Michael Chabon's Grady Tripp is one messed up college writing professor - his marriage is breaking up, his girlfriend (wife of the dean) is pregnant, his marijuana habit is taking over and his editor is just about out of a job. Tripp has published a few moderately successful novels but is strangling his creativity with introspection and marijuana - never finishing a 2,000-plus-page novel called Wonder Boys.
When his editor and best friend, Terry Crabtree, comes to town and spreads chaos, Tripp goes along for the ride. Farcical misadventures dominate, from a picked-up transvestite to a wild ride in a stolen car that contains a tuba and the corpses of a dog and a boa constrictor.
Chabon writes with a wry, vulnerable wit that cleaves open the minds of his wonderful characters while his clean prose keeps the madcap story going so well that you'll want it to never end.
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt. K.A.P. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Michael Chabon is the author of Wonder Boys, which won universal critical acclaim and was made into a feature film starring Michael Douglas. Entertainment Weekly included his latest, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, on its list of the best books of 2000. Both are available from Brilliance Audio. He received his B.A. from The University of Pittsburgh and his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. He lives with his wife and two children in California.
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