Chabon, Michael - Bharat Tandon (review date 21 April 1995)

Bharat Tandon (review date 21 April 1995)

SOURCE: “A Novelist's Nightmare,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 21, 1995, p. 20.

[In the following review, Tandon offers a generally favorable assessment of Wonder Boys.]

Henry James exhorted the potential novelist “to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” Grady Tripp, the narrator of Michael Chabon's second novel, a literary enfant terrible turned embarrassing adult, is less sanguine about the sensitivity of artists:

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all round him the neighbours soundly...

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