Grady Tripp is a middle-aged, mid-list novelist and academic whose aimless (white?) whale of a novel-in-progress, Wonder Boys, mirrors his own chaotic life. Given Tripp's startling narrative and descriptive talents, the more tolerant reader might wish excerpts from the novel actually appeared in Wonder Boys, author Michael Chabon's rendering of Tripp's midlife crisis. The less tolerant will thank Chabon for so beautifully harnessing Tripp's talent, throughout most of the novel, in his version of a fateful weekend literary symposium at the Pittsburgh-area college where he teaches.
The weekend could have provided subject matter for a handful of novels. Criticism levied during Tripp's final workshop of the week so disturbs undergrad writer James Leer that Leer cannot lift himself out of his chair. But Tripp's compassionate response turns out to be less professional reflex than karmic pre-pay: Tripp's agent, Terry Crabtree, will arrive in town that evening, fully expecting the draft of Wonder Boys to deliver on all Tripp's early promise. Meanwhile, Tripp has impregnated the (married) academic dean of his college, and his own marriage is less passionate than his marijuana habit. Still, father-to-be Tripp has already adopted something of a paternal role in the lives of student writers Leer and Hannah Greene, a wunderkind in her own right. The painfully beautiful Hannah already has published stories in The Paris Review – and is boarding with the Tripps, further straining their relationship.
It is testament to Chabon's consummate skill that he's able not only to weave the stories together but that in the process he's tailored a relatively hip udpate of the campus novel. Indeed, Chabon's vivid rendition of Grady and his milieu keeps the reader flipping the pages of what, from a lesser talent, could have been a much staider novel. Minus the pot-induced ennui, the episodic few days might have been culled from an Irving novel, while Chabon's eye is nearly as sharp as Updike's, his voice as super-charged as T.C. Boyle's.
Yet the opening and closing movements read as if they belong to a disparate work. The elegiac tone of the opening movement, in which Tripp recalls the drunken fate of horror writer August Van Zorn, and the minor key in which Trip tells of his eventual flight, remarriage, and resumption of career (albeit with lowered expectations) do not quite cohere with the picaresque comedy of the symposium weekend. That split begs a question about Grady's writerly struggles: Why would an author capable of the former spend so much of his talent on the latter?
