If anyone other than my wife had recommended Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys I wouldn't have picked it up. On its face, the story looks like yet another installment in the "old literature professor does drugs and pines for a pretty young student" litfic subgenre. I have an English Lit degree so I have way too much experience with that type of story and no thank you. But I trust my wife's opinion and this is one of her favorite books.
I'm so glad I read Wonder Boys.
I mean, it is a story about an old literature professor who does drugs and pines for a pretty young student, but it's so tongue-in-cheek, a sly parody of those kinds of books. The first person prose is purposefully grandiose and Grady (said old literature professor) is such a horrible fuck-up he circles back to being endearing. The story is a full-tilt romp through Pittsburgh and elsewhere in Southwestern Pennsylvania interwoven with Grady's ramblings about his ex-wives, childhood, the book he can't finish, and so on.
I'm not sure there's a plot. There's a dead dog in a trunk, a stolen Marilyn Monroe jacket, the college chancellor Grady knocked up, the quintessential dramatic gay lit student James Leer, an unfinished novel that looms over everything, a sort of stolen car, Grady's editor/partner in crime Crabtree, and lots of weed. There's a whole section where Grady and James Leer end up at Grady's ex-wife Emily's family's Passover seder, and that's probably my favorite part of the whole book, because it's where Michael Chabon really shows off what he does best in Wonder Boys: making the small world of the novel feel lived-in. You can feel the texture of the throw pillows, hear the creaks in the old house's wood floors, smell the food cooking. The family bickers and tells stories, talks over each other; there are petty little squabbles and in-jokes. Everything feels like you walked in on a group of people who have a history you're not fully part of. The whole novel is like that but filtered through Grady's perpetual marijuana haze.
It's a story for misfit English majors who could never take academia seriously (i.e. people like me). I haven't this much fun or laughed out loud this much while reading in a very long time.