Word: chabon
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...Michael Chabon's likable first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a lighthearted account of a young man growing up gay, was received with glad cries, and these still reverberated when his short story collection, A Model World, appeared. And then? Hmmm, let's see. The white whale's been done. Down the Mississippi on a raft? That too. Okay, lots of plots out there; maybe something about a dwarf in Germany who beats a drum...
...some such doldrum, adrift in giddiness or despair, Chabon decided to write about a novelist who can't get his next novel written. Sure enough, Wonder Boys (Villard; 368 pages; $23) is, rather too cutely, not just the title of Chabon's book, but of the novel his hero Grady Tripp can't bring himself to finish. Tripp's well-reviewed early books are receding into the distant past, and he feels fraudulent when his writing students admire them. He pretends optimism to his editor, but the truth is that his half-written book is an unreadable mass of unstrung...
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...
...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...
...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...