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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
This is one of those rare books in which subtle humor works better than comic hijinks. Chabon obviously has a talent for creating deep, meaningful characters and it shows here. While reading this book, you can feel the desperation that Grady Tripp feels or the apathy and confusion of James Leer. The story also moves along at a steady clip. The humor in this book is not so much in the actions of te characters, but the situations they find themselves in. Overall, a great effort by Chabon.
I've said time and time again that I have no patience for books about middle aged men having midlife crises and this is no exception. I'm glad I stuck with it considering I wanted to give up halfway through since the second half raised my rating by a full star, but this was a solid three-star book for me. Competent, well-written, funny at times and sympathetic, but drowning in the same kind of male self-pity that frustrated me in The Making of Zombie Wars. In that case too, I'd read other books that I'd loved by the author and was disappointed -- but not thrown off the author forever! (They even both include a few of the same plot points... hmm....)
This book was Chabon's sophomore effort, and feels like it. Not as brazenly or confidently flawed as a debut with the same plot would have been, but without the je ne sais quoi that a later novel would have had - and, as I've read two of those later novels, I can confirm they do. (I didn't love The Yiddish Policemen's Union either, but I remember feeling less bored than I did here.) I could be reading into it, especially because this is a book about a writer trying to write his book, but it hung in that slightly insecure can-I-pull-this-off-again limbo that so many second books/albums/movies do. (Speaking of, let me say that I was THRILLED it didn't end with "...so I wrote the book that you just read." I didn't think it would since most grown up books don't tend to, except it addressed the reader every once in a while and ya never know.)
There are moments here where there's awesome stuff happening, stuff that feels like the writer of (one of my all time favorites) Kavalier and Clay. The Passover Seder shines (a particular passage stuck with me through the rest of the book, about matzah and the Jewish tradition of finding loopholes in our own laws, see below); everything with the Warshaw family and almost all Grady's interactions with Crabtree are good. When James Leer stopped being annoying (pretty much when he goes to the Seder, actually), he got interesting. I was glad Hannah didn't only stay an object of our far older protagonist's desire, and in general I was pleased by how the book avoided being lascivious, which books like this can often become. But almost all of this happened in the second half of the book, which leaves the first a bit of a slog.
And to be clear, nothing in the book is really bad. Chabon is a spectacular writer; I'm not trying to say he's not. I am just glad he moved on from middle aged, needlessly self-destructive potheads to bigger, better things.
This book was Chabon's sophomore effort, and feels like it. Not as brazenly or confidently flawed as a debut with the same plot would have been, but without the je ne sais quoi that a later novel would have had - and, as I've read two of those later novels, I can confirm they do. (I didn't love The Yiddish Policemen's Union either, but I remember feeling less bored than I did here.) I could be reading into it, especially because this is a book about a writer trying to write his book, but it hung in that slightly insecure can-I-pull-this-off-again limbo that so many second books/albums/movies do. (Speaking of, let me say that I was THRILLED it didn't end with "...so I wrote the book that you just read." I didn't think it would since most grown up books don't tend to, except it addressed the reader every once in a while and ya never know.)
There are moments here where there's awesome stuff happening, stuff that feels like the writer of (one of my all time favorites) Kavalier and Clay. The Passover Seder shines (a particular passage stuck with me through the rest of the book, about matzah and the Jewish tradition of finding loopholes in our own laws, see below); everything with the Warshaw family and almost all Grady's interactions with Crabtree are good. When James Leer stopped being annoying (pretty much when he goes to the Seder, actually), he got interesting. I was glad Hannah didn't only stay an object of our far older protagonist's desire, and in general I was pleased by how the book avoided being lascivious, which books like this can often become. But almost all of this happened in the second half of the book, which leaves the first a bit of a slog.
And to be clear, nothing in the book is really bad. Chabon is a spectacular writer; I'm not trying to say he's not. I am just glad he moved on from middle aged, needlessly self-destructive potheads to bigger, better things.
I really enjoy Chabon's writing, but I got a little tired on this one by the end. The endlessly hurtling plot kind of wore me out, and I kept suspecting that this book would fail the Bechdel test.
(spoilers) I really wanted to like this book. I had read a different Chabon book and enjoyed it, and I've heard great things about Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Bob Dylan even won an Oscar for a song inspired by this/written for the soundtrack of this movie. Yet, as I was reading it, I found the prose got very tiresome, perhaps much like Grady's hulking novel he couldn't finish. I didn't care about any of the characters or what happened to them. I didn't care that Grady's wife left him. I didn't care that his mistress, who was an important member of the college, was pregnant. I didn't care that his novel flew out of the open car door. I didn't care about James and his maybe-maybe-not grandparents. I am a dog lover, and I didn't even care when the dog got shot. Nothing. Perhaps because the whole 300 pages spanned only one weekend, I felt like it was just a string of random unbelievable events that didn't really matter one way or the other, but remained in the text just to be ridiculous. I am hoping that Kavalier and Clay surpasses Wonder Boys in every aspect imaginable.
Awful. Absolutely, irredeemably, inexcusably awful. I would give it 1 star if A) I didn't LOVE other things Chabon has written and B) the first 50 pages or so hadn't grabbed me. It was interesting for about that long, and then it was a slog. I hated it, but once i realized I hated it, I was too far in to turn around, so I finished the damn thing.
Just some of the things I hated:
-Tripp's friend Crabtree may as well be a sexual predator with the way he "falls in love" with this emotionally unbalanced 20 year old and feeds him prescription drugs & gives him his first homosexual experience with a creepy gross guy twice his age. Yuck.
-Tripp is NOT sympathetic, in my opinion. He's a horrible, lying, philandering POS. And he never really gets his comeuppance. His seemingly "knowing" he's horrible doesn't make it any better... It makes it worse! He just keeps on being a cheating scumbag through the entire book, and I have no reason to believe he doesn't just find another woman to cheat on his 4th wife with once the book is over. I did not "root" for him at any moment. I think I felt more sympathy for the necrophiliac Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God." Seriously. At least he doesn't really know any better.
-The snake. Come on. Really? That was just contrived and stupid.
I was so disappointed in this book, it made me angry. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was wonderful. Gentlemen of the Road was a classic. This book = crap. Sorry. :/
Just some of the things I hated:
-Tripp's friend Crabtree may as well be a sexual predator with the way he "falls in love" with this emotionally unbalanced 20 year old and feeds him prescription drugs & gives him his first homosexual experience with a creepy gross guy twice his age. Yuck.
-Tripp is NOT sympathetic, in my opinion. He's a horrible, lying, philandering POS. And he never really gets his comeuppance. His seemingly "knowing" he's horrible doesn't make it any better... It makes it worse! He just keeps on being a cheating scumbag through the entire book, and I have no reason to believe he doesn't just find another woman to cheat on his 4th wife with once the book is over. I did not "root" for him at any moment. I think I felt more sympathy for the necrophiliac Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God." Seriously. At least he doesn't really know any better.
-The snake. Come on. Really? That was just contrived and stupid.
I was so disappointed in this book, it made me angry. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was wonderful. Gentlemen of the Road was a classic. This book = crap. Sorry. :/
Wonder Boys is a bit dark but humorous. The story takes place over one weekend in the life of a washed up writer, in which several ridiculous but entertaining things occur to bring him to an epiphany. The book progressed reasonably well, although I did skip a few descriptive passages. The main drawback I would find is that the ending seemed to be a bit "neat" -- the whole story finished in about 2 pages, and left me feeling a bit unsettled and slightly depressed. Overall, though, the story is worth a read.
didn't care about the plot but had a number of very nice passages.
Particularly liked: "Mr. Leer wrapped his bony arm around her in a way that was at once reassuring and triumphant, as if to say, There, I told you everything would work out fine. I imagined that he was always telling her something like this, in the vain hope that such lessons in grace had a cumulative force and that one day she would see that, for the most part, everything did. It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world."
Particularly liked: "Mr. Leer wrapped his bony arm around her in a way that was at once reassuring and triumphant, as if to say, There, I told you everything would work out fine. I imagined that he was always telling her something like this, in the vain hope that such lessons in grace had a cumulative force and that one day she would see that, for the most part, everything did. It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world."
a novel about writing and writers. it's a simple plot told complexly: a classic tale of adultery and writer's block becomes a bizarre, rollicking adventure through their crumbling lives.
"I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car."
"I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car."
Wonder Boys tem o defeito de ser uma espécie de Take 2 do The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, que ainda é o meu favorito do Chabon. Humor feito em cima de pessoas que, se não fosse pelo humor pretendido, teriam um comportamento totalmente abusivo e irritante. Por outro lado, acho bacana histórias construídas em cima de personagens completamente losers e errados. Cria-se algo de humano aí com o jeito que o Chabon trabalha.
A genialidade fica por conta do modo como ele faz as rimas da história, costurando-a com a sequências de atrapalhadas e desastres atraídos pelo protagonista e seus melhores amigos, usando objetos quase como elementos cênicos de teatro para criar sua brincadeira.
Ah, o livro trata de autores, editores, estudantes de literatura e outras criaturas naturalmente desastradas, o que teve uma graça extra para mim.
A genialidade fica por conta do modo como ele faz as rimas da história, costurando-a com a sequências de atrapalhadas e desastres atraídos pelo protagonista e seus melhores amigos, usando objetos quase como elementos cênicos de teatro para criar sua brincadeira.
Ah, o livro trata de autores, editores, estudantes de literatura e outras criaturas naturalmente desastradas, o que teve uma graça extra para mim.