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 sleep.

Much of Wonder Boys possesses this fever-dream quality of narration, as the perpetually drugged, failed author Tripp stumbles through a weekend that would be much better lost, but refuses to go away.

Tripp's problem is not writer's block but writer's bloat; he is a former Wunderkind whose fourth novel, Wonder Boys, is clearly turning into a monster as flabby and directionless as its author. It is hard to avoid making ironic parallels between Tripp's work and Chabon's novel of the same title; indeed, the dust-jacket photograph (of Chabon's manuscript) and the blurb positively encourage such thoughts. Since his first novel, the much-hyped The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was published in 1987, Chabon has produced only one book of short stories, while his more prolific contemporaries, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, have seen their celebrity turned against them. But he has managed to make out of the stuff of novelist's nightmares a winningly cynical comedy of literary fame. Pittsburgh was praised for its transformation of the rite-of-passage genre; here, Chabon opts for a mixture of campus novel, Sunset Boulevard and picaresque Gonzo-monologue.

Tripp's third wife, “the only Jewish girl in Squirrel Hill with an epicanthic fold,” leaves him on the opening day of a symposium on the novel organized by his faculty, while Crabtree, his disreputable agent, arrives to inspect the non-existent final draft of Wonder Boys. Thus Chabon sets in motion that reliable pair, Life and Art, with Grady Tripp providing the druggy haze through which the two are seen imitating each other. The wild, episodic plot of the novel is difficult to summarize: the weekend takes in a dead dog, a dead snake, a Capra-obsessed student, a tuba, Marilyn Monroe's wedding jacket and a fraught Jewish-Korean Passover.

And if this all sounds like a psychedelic cartoon, that's how it reads, too. But this need be no bad thing; after all, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover are often at their best when they most resemble Tex Avery. The loose plot also gives Chabon a structure on which to hang the satirical vignettes which are the book's most enjoyable feature. There is nothing terribly original going on here, but the skill with which Chabon composes Tripp's comic despair, and the delight he takes in his grotesque characters hold the reader's attention.

Wonder Boys is funniest when lampooning other people's writing, whether it be the semiotics of Marilyn Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio (“the American tendency to view every marriage as a cross between tabooed exogamy and corporate merger”) or sub-Lovecraft horror (“she was transformed, somewhat inexplicably I recall, into an incarnation of Yshtaxta, a succubus from a distant galaxy”). And at the centre of it all lies the exquisitely doomed Wonder Boys itself:

I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within … men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.

The sentence-structure is typical of the novel: as the best cartoons revel in their ability to pile absurdity on absurdity, so Chabon rejoices in his capacity to compound Tripp's clauses and excesses beyond conventional spans. This humour of poise and cadence is welcome at a time when American comedy, be it Quentin Tarantino's films or American Psycho, has come to rely on postmodern name-dropping as a substitute for jokes.

Perhaps inevitably, Tripp's story runs out of steam; and the novel ends up too much like Fear and Loathing in the Creative Writing Faculty. Nevertheless Wonder Boys has been worth the wait, although it may well prove a disappointment to devotees of Chabon's earlier work. The book provides a great deal of fun, partly because it stubbornly refuses to be the Great American Novel that Tripp's Wonder Boys fails to be. Chabon offers us a sobering suggestion, that writers are destined to become the losers they love to portray; and an ounce of self-parody is worth several volumes of portentousness. Even so, one can't help feeling that he is gnawing a little too gleefully at the hand that feeds him.