Second Thoughts

I recently read Michael Chabon’s book Wonder Boys, on which one of my favorite, most cherished films was based. As a movie it’s a slyly uplifting story about a failing writing professor who comes to realize one of his students is a strikingly talented writer, however much he may succumb to petty thievery, excessive brooding, and compulsive storytelling (what the less romantic of us might call lying). Amidst a failing life, which culminates in a series of genuinely hilarious strokes of bad luck and whimsical coincidences, Grady Tripp is able to lose everything he thought worthwhile while gaining what he never knew to be important. It’s a collegiate film set in a town of professors with nostalgic cars, who use typewriters, relive old movies, and generally live in a universe in which aesthetic consequence is far weightier than actual consequence. In fact, the reckless main character never quite pays for his actions, not really, and it’s mostly solved because he concludes at the end that he “knows where he wants to go” as a writer.

The book is quite different in tone, if only because of its lack of a happy, pat ending. It’s more satirical, sharper, less warm. James Leer, the student, is not a genius writer, and actually writes rather complicated, screwed-up, lacerated prose that’s nearly impossible to read because of its excessive and ill-placed punctuation. The various farcical instances of the novel have a different sort of humor which isn’t laced with lightness or as much absurdity, as in the movie. It cuts deeper, it’s more satirical, and it has consequence. There’s something of a macabre edge to the novel’s world, which is complemented by the narrator’s continual allusions of his life circumstances to the short stories of August Van Zorn, an obscure writer who descended out of Edgar Allen Poe.

One of the best parts about the book is the way Grady Tripp’s character relates himself to his literary interests, including his own characters. At WordFest, the weekend event which is the backdrop to the whole book and film, there is a professor who gives a lecture entitled “The Writer as Doppelgänger”, referring to the idea of a shadow self which follows one around causing mischief, e.g. see Peter Pan. Having what Grady calls the “midnight disease,” many writers find that their literary aspirations and characters become doppelgängers, as they gradually lose hold of the line between the physical and fictional world, always suffering the quintessential fates of their characters. After awhile, a writer confuses reality with dreams, or himself with his characters, or the random happenings of his life with the machinations of a plot. The line between fiction and reality becomes overrun.

This aspect of the novel changes it completely, I think, from the movie. I’m not sure which one I like better--the movie is darkly funny and familiar and disarmingly touching. The book has a darker edge to it, a shadow which is the doppelganger and the midnight disease, and a realization that real consequences happen and that one must face them, and that they set the artistic consequences into better, clearer relief.