Metro Pulse/Pulp/Michael Chabon

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An appreciation of Michael Chabon

by Jeanne McDonald

Not since the publication of A New Life by Bernard Malamud in 1961 or The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy in 1952 has a book so wittily and accurately portrayed the American academic life as Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys ($14, Picador). Both Malamud's hero, Levin, and Chabon's narrator, Grady Tripp, are hapless victims of the system—Levin as a new instructor at a small Oregon college in the 1950s, awed by the petty concerns and labyrinthine politics of the faculty and administration; Tripp as a disillusioned English professor at a large university in Pittsburgh.

Tripp's main problem is coming up with a successor to his previously celebrated novel, published when he himself was a "wonder boy." It doesn't help that he's constantly stoned and has, for five years, been sleeping with Sara Gaskell, who is both chancellor and wife of the head of the English Department. The story takes place during WordFest, the department's annual literary weekend. Thrown into that imbroglio is the hero's unlikely role as surrogate father to a family of misfits—James Leer, a suicidal student who fabricates both his past and present, murders Sara's blind dog and robs her husband of a jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe; Hannah, a voluptuous coed who rents a room in Tripp's house; and Crabtree, Tripp's sexually deviant agent, who hopes to leave Pittsburgh with Tripp's long-awaited manuscript in order to save his own career.

Things get even worse when Tripp's wife leaves him and Sara announces that she is pregnant with his baby. Even amidst fainting spells caused by his substance abuse and tumultuous lifestyle, Tripp doggedly returns to his novel, over 2000 pages long but still plotless. When Hannah begins reading the manuscript, Grady is crushed by her evaluation: "...It...gets all spread out," says Hannah, "...Like that thing with the Indian ruin? And all that about the town cemetery? All the headstones, and their inscriptions, and the bones and bodies underneath them? And the part about their different guns in the cabinet in the old house? And the genealogies of their horses?...I'm sorry, Grady, really, I just couldn't help wondering...what this book would be like...if you weren't always so stoned all the time when you write."

All this convoluted intrigue might sound too sensational for a serious novel, but Chabon has a remarkable talent for creating literary, even lyrical, books from bizarre situations. As a matter of fact, this Pulitzer Prize-winning author (for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), is adept at creating bizarre situations that seem absolutely true. Take Werewolves in Their Youth ($12, Picador), where the ubiquitous writer August Van Zorn, whom Grady Tripp cites as his mentor in Wonder Boys, turns up as author of a creepy story reminiscent of Poe or Stephen King, called "In the Black Mill." Chabon prefaces the story with Tripp's description of Van Zorn: "He worked at night, using a fountain pen, in a bentwood rocking chair, with a Hudson's Bay blanket draped across his lap and a bottle of bourbon on the table before him. When his work was going well, he could be heard...madly rocking while he subjected his heroes to the gruesome rewards of their passions for unnameable things."

The title story is a touching evocation of the children we knew when we were growing up, those who, through bad genes or abuse or terrible turns of fate, engendered terror in our hearts. In my neighborhood, it was "Jimbo," a huge genetic accident with the added burden of a raw and festering skin disorder, who chased us, loping, and howling unrecognizable words. In the summers, when my brother went to camp and my sister and I had to work his newspaper route, we blindly hurled the paper somewhere in the vicinity of Jimbo's house and then ran for our lives.

Then there was James, an enormous boy at our junior high school who had an unfortunate penchant for choking people. Invariably, at recess, the boys taunted James to the point of explosion, until at last he bellowed, grabbed the nearest throat, and squeezed until a male teacher could be summoned to save yet another bully's miserable life. Timothy Stokes in "Werewolves" is the boy who terrorizes children in his school, but his classmate Paul begins to understand Timothy's need to escape from reality when his own family begins to break up. In these nine stories, horror abounds, but not without compassionate touches that lend enlightenment to the dark alien fears that haunt our childhoods.

The immense talent of Michael Chabon allows his readers to imagine the lives of his characters continuing long after the last pages of his books are read. He's writing about truths, not the truth, and that's what makes him a wonder boy.