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Title: Wonder Boys (Bookcassette(r) Edition) by Michael Chabon, David Colacci ISBN: 1-56100-626-2 Publisher: Bookcassette Sales Pub. Date: April, 1995 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 4 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.31 (110 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: An Interesting Tripp
Comment: I'm one of the club members who believe that novels are just about almost always much better than their film adaptations. However, I found the movie was stronger than the novel. I watched the movie before I read the book, and don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book, but the movie inspired me more.
I'm not going to go through the plot, but I will state that this was my first time reading Chabon, and he has quickly become one of my favorite writers. James Leer and Terry Crabtree were my favorite characters and there were moments I found myself laughing out loud in the quietest section of my school library.
The novel did drag on a bit for me whenever Tripp went to visit his ex-wifes family for the Passover Seder, but other than that, the story flowed pretty well.
I loved these characters and became attached to them pretty quickly. Chabon has the ability to make you care for certain characters, even if you know you would never be able to get along with them if they truly did exist. With this novel, he created a simple story about ones man situation which would, at moments, get worse than it was before but everything eventually works itself, even if it's through publishing bribery as was one instance.
While this isn't Chabon's best work, I am actually considering re-reading it if I ever get the copy I loaned out to a friend of mine back.
Rating: 4
Summary: This is Good Reading
Comment: I read this book after I saw the movie, so I am judging it a bit backwards. I read with a vision in my head of the way the characters were portrayed in the film, and tried to envision them the way Michael Chabon wrote them. For example, in the book, Grady Tripp is a large, imposing man, and his friend and editor, Terry Crabtree, is the same age as he is, and they have been friends since college. Of course, in the film, the slender Michael Douglas plays Grady, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Crabtree, making him about 20 years younger. But, things always change when books are adapted to film. I think the screenwriter did a fine job adapting this novel to the screen, and keeping it fairly faithful to the book.
Michael Chabon is a very descriptive writer, as far as feelings, sensations, smells and the like. He focuses mainly on Grady Tripp as narrator here, and a lot on Crabtree and James Leer. He is also more open about Crabtree's sexuality in the book, although it wasn't exactly hidden in the movie. There were also some changes, like the name and breed of the dog, which seemed kind of unnecessary.
All in all, I found this book a well-written page turner, with a very interesting protaganist, the confused, dope-smoking, blocked writer, Grady Tripp. There is much more about his estranged wife and family in the book, and the ending isn't quite as uplifting as the film, plus, I would have liked an epilogue of what happened to the characters after the novel was over. Although, the ending of the book is more realistic and ambivalent than the film.
I couldn't wait to finish the book, and then view the movie again. It's rare that a film is so accurate to the novel and so well-casted. Especially since the author himself did not adapt the screenplay, it is amazingly like the book in almost every way. I couldn't wait to finish the book, because I was really caught up in the lives of the characters. Michael Chabon is definitely a very good writer, and I want to read his other novels, so that I can read them without the pre-existing condition of having seen the film.
Rating: 5
Summary: Tripp's trippy trip through Pittsburgh's academic underworld
Comment: Grady Tripp--professor, pothead, philanderer--is not all that likable; the type of egotistical pretender who rarely examines his own feelings, "an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house." But, then again, none of the cast of characters who comprise his limited universe and massage his enormous ego are all that admirable: his underperforming and pliable editor, his suicidal and mendacious star student, his two-faced and newly pregnant mistress, his credulous and demoralized Jewish Korean American wife, his bubbly and flirtatious boarder.
What makes Chabon's novel so wonderful is not that you'll meet characters you'll admire or like or identify with--you won't, one hopes--but that, even though it's a satire of academic life, this horde of misfits is so thoroughly believable. And it's one of the funniest books I've read: a protracted comedy of errors and pure boneheadedness.
Several years late with his fourth novel, Tripp plays host to his editor, who has arrived for a college symposium on writing and who hopes that Tripp, against all odds, has completed his long-promised magnum opus. With the help of their wayward companions, the undynamic duo collect in Tripp's 1966 emerald green Ford Galaxie 500 convertible: a dead blind dog, a tuba, a rather hefty bag of marijuana, a boa constrictor, a jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe, 2,611 manuscript pages of an unfinished (and unfinishable) novel, an assortment of pharmaceuticals--all of which are pursued through Pittsburgh by a street tough packing a German nine millimeter. It's a Peter Bogdanovich farce for the literary set.
On top of its ludicrous yet somehow plausible plot, Chabon flaunts an enviable ability to construct perfectly crafted sentences and drolly concise depictions, sprinkled liberally with references to highbrow and lowbrow culture from the last century. About a voracious reader: "Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine." About a free-spirited sister-in-law: "...it would certainly be typical of Deborah to decide that the best possible way of preparing for a family Seder was to drink Manischewitz and lie around half naked reading 'Betty and Veronica.'"
Chabon is a writer's writer whose prose can distract critics and colleagues to a begrudgingly awed full stop. Fortunately for readers, however, he aims his novels at a much broader audience.
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Title: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon ISBN: 0312282990 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 25 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon ISBN: 0060972122 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 19 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Werewolves in Their Youth : Stories by Michael Chabon ISBN: 0312254385 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 02 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title:Wonder Boys ASIN: B00003CXDJ Publisher: Paramount Home Video Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $13.04 |
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Title: Model World and Other Stories by Michael Chabon ISBN: 0380710994 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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