeting that was held in place by strips of duct tape, a strange, black leather case was coming toward us, big as a trash can, molded according to a fanciful geometry, as though it had been designed to transport intact the heart, valves, and ventricles of an elephant.

That would be a tuba, I said. I sucked my cheek in and looked at him through a half-closed eye. Do you suppose—?

I think it has to be, said Crabtree. It’s wrapped in plastic.

I hoisted it from the carousel—it was even heavier than it looked—and set it beside the other two, and then we turned toward the ladies’ room and waited for Miss Sloviak to rejoin us. When, after a few more minutes, Miss Sloviak didn’t come back, we decided that I ought to rent a cart. I borrowed a dollar from Crabtree and after a brief struggle with the cart dispenser we managed to get the cart loaded, and wheeled it across the carpet to the bathroom.

Miss Sloviak? called Crabtree, knocking like a gentleman on the ladies’ room door.

I’ll be right out, said Miss Sloviak.

Probably putting the plastic wrapper back onto her johnson, I said.

Tripp, said Crabtree. He looked straight at me now and held my eyes with his for as long as he could manage, given the agitated state of his pleasure receptors. Is it really almost done?

Sure, I said. Of course it is. Crabtree, are you still going to be my editor?

Sure, he said. He broke eye contact with me and turned back to watch the dwindling parade of suitcases drifting along the baggage carousel. Everything’s going to be fine.

Then Miss Sloviak emerged from the ladies’ room, hair reestablished, cheeks rouged, eyelids freshly painted a soft viridian, smelling of what I recognized as Cristalle, the fragrance worn both by my wife, Emily, and also by my lover, Sara Gaskell. It smelled a little bitter to me, as you might imagine. Miss Sloviak looked down at the luggage on the cart, and then at Crabtree, and broke out into a broad, toothy, almost intolerably flirtatious lipsticked grin.

Why, Mr. Crabtree, said Miss Sloviak, in a creditable Mae West, is that a tuba on your luggage cart, or are you just glad to see me?

When I looked at Crabtree I saw, to my amazement, that he had turned bright red in the face. It had been a long time since I’d seen him do that.

CRABTREE AND I MET in college, a place in which I’d never intended to meet anyone. After graduating from high school I took great pains to avoid having to go to college at all, and in particular to Coxley, which had offered me the annual townie scholarship, along with a place as tight end on the starting eleven. I was and remain a big old bastard, six-three, fat now and I know it, and while at the time I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field, I wore quadrangular black-rimmed eyeglasses and the patent-leather shoes, serge high-waters, and sober, V-necked sweater-vests my grandmother required of me, so it must have taken a kind of imaginative faith to see me as a football star with a four-year free ride; but in any case I had no desire to play for Coxley—or for anyone else—and one day in late June, 1968, I left my poor grandmother a rather smart-assed note and ran away from the somber hills, towns, and crooked spires of western Pennsylvania that had so haunted August Van Zorn. I didn’t come back for twenty-five years.

I’ll skip over a lot of what followed my cowardly departure from home. Let’s just say that I’d read Kerouac the year before, and had conceived the usual picture of myself as an outlaw-poet-pathfinder, a kind of Zen-masterly John C. Frémont on amphetamines with a marbled dime-store pad of lined paper in the back pocket of my denim pants. I still see myself that way, I suppose, and I’m probably none the better for it. Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the jobs as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn’t, I might as well have. I worked for part of a summer in a hellish Texarkanan carnival as the contumelious clown you get to drop into a tank of water after he calls you pencil-dick. I was shot in the meat of my left hand in a bar outside La Crosse, Wisconsin. All of this rich material I made good use of in my first novel, The Bottomlands, 1976, which was well reviewed, and which sometimes, at desperate instants, I consider to be my truest work. After a few years of unhappy and often depraved existence, I landed, again in the classic manner, in California, where I fell in love with a philosophy major at Berkeley who persuaded me not to waste in wandering what she called, with an air of utter, soul-enveloping conviction that has since led to great misery and that I have never for one instant forgotten, my gift. I was pinned to the spot by this touching tribute to my genius, and stayed put long enough to get together an application to Cal. I was just about ready to blow town—alone—when the letter of acceptance arrived.

Terry Crabtree and I met at the start of our junior year, when we landed in the same short-story class, an introductory course I’d tried every semester to get into. Crabtree had signed up for it on an impulse, and gotten in on the strength of a story he’d written in the tenth grade, about an encounter, at a watering place, between the aging Sherlock Holmes and a youthful Adolf Hitler, who has come from Vienna to Carlsbad to rob invalid ladies of their jewelry. It was a remarkable trick for a fifteen-year-old to have performed, but it was unique; Crabtree had written nothing since then, not a line. The story had weird sexual undertones, as, it must be said, did its author. He was then an awkward, frail young man, his face all forehead and teeth, and he kept to himself, at the back of the class, dressed in a tight, unfashionable suit and tie, a red cashmere scarf tucked like an ascot into his raised lapels when the weather turned cool. I sat in my own corner of the room, sporting a new beard and a pair of little round wire-rims, and took careful notes on everything the teacher had to say.

The teacher was a real writer, too, a lean, handsome cowboy writer from an old Central Valley ranching family, who revered Faulkner and who in his younger days had published a fat, controversial novel that was made into a movie with Robert Mitchum and Mercedes McCambridge. He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook, since lost, with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon. He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

It was in this man’s class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder—from what I’ve since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.

But these are observations I made only later, over the course of many years’ exposure to the workings of the midnight disease. At the time I was simply intimidated, by our teacher’s fame, by his snakeskin boots, and by the secrets of the craft which I believed him to possess. The class covered two stories every session, and in the first go-around I held the last slot on the schedule, along with Crabtree, who, I noticed, made no effort whatever to write down the axioms that filled the smoky air of the classroom, nor ever had anything to contribute to the class beyond an occasional terse but unfailingly polite comment on the banality of the work under discussion that afternoon. Naturally

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