MADreads

Wonder book

September 14th, 2009 Jon - Central Library

I laughed out loud eighty-four times over the course of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.  Some were mere chuckles, but others were loud guffaws of the wake-up-the-person-sleeping-next-to-you type.  That’s a lot of of laughs, especially for a guy like me, and by “guy like me” I mean the kind of guy who keeps track of how often he laughs.  Eighty-four laughs over three-hundred and sixty pages is a pretty good percentage, so if you actually end up enjoying the book more than I did, I don’t know how you’ll ever finish it.  Then again, even if you find this book half as amusing as I did, or a quarter, you will probably still enjoy it.

Wonder Boys follows Grady Tripp through the weekend of Wordfest, a writer’s conference held at the college where he teaches writing.  Grady’s wife has just left him, his mistress, the chancellor of the college, is pregnant with his child, and his editor, Terry Crabtree, wants to see the book he’s been working on.  The book he’s been working on for seven years.  It’s over two-thousand six-hundred pages long and has five alternate endings.  Like Grady’s life, it’s a mess.

In spite of this, or because of it, Grady makes for a wonderful picaresque hero and Wonder Boys is a wonderful novel.  While the laughs are there, so are well-drawn characters and real pathos.  As Grady, Crabree, and Grady’s student, James Leer, stumble through one adventure after another, it begins to appear that the book’s real subject is male friendship. Don Quijote was published in the early seventeenth century, and Wonder Boys in 1995, which makes me wonder why people seem to think Judd Apatow discovered it.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Apatow’s films, but if you’re all caught up on the bromance canon, Wonder Boys was also made into a film with Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr, Katie Holmes, Tobey Maguire, and Frances McDormand.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction, Recreational Fiction