The Books: “Wonder Boys” (Michael Chabon)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Wonder Boys – by Michael Chabon. I wrote somewhere once about the long long wait for this book after Chabon’s debut The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Mitchell and I had fallen so in love with his writing that we eagerly waited to see what he would do next. Years passed. Occasionally, one of us would say to the other, “What ever happened to Michael Chabon, dammit??”

Then – finally – Wonder Boys. His second novel.

The story of what happened in those intervening years is well-known (so I won’t repeat it here) – and in a way – it’s what Wonder Boys is all about. It’s always just been such a great example to me – of following your gut. Of knowing when to say: You know what? What I’m working on is NOT WORKING. Of being bold enough to throw something out – and start over completely. (Like recently – when John Irving re-wrote his entire book, changing the POV – and NOBODY wanted him to do it, because he would miss his deadline, etc. and it’s almost like – at a certain point in the process, it seems like it becomes too late to change things. I LOVE that story about Irving and I love the story about Chabon. Be bold. Be bold. Don’t be afraid. Follow your gut.) The Wonder Boys is a lovely novel – funny – so funny, sad, and full of indelible characters. I mean. Grady Tripp. Come on. I can never forget him.

Oh, and GREAT adaptation of the book into a film. I heard it was going to be a film and got scared … because I kinda feel proprietary about Michael Chabon and I didn’t want them to mess it up (as they so often do. I’m still pissed about The Shipping News) But not only did they not mess it up – they did a great job – and captured the SPIRIT of the book, which sometimes is the hardest thing to get. I love that movie. Bravo.

But what I really love about this book is the parts about writing. It’s not so much Chabon navel gazing … but really examining the whole process. And how one can get so easily sidetracked – that’s the excerpt I chose today – although there were so many to choose from.

Excerpt from Wonder Boys – by Michael Chabon.

While the coffee was brewing I drank a tall glass of orange juice, to which I added two tablespoons of honey, on the theory that an increase in my blood sugar, along with a massive dose of caffeine, would eliminate the last traces of my hangover. Pot for the nausea and the heaviness of heart, vitamin C for the cell structure, sugar for the depleted blood, caffeine to burn off the moral fog; it was starting to come back to me now – the whole praxis of alcoholism and reckless living. When the coffee was ready, I poured it into a thermos pitcher and carried it out to my office at the back of the house, where James Leer lay on the sofa, his head pillowed on his praying hands, like someone pantomiming sleep. The sleeping bag had slid partway to the floor and I saw now that he’d gone to bed naked. His suit, shirt, and tie were draped across the footrest of my old Eames chair, white BVDs folded neatly on top of the pile. I wondered if Hannah had undressed him, or if he’d managed it himself. He had the shrunken look of a tall person asleep, curled up into himself, his knees and elbows and wrists too large, his skin pale and freckled. His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy’s – perhaps over time one’s genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer. I felt sorry for James Leer when I saw his penis. Carefully I redistributed the sleeping bag over his form.

“Thank you,” he said, without waking.

I said, “You’re welcome,” and then carried the pot of coffee over to my desk. It was six-fifteen. I went to work. I had to slap an ending on Wonder Boys by tomorrow evening if I was going to let Crabtree see it. I took a sip of coffee and gave my left cheek an exhortatory smack. For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I’d fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before. As of this fine morning I was halfway through its fourth page, more or less, with another five pages to go. An accidental poisoning, a car crash, a house on fire; the births of three children and a miraculous trotter named Faithless; a theft, an arrest, a trial, an electrocution; a wedding, two funerals, a cross-country trip; two dances, a seduction in a fallout shelter, and a deer hunt; all these scenes and a dozen others I had yet to write, according to the neat headings of my stupid fucking outline: nine central characters’ and a lifetime’s worth of destiny that I had, for the last month, been attempting to compress into fifty-odd pages of terse and lambent prose. I reread with scorn the confident, pompous annotations I’d made on that distant day: Take your time with this, and This has to be very very big, and worst of all, This scene should read as a single vast Interstate of Language, three thousand miles long. How I hated the asshole who had written that note!

Once again and with the usual pleasure I entertained the notion of tossing the whole thing out. With this swollen monster out of the way I’d be at liberty to undertake The Snake Handler, or the story of the washed-up astronaut who marooned himself in Disney World, or the story of the two doomed baseball teams, blue and gray, playing nine on the eve of Chancellorsville, or The King of Freestyle, or any of the dozen other imaginary novels that had fluttered past like admirals and lyrebirds while I labored with my shovel in the ostrich pen of Wonder Boys. Then I indulged the equally usual, not quite as pleasurable fantasy of taking Crabtree into my confidence, telling him that I was still years away from finishing Wonder Boys, and throwing myself on his mercy. Then I thought of Joe Fahey and, as always, rolled a blank sheet of paper into the machine.

I worked for four hours, typing steadily, lowering myself on a very thin cord into the dank and worm-ridden hole of an ending I’d already tried three times before. This one would oblige me to go back through the previous two-thousand-odd pages to flatten out and marginalize one of the present main characters and to eliminate another entirely, but I thought that of the five false conclusions to the novel I’d come up with in the last month, it was probably my best shot. While I worked I told myself lies. Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone. Ending the book this way, I told myself, would work out for the best; this was in fact the very ending my book had been straining toward all along. Crabtree’s visit, viewed properly, was a kind of creative accident, a gift from God, a hammer blow to loosen all the windows my imagination had long since painted shut. I would finish it sometime tomorrow, hand it over to Crabtree, and thus save both our careers.