30 July, 2001: Wonder Boys
I didn't see the movie of Wonder Boys. I have an almost uncontrolable loathing for Michael Douglas movies, and I couldn't imagine enjoying watching Douglas getting stoned for the length of a film. Having read Wonder Boys, though, maybe I could see it -- the protagonist, Grady, travels a path of self-immolation so total that the book almost painful to read. And, were it not for the fact that Grady is deserves everything he gets, I don't know that I'd have liked Wonder Boys as much. There's schadenfreude to be found in watching Grady, a narcissistic horndog failure who spends much of the novel stoned and all of the novel floating through without a plan, deal with his life collapsing. But because Michael Chabon is a good writer (as I discovered earlier reading the excellent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, it's deeper than that -- Grady is a man who has never lived up to his potential and knows it, and who among us hasn't felt like that? An impressive book, especially considering the Michael Douglas connection. I'll have to dig up a copy of Werewolves in Their Youth next.