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A review by micaelabrody
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
3.0
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.