Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

A couple of years ago, I was working as an editorial assistant for a fiction publisher. It was a good job - a shimmering-holy-grail sort of job, really, for a literature graduate like myself - the kind of career-starter that other literature graduates would fight to their last bloodied gasp to secure. I was pretty lucky to have landed this job, this shining golden job that allowed me to read and edit and generally indulge my love of books for a living. And yet, in the middle of the cold black tidal wave of the recession, I decided to leave my job. With no other job to go to.

Quite a lot of people thought I was mad. I didn't blame them. I was a bit mad, I think. The thing was, I'd pretty much fallen into the job, and so it felt quite natural to just fall right on out of it again. There are a whole long and convoluted list of reasons why I resigned, which I am not going to go into on a book review blog, but suffice to say that one of them - definitely one of them - was the slush pile.

The slush pile was the deluge of unsolicited manuscripts I had to sift through on a daily basis. For months, every manuscript I picked up had some kind of depressing premise. Death, drugs, nihilistic sex, abuse. I used to take this stuff to read and make notes on during my train commute home, and oh my goodness, it was just about all I could do not to hurl myself onto the tracks by the end of each journey. I used to come back into the office complaining about it. "Why does nobody ever send us in anything funny?" I lamented.

With this in mind, as a parting gift, one of my colleagues gave me this book, Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon. It's taken me until now to read it, and I'm not sure why - maybe because it is partially about the business of publishing fiction, and I needed to distance myself from that for a little while. Anyway, once I started reading it, I ate the damn thing up. It is funny. It's got wit, slapstick, self-deprecation . . . It's also got death, drugs, nihilistic sex, and abuse - but they're done funny.

It's about Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor and novelist, struggling to finish an absolute behemoth of a book entitled Wonder Boys which he has promised to deliver to his friend and editor, Terry Crabtree. Crabtree has come to visit, and Grady is desperate to hide from him the fact that the book is actually still unfinished. On top of this, Grady's wife is missing, his mistress is pregnant, and his fucked-up student has killed a dog that Grady feels responsible for.

One of my favourite bits, where Grady is trying to work out how he feels about the prospect of a baby:

'Do you have any babies in this hospital, by any chance?' I said when she looked up. 'You know, where you can look at them behind the glass?'

. . . So the tuba and I went to take a look at the babies. There were only two on display at the moment, lying in their glass crates like a couple of large squirming turnips. A man I presumed to be the father of one of them was leaning against the observation window, an old guy like me, sawdust on his trousers, hair Brylcreemed, his shop foreman's face beefy and half asleep. He kept looking from one to the other of the babies, biting his lip, as if trying to decide which one to spend his hard-earned dollars on. Neither of them, his face seemed to say, was exactly a bargain, head dented, skin purple and crazy with veins, spastic limbs struggling as if against some invisible medium or foe.

"Boy," I said, "would I like to have me one of those." 

The whole thing is irreverent. Irreverent and irresponsible. And I'm not sure how funny non-writers would find it - a lot of the humour hinges on the paranoia of writer's block, and the gap between how the writer perceives themself and how they actually are:

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 . . . 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!

Personally, I found it hilarious. I'd recommend it to aspiring, failed and successful writers everywhere, and oh, how I would have loved to have found it in the middle of my slush pile.