Wonder Boys

            As I’ve mentioned before, way back in these posts, one of my favorite novels is Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. A lot of that has to do with when I first read it, in the fall of sophomore year when my life wasn’t much better than that of Grady Tripp, the central character of the novel, whose life is rapidly deteriorating in the space of only a few days. It was also a time when I was pinning for Pennsylvania, a place that I can only seem to remember with the kind of nostalgia most people reserve for the 50’s (and of course, the novel begins in Pennsylvania in the late forties and early fifties) and a longing for college.

            For those of you who haven’t read the book, which will probably be the majority, it deals with a professor who has spent several years (I think almost a decade, though I might be wrong) working on his novel Wonder Boys. I particularly love the opening, which describes the author’s early life in Pennsylvania and the first real writer he ever knew, an H. P. Lovecraft style horror writer and professor of English at the local university. And to evoke the ending, I think I’ll have to quote the last few sentences, which don’t give much away:

“He has known a number of famous and admired authors in his time, and he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters. The young men listen dutifully for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for the parts that sound true”.  

I love that passage. It brings me back to a hundred times that I’ve been in there, in the dusty stacks of one or another of the libraries I frequent, feverously thumbing through a volume I’ve just picked up, wondering if I should include the book in my bag. It was actually the very way I found Wonder Boys, reading the last sentence, as I often do, to determine its worthiness, and this one immediately went in the bag.

It’s because of my deep affection for this novel that I approached the film version, which like the novel opened to critical praise and public indifference, with weariness. I often find the film versions to books horribly simplified, and these streamlined monstrosities frequently strip out the very parts of the novels that I loved. And I had a sinking feeling the very parts of the novel they would simplify in Wonder Boys were those I loved most, the beginning and the ending, as to do the book proper justice they’d have to use extensive and obtrusive flashbacks and flashfowards.

As such, I only watched the film recently, at the beginning of the school year actually. And to my surprise, I thought it was actually very good. Most of what it left out or changed from the novel was minor or necessarily changed to fit the adaptation. It had the same comic energy of the book and the almost screwball comedic styling that made the novel so memorable. Grady Tripp’s life spinning out of control was just as sad and hilarious as it had been on the page, although I will say I am an unabashed Michael Douglas fan, so that helped a bit. So to sum up, if anyone out there reads this post (which is far too short and really doesn’t do justice to either the book or the film) I would suggest you pick up a copy of the book or film from the Ithaca College library. Or I could lend you it. Although, I think that would be something of an impertinence, and I’d probably tell you no in any case. (That last sentence was, with the exception of the last clause, a joke.)