Wonder Boys

It took me a long time to come back to Michael Chabon’s early books after reading Kavalier and Clay. I had in my head that Wonder Boys was frivolous and overly modern, possibly because I get the movie mixed up with the book. However, on re-reading it I remembered that this is actually an excellent novel.

Chabon uses insomnia to symbolize a gift for writing. He calls writing “the midnight disease.” Writers lie awake at night, persistently unable to stop noticing and analyzing the world around them. And as the main character loses his way as a writer, he also finds himself increasingly plagued by daytime blackouts — not only is he not staying awake while others sleep, he can’t even stay awake while others stay awake.

Chabon can write about writers and writing in a poetic, fucked-up way that makes you not only want to be a writer but believe you are one. Even I, eternally preoccupied with sleeping, can believe in my own writerly talents, simply because I stayed awake long enough to read this book. It helps that the prose is the lovely, twisting stuff you expect from Chabon, making this an effortless read in the way that his more “serious” works are not. It’s a book you can wrap an afternoon around, rather than, say, an entire philosophy.

He does make mistakes, of course. He has that early novelist’s fault of trying to say everything about a character without saying anything about a character. That’s great if you pick the right details. The way a woman stubbornly keeps wearing her hideous parka, combined with the way she sits in chairs, might speak volumes in the right hands. Chabon gets good at this later, but in Wonder Boys you get ham-handed character development sometime. You know the father-in-law is lovable because he fixes things, he has gentle hands — oh, and also he and his wife adopted three Korean orphans. You know the sister-in-law is difficult because she has this quirky, strange way of speaking — and also she’s cross-eyed, and wears hideous clothes, and eats mushrooms she finds under cowshit.

But, you know, mostly it’s great. And I love Sara, my chosen heroine out of the three or four women who cycle through the plot. I wish she didn’t have to compete with a sexed-up college girl for the hero’s affections, a girl who only exists to ultimately reject him so he can come to terms with the only woman left who will have him. But I guess it wouldn’t be a middle-aged male Bildungsroman without one sexy adolescent girl.

“Sara, honey,” I said, “I’m stuck.” I gave my arm a gentle tug, trying to free it. “You’re lying on my arm.”

She didn’t move; she only opened her eyes, dry once again, and gave me a very hard stare.

“I guess you’re going to have to chew it off, then,” she said.

Love and Friendship

I re-read Love and Friendship last night, Jane Austen’s novella — novlette? novelina? — that she wrote while still in her teens. I’d forgotten how much of the later books can be found in here. For example:

A young man speaks to people he’s met moments ago:

“My father,” he continued, “is a mean and mercenary wretch — it is only to such particular friends as this dear party that I would thus betray his failings.”

Doesn’t that sound like Wickham in Pride and Prejudice telling Elizabeth and her family everything about his history with Mr. Darcy, when he’s only just met them?

Or this, where the heroine meets another girl for the first time:

There was a disagreeable coldness and forbidding reserve in her reception of me which was equally distressing and unexpected: none of that interesting sensibility or amiable sympathy in her manners and address to me when we first met which should have distinguished our introduction to each other.

Sounds like Emma complaining about Jane Fairfax, who she’s only just met again after an absence of many years:

Wrapped up in a cloak of politeness, she was determined to hazard nothing. She was disgustingly, was suspiciously reserved.

In this passage, the heroine condemns a young man as being entirely worthless:

They said he was sensible, well-informed, and agreeable; we did not pretend to judge of such trifles, but as we were convinced he had no soul, that he had never read the Sorrows of Werther…we were certain Janetta could feel no affection for him.

Not unlike Harriet in Emma requiring Robert Martin to read The Romance of the Forest before she could consider him perfect, or Catherine in Northanger Abbey being so delighted that Henry Tilney admitted to reading Gothic novels.

Really, the heroines of Love and Friendship are Jane Austen’s models for many of her future silly characters: Harriet, Catherine and Isabella in Northanger Abbey, Maria in Mansfield Park and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, to name a few. And that’s the fun of reading this, because all the sensible characters are sunk back in the narrative. Imagine Pride and Prejudice if Lydia and Kitty had been the main characters, running mad with all the officers and running wild at home, while Elizabeth and Jane were just part of the wallpaper. Sort of a Breakfast Club for the empire waist set.

Anyway, Love and Friendship (tagline: “Deceived in Friendship and Betrayed in Love”) is a fun half-hour read and if you like Jane Austen but find her occasionally stuffy you should try this.

I could not help telling her how much she engaged my admiration. “Oh! Miss Jane,” said I — and stopped from an inability, at the moment, of expressing myself as I could wish — “Oh! Miss Jane,” I repeated — I could not think of words to suit my feelings. She seemed waiting for my speech. I was confused — distressed — my thoughts were bewildered — and I could only add — “How do you do?”