I am back. Hopefully with more consistency. I joined a book
club or two and have like 10 books on backlog to review, plus some movies I
want to talk about.
About a month ago I decided to read Michael Chabon's
"Wonder Boys." This is the sixth book of Chabon's that I have read.
As an overall writer he seems to epitomize what, in my mind, I call 'glimpses
of greatness. 'By this I mean he is the type of writer who, at times, will
strike you with an incredible insight, with full awareness that he is doing it.
He shows the reader what is possible with writing, but never quite gets there
himself. This being said he is still one of my favorites to read. This is in part
because most of the 'insights' of his novels are meta-fictional in nature, but
focus on questions of identity.
"Wonder Boys" is no different in this respect. At
the center of the story are a washed up author and creative writing professor
coming to terms with the failure of every aspect of his life - marriage, job,
relationships, health, new novel. Over the span of a weekend he is forced to
face each of these failings. Facing these failings in essence means reassessing
and restructuring his identity. As Grady Tripp uses weed and denial to stave
off nihilism, the reader is continually presented with brief and beautiful
insights from the lucid moments of his mind. These range from attempts at
diagnosing the disease that makes writers write to the way writers create their
own problems to then have stories to tell later. One of these moments, my
favorite of the novel, taps into a fear present in a lot of American literature
with beautiful precision and subtlety:
"Most of the love parade seemed to have been crafted
out of echoes and fragments and secondhand threads. The people spoke, amused
themselves, and reacted to one another like people in movies. The things that
happened were kinds of things that happened in the movies. Other than along
certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had
actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only
fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in
her father's library."
What I love in this quote is the trepidation of the cyclical
nature of 'art' and 'reality' and their imitations of one another. Whereas many
authors - Adorno, Twain, Vonnegut - seem to fear that media controls the minds
of the populace. Chabon takes a meta-fictional direction and bleaker direction:
the media controls the minds of those creating the media creating a vicious
cycle. There is an interesting producer/consumer desire here that is worth
considering. Have we reached a point of utter confusion and integration of
'art' and 'reality' when the producers of the art can no longer distinguish
their product from what we call 'real?' When does this distinction cease to
exist and/or matter?
These are the questions that Chabon's novel seems to bring
up. Having a compelling plot, well-crafted prose, and some moments of clarity
the novel can definitely be said to be a worthwhile read - especially if you
like meta-fictional ‘play.’ I have already recommended this book to two people
who I know would enjoy it.
Also, they made a movie out of this book. I have not seen
it, but have been told by people I trust that it is good. I will be checking it
out. If any of you have seen it or read the book let me know what you think.
