Wonder Boys (1995)

Wonder Boys may or may not be typical of Michael Chabon—it's certainly different from his better known and more widely honored The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which came five years later—but it is typical of a certain strain of mainstream fiction with its sources in MFA college creative writing programs. So we have a dissolute middle-aged white man who is just such an MFA professor in the process of ruining his own life. In fact, the book concerns the climax of exactly that. Our hero, Grady Tripp, is all appetite: an obese whale who spends all his waking moments smoking marijuana, whose marriage is dissolving because he is having an affair (yet another, of course), whose literary agent and publisher are hounding him for the manuscript of a novel that is overdue by years, the advance for which (of course, again) has long since been spent. All events related are in the mode of a desperate slapstick farce, as everything in this sad sack's life is conveniently coming to a head at once. We know the tales of these ne'er-do-well WASPs in academia-land well—started to see them even in the '50s. Let me be clear that I enjoyed Wonder Boys and got a big kick out of it, even as I recognize I've already said enough to steer some (or most) away by now. Enjoyed it, to be clear, even as I noted the generally hackneyed paces. Chabon brings minor new elements of interest to it, such as the descriptions of chronic marijuana use, which I think are good, as well as a more normative sense of gays. In the long run, it's homophobia that is likely to be the death of many of these exercises, so at least Chabon escapes that. Small consolation. They are so ubiquitous now they actually have genre labels and a Wikipedia page—"campus novel, also known as academic novel." Of the "significant examples" listed there (including Wonder Boys), most of those I knew are roughly contemporaneous: Changing Places by David Lodge (1975), Straight Man by Richard Russo (1997), The Human Stain by Philip Roth (2000), for example. Early examples include The Masters by C. P. Snow (1951), The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy (1952), and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954). It is a pretty long list, and even for someone like me who is tolerant of them, I blanch a little at the imposing volume. So I am all caveats, but that said, I did like Wonder Boys. The narrative current is strong, it is packed with rich incident and evocative detail, and it never slows. You can do worse.

In case it's not at the library.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

Michael Chabon's deft and remarkable novel concocts an alternative history of comic books stretched just wide enough to contain his two titular characters, comic book scripter Sammy Clay and illustrator-with-portfolio-extraordinaire Joe Kavalier, who are cousins. Clay grew up in Brooklyn and Kavalier escaped Prague even as the fascist pall of the late '30s settled across it ("escape" in every sense being the operative word). The novel concerns itself with comic books and a burgeoning new industry and even art form, as well as with World War II, love, destiny, obsession, fate, and finding oneself, among other matters addressed. It sprawls from Manhattan diners where Gil Kane and Stan Lee get breakfast to the wastelands of the Antarctic to the back alleys of the Prague ghetto. It features golems and other super-heroes—even invents one for the occasion, the Escapist, which if not particularly believable as Golden Age fare to me was still good enough for Dark Horse to give it a try recently. There are Nazis here (of course), though mostly of the American variety, along with fisticuffs, spectacular magic tricks, gay sex, and no small amount of casual, historical name-dropping throughout. Orson Welles pops up once or twice. So does Man Ray. But for all the clever sleight of hand and determined wandering afield, Chabon is masterful at keeping the focus on mid-20th century life and all that it brought. And though it's rather a long novel, it lends itself easily to taking in large gulps—which, after the first hundred pages or so, could very well be all you want to do until you've finished it up.

In case it's not at the library.