Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Chabon, Michael - Shelby Hearon (review date 2 April 1995)

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Shelby Hearon (review date 2 April 1995)

SOURCE: “Novel Complications: Michael Chabon's ‘Wildly Funny’ Tale of a Problem-Plagued Writer's Final Fling,” in Chicago Tribune Books, April 2, 1995, p. 5.

[In the following review, Hearon offers a positive assessment of Wonder Boys.]

At the start of Michael Chabon's second novel, Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp, a fat, 40ish, 6-foot-3 academic in small-town Pennsylvania, is laboring on his fourth novel, Wonder Boys, already over a thousand pages long and with five possible endings involving biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths. He's trying to complete it before his best friend and longtime editor, Terry Crabtree, arrives to give a lecture at the college where Tripp is trapped in the chicken coop of teaching fiction.

This, then, is that agreeable and ironic staple, the novelist's novel about a novelist and his novel. What makes this wise, wildly funny story much...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. David Montrose (review date 26 April 1991)
   2. Elizabeth Tallent (review date 9 June 1991)
   3. Kathryn Herold (review date Fall 1991)
   4. Greg Johnson (review date Summer 1992)
   5. Douglas Fowler (essay date Winter 1995)
   6. Jonathan Yardley (review date 19 March 1995)
   7. Richard Eder (review date 26 March 1995)
   8. Shelby Hearon (review date 2 April 1995)
   9. Michael Chabon with Lisa See (interview date 10 April 1995)
   10. Bharat Tandon (review date 21 April 1995)
   11. Erik Himmelsbach (essay date 27 April 1995)
   12. Roz Kaveney (review date 9 June 1995)
   13. Michael Gorra (review date 26 June 1995)
   14. Suzann Bick (review date Fall 1995)
   15. Sven Birkerts (review date January 1996)
   16. Mark Greif (review date 5 March 1999)
   17. James Hynes (review date 4 April 1999)
   18. Donna Seaman (review date 16 May 1999)
   19. Michael Dirda (review date 17 September 2000)
   20. David Horspool (review date 6 October 2000)
   21. Jonathan Levi (review date 8 October 2000)
   22. Michael Chabon with Michael J. Ybarra (interview date 9 October 2000)
   23. David Bahr (essay date 19 December 2000)
   24. Tom Deignan (review date February 2001)
   25. Tom Deignan (essay date February 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright