Wonder Boys

Every other Michael Chabon novel that I have read has started out so slow that I've abandoned it for months at a time, but ultimately has been profound and moving and made me feel like I have a place in the universe. Wonder Boys did the opposite. Despite it's easy readability, Wonder Boys made me feel hated, like the world for which it's written or is found funny is a world that is antithetical to people like me.

About a quarter of the way through, I realized that I'd seen and hated the movie. That added to the feel of the novel, to be honest – this is a novel about people using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate the sort of depression that comes not from any sort of psychopathology, but rather the reasonable self-loathing if you're the sort of dick to do idiotic things while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Not surprisingly, this becomes a downward spiral of totally unsympathetic assholes continuing to do idiotic things then self-medicate further, then become more of a self-absorbed asshole who does even more idiotic things. I read the book with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, anticipating how things could possibly get even worse. Knowing the specific form the devolution takes from watching the movie added to the ambiance, so to speak.

So why two stars? The second star comes entirely from a Passover seder scene that is laugh-out-loud funny. Fights over what to put in the second seder plate space for bitter herbs (or even how to pronounce “Chazeret”) are reminiscent to every Jewish home and also to what I love about most Chabon novels. It was like a breath of fresh air (before that, too, became another drug-using, drunk-driving, pet-killing rampage)

“Sara would read anything you handed her–Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet–at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual to find her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house–reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania–and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”

“Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.”

“It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.”