The Wonder of Boys

“The artist, perhaps more than any other person, inhabits failure.”

I kept thinking about this hauntingly true statement by Joyce Carol Oates as I read “Wonder Boys” by Michael Chabon again recently.

A modern classic, “Wonder Boys” firmly established Michael Chabon as a force in contemporary American fiction. At once a deft parody of the American fame factory and a piercing portrait of young and old desire, this novel introduces two unforgettable characters: Grady Tripp, a former publishing prodigy now lost in a fog of pot and passion and stalled in the midst of his endless second book, and Grady’s student, James Leer, a budding writer obsessed with Hollywood self-destruction and struggling with his own searching heart. In their odyssey through the streets of Pittsburgh, Grady and James are joined by Grady’s pregnant mistress, his hilariously bizarre editor, and an achingly beautiful student lodger. The result is a wildly comic, poignantly moving, and ultimately profound search for past promise, future fame, and a purpose to Grady’s life.

A rare talent, Chabon is a literary novelist who plots like a genre writer, making his books profound page-turners, exciting character-driven adventures.

I’m sure, as a novelist, I over-identify with Grady Tripp—admittedly, novels featuring novelists are among my favorites (with “The End of the Affair” sitting securely on top)—but you needn’t be a novelist to enjoy this funny, insightful, wild ride.

“Wonder Boys” has my highest recommendation. It’s as funny as it is insightful, a serious novel that’s more entertaining than most of the novels that aim merely to entertain.

Though an absolute train wreck, Grady Tripp is as likable and sympathetic a character as you’re likely to meet. He presents as a big unmade bed, a man-child wreaking havoc in Neverland, but lurking beneath the boy is a shadow self, dark and dangerous.

As John Gardner said, “True artists, whatever smiling face they may show you, are obsessive, driven people.” This is certainly true of Grady.

Writing a novel is such a long, lonely journey, requires so much isolation and concentration, it can drive a man a little mad (as in the case of Grady, who’s been working on his for seven years) or a lot mad (as in the case of Jack Torrance). After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Grady, like most novelists, has a disease. The midnight disease—that cureless condition, with which I am well acquainted, and all novelists suffer from—is poignantly and accurately described by Grady as an affliction “which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to ‘fit in’ by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happens with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave the feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief objective of your own hostile gaze.”

This is just one aspect of the midnight disease, but it is scarily dead-on. A novelist, no matter what she is experiencing, is also observing, taking notes—mental or otherwise—raw meat for the monster in the basement.

I go back to Joyce Carol Oates—surely a sufferer of this same affliction—“The novel is the disease for which only the novel is the cure.”

Having a midnight mind or being stricken with the midnight disease is akin to the notion that the writer has his own doppelganger living inside him—and on the page he’s bleeding onto.

In “Wonder Boys” an author delivering a lecture posits that over the course of his writing life, he had become his own doppelganger, “a malignant shadow who lived in the mirrors and under the floorboards and behind the drapes of his own existence, haunting all his personal relationships and all of his commerce with the world; a being unmoved by tragedy, unconcerned with the feelings of others, disinclined to any human business but surveillance and recollection.”

The author goes on to say that it’s this shadow self that gets him into trouble, that keeps things interesting so he has something to write about.

As true as this is, Grady takes it, kneads it a bit, and comes up with this: “This was the writer's true doppelganger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work—Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver—whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life’s very course.”

This is life imitating art at its very purest, and I can tell you firsthand it’s true—perceptively, scarily, devastatingly true.

The world is full of adults—responsible men and women clocking in and out, showing up, shouldering loads, dependable, reliable, mature.
Then there are those of us who play for a living (even when we can’t make a living at it)—artists, actors, musicians, writers, and many others who spend much of our time pretending.

The wonder of boys is that we never grow up—not really, not completely. Sure, we look like all the other grownups, but that’s just a costume.
This spirit of puer aeternus is captured brilliantly in “Wonder Boys,” and is personified in an insight Grady has about the state of modern marriage and the world:

“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.”

Eternal boys like Grady never grow up, and I, for one, wouldn’t want them to. Sure, he’s continually setting fire to his life in ways he’s conscious of and not, and those closest to him suffer the most damage, but what’s a little smoke inhalation and third-degree burns when you’re having so much fun?