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.
11:49 pm 
8 July, 2001: Skin Tight
The first Carl Hiassen book I read, Tourist Season, was charming -- an Elmore Leonard novel by way of Dave Barry, about a crazed man's attempt to scare tourists out of Florida. I had high hopes for Skin Tight, but it just kind of lay there like a leaden blob. The culture of body worship might have made for an amusing lark for a comic crime novel -- I'd have enjoyed Donald Westlake's take on it, I think -- but Hiassen seems to have realized that he didn't have enough material to make for that book and welded on some characters from a different book. The protagonist is a laconic Vietnam Vet with a streak of violence and a bad habit of marrying coctail waitresses; the evil plastic surgeon's chief stooge is a seven-footer whose face is a mass of scar tissue (the result of plastic surgery gone awry, natch) named "Chemo." Other, similarly cringeworthy touches abound. This book was a big sloppy mess that burnt through the goodwill Hiassen had earned with Tourist Season; I'm not actually sure that I want to read Big Numbers now.
5:11 pm