[In the following excerpt, Birkerts offers a positive assessment of Wonder Boys.]

Novelists writing novels about novelists are like doctors taking their own blood pressure and temperature. The thermometer goes straight into the horse's mouth and those who are interested in the health of the art ought to pay close attention.

This past publishing season has been striking in that three novels [Men in Black, The Information, and Wonder Boys], all by seasoned practitioners, have not only featured novelist protagonists but have, each in its own way, used the erosion of writerly dreams as a way to look at the larger context of literary culture in our day. Martin Amis and Scott Spencer, both in their forties—writing about novelists in their forties—are, as perhaps is fitting, more attuned to the corrosive forces of the whole publishing system, whereas Michael Chabon, still in his thirties, focuses more on the private demons of his protagonist. In all three novels, however, ideas of failure and concession are writ large. Ridicule, self-pity, and a swarm of pestering sarcasms crowd around the various exemplars of the creative imagination. And although writer protagonists have always been made to suffer—for their hubris, their privileged disconnectedness from the messy business of living—we are a long way here from Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, Saul Bellow's Charlie Citrine, or even Don DeLillo's Bill Gray. The high-mindedness and dignity of the vocation are almost entirely sacrificed in these novels; there is a shared will on the part of the authors to inflict humiliation, to exact punishment, perhaps for dreams dreamed too naively. …

Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys is likewise about literary promise gone awry, though in this case the cause is rooted less in the culture at large and more in the failure of the character's character. Chabon's protagonist, Grady Tripp, is a one-time literary star who has landed himself a teaching post at a small Pennsylvania college:

My third novel, The Land Downstairs, had won a PEN award and, at twelve thousand copies, sold twice as well as both its predecessors combined, and in its aftermath Crabtree and his bosses at Bartizan had felt sanguine enough about my imminent attainment to the status of, at the least, cult favorite to advance me a ridiculous sum of money in exchange for nothing more than a fatuous smile from the thunderstruck author and a title invented out of air and brain-sparkle while pissing into the aluminum trough of a men's room at Three Rivers Stadium. Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed—three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town are born, grow up, and die—and I'd started to work on it at once, and had been diligently hacking away at the thing ever since.

His problem is not writer's block: “The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. 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. … It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half dozen times.”

Another name for Grady's problem might be cannabis—he has become a pot-smoker of considerable appetite. That and his penchant for ending up in odd situations with deviant individuals leads to a weekend rout when his manic editor, Terry Crabtree, comes to visit for a literary festival hosted by the college. Grady's progress, from one disaster to the next, is determined at every turn by his concealments: from Crabtree he must hide that his novel is nowhere near to being done; from his wife he would hide his mistress (to no avail); from his mistress he must keep the accidental shooting of her beloved dog (the body of which is secreted in Grady's car for most of the novel). … But when the last of his stoned subterfuges has failed, what Grady cannot conceal is that he has failed himself, his dream. He has used up the exhaustible capital of his youth, and whatever else may happen to him as a writer, he can no longer think of himself as a “wonder boy.”

The novel ends with a sudden leap forward in time. Grady has married his mistress, Sara, fathered a son, quit pot. He still writes, but there is undeniable resignation in his attitude:

On a day when my work hasn't gone well, I like to spend a couple of hours at the Alibi's dented steel bar, and you will find me there on Tuesday nights after the advanced workshop lets out. You can look for the half-blind minotaur with the corduroy sport coat and the battered horsehide briefcase, at the far end of the bar by the jukebox, holding on to a mug of Iron City cut, for the sake of his health, with thin, sweet lemonade. If you sit long enough on the neighboring stool he will probably mention that he is working hard on a novel about baseball and the Civil War. … Usually he sits with one or two much younger men, students of his, wonder boys whose hearts are filled with the dread and mystery of the books they believe themselves destined to write.

Of the three novels considered here, all of them about failure and the loss of the dream, Chabon's is the most hopeful. Not because of its conclusion, however, but because the writing itself somehow transfigures—and thus somehow belies—its melancholy conclusion. We read about the dying of the imagination, but the prose itself is alert and imaginative. We can believe that Grady's stream is running dry, but not the larger stream—the feeding aquifer—and this is what finally matters.

But what about the larger question? Are these three novels telling us something we ought to be heeding? Is there a truth about literary life—its current state and future prospects—to be extracted? My sense is that all three writers are, to different degrees, working out a particular recognition. That each is saying goodbye to the romanticized image of the writer and the writer's life. They have recognized that these are dreams the world no longer honors much, and they have turned their frustration—their rage—to creative ends. In the humiliations visited upon Sam Holland, Richard Tull, and Grady Tripp, we see—do we not?—an original vision and desire gone sour. We mock our adolescent selves because we were too vulnerable, too exposed. Authors mock their writer-characters for similar reasons. Is it because they have themselves grown up, or has the world in fact become a less hospitable place to the creative imagination? Both, I'd say.