“The Wonder Boys” by Michael Chabon
This is a wild ride of a story about what ambition looks like in the bloom of youth and at the opening of old age. Set in academia, where promise shines and dulls with the advent of star students and waning of star professors, it tells a story as old as time. It’s a story about the abuse of time itself. While this shares a subgenre with “Goodbye, Mr Chips” and “The Paper Chase” it is about so much more than an old teacher and his unruly modern students. Chabon reaches well past the classroom to tell this story, fitting in 3/4 of a dead snake, Marilyn Monroe’s wedding jacket and old jazz clubs in Pittsburgh. And then there is the writing. In a very good novel you are lucky to get five fabulous sentences that motor the plot forward with lyricism and are invisibly dipped in meaning. Here the mic is dropped on about every third page. To wit, “...he likes to caution and amuse his young companions with case histories of the incurable disease that leads all good writers to suffer, inevitably, the quintessential fate of their characters.”
People say I am a harsh critic on literature. But that is only to remind everyone what stellar looks like.
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