Here, as in McGurl’s appraisal, creative writing is about reflexive self-realization, a fundamentally therapeutic assignment. Chabon has stated that he finds it strange that creative writing in the academy sometimes gets taken to task while the visual and performing arts do not; they are all arts which require technique drawn from a particular body of experience and knowledge (Tobias). A ready answer to that question would be that painting, piccolos, and pirouettes require particular physical aptitudes, equipment, and mechanics, where literary arts do not—the point of a creative writing class is not to teach a student to type, but to create. This question as to the mission of academic creative writing—or of creative writing generally—is a key factor to understanding Grady Tripp’s identity issues, as well as the theoretical relationship between Tripp and James Leer.
Tripp is a creative writing professor who has not himself published in years; his professional life, literary and pedagogical, has run out of steam. He is no longer an author in a functional sense. His work in progress, the eponymous Wonder Boys, a sprawling novel about a family by the name of Wonder, has ballooned well beyond two thousand pages. Writing the novel has become as much a quest to define himself—a task he is not, at present, able to do—as to tell the story he wants to tell. In the absence of a promising professional future as a writer, he has little else to console him. He is a professor, but wonders, “What kind of teacher was I?” (Wonder 231) given that his workshops, at which he tends to be mentally absent, devolve into student-to-student whipping sessions, and that he tends to lead his students into trouble both in and out of the classroom. To answer his question, Tripp will have to come to understand writing as a quest for identity; but, once he comes to understand the reflexive rationale of writing, he will come to understand himself, thereby undermining the motivation he had to write to begin with.
“The first real writer I ever knew,” the novel begins, “was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn.” Born Albert Vetch, this “real writer” lived in the “uppermost room of [a hotel’s] turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two” (3). Van Zorn wrote fantasy and horror stories, working “at night, using a fountain pen, in a bentwood rocking chair, with a Hudson Bay blanket draped across his lap and a bottle of bourbon on the table before him.” The clichés of the writing life abound, and Van Zorn, as the archetypal “writer,” would later takes his own life. “He set a kind of example,” Grady continues, “that, as a writer, I’ve been living up to ever since. I only hope that I haven’t invented him” (5). But Tripp has invented him, or at least played into the invented persona “August Van Zorn.” For Tripp, the focus is not on who Van Zorn was, but rather who Tripp would like to conceive of him being: Tripp habitually refers to Van Zorn by his pen name rather than his given name. It is the original invention, Van Zorn, and further invention that Tripp creates, the “example” that he has been living up to, that constitute the authorial reality in which Tripp is interested. In this uneasy dance between actual writer and writer-figure, the aspirant leads the life of the archetypal writer in the hope of becoming the archetypal writer. There is a particular shadow that the real, live writer casts, and Tripp, in his youth, wanted to be in it long enough that he might himself transform.
Vetch/Van Zorn ignited Tripp’s youthful infatuation with writing and the writing life. In his adolescence, Tripp absconds to the American West, imagining himself “an outlaw-poet-pathfinder, a kind of Zen-masterly John C. Frémont on amphetamines with a marbled dime-store pad of lined paper in the back pocket of my denim pants” (17). It’s a self-conception he never shakes, even when it no longer represents who he is. This pastiche of beatnik stereotypes also represents the sort of Platonic self-creation inherent in the writing process. The task of becoming a writer is one of affectation, and part of the novel’s operative anxiety is that, for the character to find the self, the character must become the writer, but for the character to become the writer, he must mimic other writers, thereby divorcing himself from his own identity.
Tripp, in his youth, longed for writerly status, but having risen to it, he burned through it. Where he was once “the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction” (98), he finds himself now a has-been, a sagging hulk of a man, his creative spring long since run dry. His personal life is beleaguered by the trickle-down effects of his professional woes, and his efforts to define himself as he defines his mythic Wonders becomes a chicken-and-egg problem; his wife has left him, his lover is pregnant, and Hannah, the student to whom he rents a room, has developed an infatuation that will only be broken when she reads the ill-formed draft of the novel he has been working on. This amorous aspect of his private life tandems neatly with his romanticized ideal of the writer-as-creator in that it carries connate implications of writer-as-procreator. In a novel as thoroughly metatextual as Wonder Boys, there is little difference between the literal and the fictional child. But as Tripp’s creative life is disordered, so is his procreative life; he has impregnated the chancellor of the college, Sara Gaskell, who is also the wife of the English department chair, Walter Gaskell, Tripp’s immediate superior in the workplace. Furthering the chaos, and metaphorically endangering Tripp’s creative/procreative world, is the fact that Sara is tentatively planning to have an abortion. In the sense of the family romance on which Marthe Robert would build a literary theory of the god-sired “foundling,” Tripp is a literary god (as author) bereft of control over his quixotic world and a literal orphan (both parents died when he was young) losing control over the quotidian. At its core, Tripp’s conundrum is about the anxiety of order in the creative writing teacher who both abhors order as the enemy of creativity but requires it before he can impart the necessary orderliness implicit in his professorial charge.
Tripp tends to remember others he has known as being “real writers.” It is difficult to determine with certainty whether this is meant only to ring of wide-eyed ingenuousness or to differentiate the “real” writers from the student writers, or perhaps to establish a sort of caste system—he only gives the designation to those in creative writing, never to his scholarly colleagues who write but are not “writers.” Among the “real” writers is John Jose Fahey, an ill-fated colleague of Tripp’s and the author of four novels. Tripp remembers that Fahey fell apart after taking a post at a small college in Tennessee. Fahey had been “a disciplined writer . . . with an admirable gift for narrative digression he claimed to have inherited from his Mexican mother, and very few bad or unmanageable habits” (13). Nevertheless, something in or around the college gig breaks him. Chabon never explains the correlation, only the effects: “He pulled off the difficult trick of losing his tenured job at the Tennessee college, when he started showing up drunk for work, spoke with unpardonable cruelty to the talentless element of his classes, and one day waved a loaded pistol from the lectern and instructed his pupils to write about Fear” (13). Fahey, again, like real writers tend to do, kills himself. His story is much like Tripp’s: early acclaim, a publisher’s advance, an imagination stalled by career security, and, finally, the ultimate manifestation of the writer’s career in stasis: the job of creative writing professor, at which point the writer is no longer a writer and spirals into a shadowy second life borrowed from the first.
Tripp’s career also began under the call of trumpets, a “well reviewed” first novel that he considers to be his “truest work,” his third novel winning a PEN Award (11). Chabon never specifies precisely the circumstances of when or why Tripp took his present post, but he has been there for some time, “dangling unhappily” (99). So he relies on emissaries from the world beyond academe to maintain his writerly identity, among them his editor, Terry Crabtree. Crabtree is clearly not only an individual involved in literature; he is a literary figure. The two of them met in a short story seminar at the University of California. Crabtree, not a “real” writer, but a person who wanted to be in the writin
g scene, had faked his way into the class by auditioning with a story he’d written in the tenth grade about “an encounter, at a watering place, between the aging Sherlock Holmes and a youthful Adolf Hitler, who has come from Vienna to Carlsbad to rob invalid ladies of their jewelry” (18).[1] Since that time, Crabtree had written nothing else. Crabtree’s and Tripp’s destinies later coincide when the former, as a junior editor, takes a chance on the latter’s early work, which becomes a success, propelling the two simultaneously to the top of their professions. But as their career ascensions were each tied to Tripp’s creative abilities, so would their relative declines begin when Tripp fails to continue writing to the level of his early promise. They had met when each pilfered an obscure story of Van Zorn’s, made creative edits, and distributed them to the workshop (22).[2] Despite the fact that they had each essentially turned in the same narrative, no one in the class, not even the professor, realizes. The professor, like Tripp and Fahey in their stints in the same profession, is mentally removed from his classroom. But Terry Crabtree’s relationship to the literary world, in which he intends to make himself a peripheral figure, is worth note. The most mobile, flamboyant, and libidinous character in the novel, Crabtree is also the most self-possessed, therefore less in need of the sort of artistic clarification craved by Tripp and his students. Crabtree is himself a “character,” therefore less in need of creating characters. In remembering the start of his relationship with Crabtree, Tripp likewise reflects on his college creative writing professor, “a real writer” given to “gnomic utterances” on the writing process (19). The professor is the final in a series of characters in which Tripp presents his models of the literary life: Van Zorn, the lone wolf with an identity crisis whose fictional worlds cannot prop up a life doomed to suicide; Fahey, the burned-out writer-made-teacher whose life in an academic corral accelerated his final destruction; Crabtree, an individual who seems to be living his own outlandish narrative rather than committing it to the page (though his need to be near writers indicates that he wants his story to be immortalized by someone else); and the professor, who, through passivity toward his classroom duties, has been able to maintain the writer’s persona he brought with him to the academy.
After this series of flashbacks, the novel settles into its primary setting, WordFest, a literary festival for which the English department charges would-be writers a few hundred dollars to hobnob with established figures in writing, a more or less writerly social event that has less to do with what it means to be a writer than what fun it is to pretend to be one. Among the opening festivities of WordFest is a party held at the Gaskells’ home. Walter, Sara’s spouse, is an ineffectual husband, either impotent or uninterested in sex, and it is here that Sara informs Tripp that their illicit union has resulted in pregnancy. Despite Wonder Boys being set in a university English department, and despite the fact that its protagonist is largely dependent on the financial security his post brings, Chabon is harsh toward Walter and the other faculty members who flit briefly in and out of the story. Worth noting is the fact that it is the writer, not the scholar, who is able to fulfill the generative role (though the fact that this only occurs once Tripp has lost his ability as an artist sends a mixed message). Walter is not only sexually incapable—Tripp “knew that [Sara] and Walter had not made love in several years” (45)—but intellectually so as well. Tripp lampoons Walter’s personal fixation with baseball history as it has passed through his ivory tower filter to become a convoluted analysis of the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe:
The DiMaggio-Monroe union was a significant obsession of Walter’s, and the subject of his own magnum opus, his Wonder Boys, an impenetrable seven-hundred-page critical “reading,” as yet unpublished, of the marriage of Marilyn and Joe and its “function” in what Walter, in his lighter moods, liked to call “American mythopoetics.” In that brief unhappy tale of jealousy, affection, self-deception, and bad luck he claimed to find, as far as I understood it, a typically American narrative of hyperbole and disappointment, “the wedding as spectacular antievent”; an allegory of the Husband as Slugger; and conclusive proof of what he called, in one memorable passage, “the American tendency to view every marriage as a cross between tabooed exogamy and corporate merger.” (60–61)
As it happens, Tripp’s star student, James Leer—also attending the party—is writing a period-piece novel in which the protagonist meets a young Norma Jean Mortensen before her ascension. Leer’s poetic rendition is presented in a more favorable light, the star without the glamour, as a person, worthy of experiencing but lacking the iconographic “significance” that Walter has found in the same subject, implying that the writer has manufactured the real, the scholar merely a convoluted abstraction.
But writers are, themselves, worth little apart from their work. As abusive as Tripp can be toward the scholastic faculty, he is sometimes more dismayed by their creative counterparts. At the party, Tripp finds among his writer-colleagues a “leering, self-important old windbag who flirted with young girls to stave off the fear of death” and “the withered neck and hollow stare of a woman who had wasted her life” (44). Even though their stories lived on, the people who authored them were fading. This bleak analysis is perhaps also due to the fact that Tripp is seeing himself less and less as an author; insofar as he had idolized his cohorts-in-craft because in them he saw—or hoped to see—something of himself; he now, uncertain of his own craft, sees them as fragile people, not gods of the page.
At this point in the story, things begin to happen quickly. Tripp, stepping away from the party, encounters James Leer. James is crashing the party, but Tripp takes him under his wing, and after the other guests leave to attend the opening lecture, Tripp takes James into Walter and Sara’s bedroom, where he opens Walter’s safe. Tripp is aware that James is obsessed with the yesteryear of Hollywood, and among the contents of the safe is Walter’s most prized piece of memorabilia, the jacket Marilyn Monroe wore on the day she was married to DiMaggio. In short order, James, unbeknownst to Tripp, pilfers the jacket, Tripp is attacked by the Gaskells’ dog, Doctor Dee, James shoots the dog with a derringer he happened to have in his pocket (he would insinuate he was carrying it so that he might take his own life), the two hide the corpse in Tripp’s car (a Ford Galaxie with a sketchy chain of title he won in a poker game), and, finally, to quell the pain of the dog bite and to get the stiff-shirted James to loosen up, the two partake of prescription painkillers and booze before heading to WordFest’s inaugural address.
Such is Chabon’s eager flair for plot.
The opening address for WordFest, delivered by an “elfin man” from the party, a renowned writer elsewhere identified in the novel only as “Q.,” is on the subject of “The Writer as Doppelgänger” and begins with a passage from Conrad’s The Secret Sharer (53). The title and topic of the address are important. Just as Tripp had modeled himself on Van Zorn (not Vetch), had sought out the larger-than-life imprint of the Creator of Stories—Creator of Worlds—so would this conflict between what he was and what he sought to become manifest as the primary emotional conflict of the novel. In his “pirate days, before stars were lost from certain constellations” (i.e., before reality interrupted his romantic conception of himself), he had been “a monstrous thing . . . , a Yeti, a Swamp Thing, the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction” (98). But that was when he allowed himself the freedom to think of himself as a figure of literature. His writing, and in suit his person, have fallen. After a night of excess that includes dancing at an R&B establishment, James getting drunk for the first time in his life and being molested by Crabtree, the revelation that the Galaxie is ill gotten followed by a run-in with its rightful owner, and the loss and recovery of James’s knapsack (which contains, as it turns out, a draft of his first novel), Tripp awakens to toil compulsively on the dead weight of his novel. As he rolls another blank sheet into his typewriter in the early hours, he thinks of the blighted figure of Joe Fahey, the career suicide turned actu
al suicide (134). Tripp’s life is spiraling downward, and he needs some form of comfort.
Presently at odds with Sara over the pregnancy, he seeks out his soon-to-be ex-in-laws, the Warshaws, who are to be celebrating Passover in their hometown, which, a bit on the nose, is called Kinship. James, who has slept off the prior evening’s excesses at Tripp’s home, comes along for the ride. Importantly, all of the Warshaw family members carry with them specific artistic associations. When introducing James to Irene Warshaw, Tripp notes that James is a “very talented writer.” Irene, having majored in English, is very excited about this, and Tripp notes that she “esteemed writers far too highly,” apparently unable to see far enough beyond her nose to realize that the writer to whom she is closest, Tripp, has devastated her daughter emotionally (172). Irene’s husband, Irv, having later in his education turned to metallurgical engineering, first studied music composition “with an émigré pupil of Schoenberg’s, and [had] written a few unlistenable pieces with titles like Molecules I–XXIV, Concerto for Klein Bottle, and Reductio ad Infinitum” (178). That these two are the feast founders of the group is important given that Irene’s association is with an idealized notion of authorship and Irv’s is with, presumably, atonal experimentation. Together, they represent the literary world as Tripp sees it, disordered, fantastic, romantic, unassailed by the strictures of reality.
Unfortunately, their children only became shadow images of a creative tradition that never would be. Their libertine daughter Deborah spurned reading at an early age and “rarely read anything” other than comic books (179). Their son, Sam, died before he progressed beyond anything above juvenile fantasy of the Buck Rogers variety. Tripp’s estranged wife is a failed novelist turned ad writer, whose abortiveness at the page is apparently surpassed only by her incompetence in the kitchen. Tripp wonders several times why it is that he is choosing to attend this gathering. The Warshaws are not his blood kin, and in short order neither will they be related by law. Instead, they fill a void left by his not having a family (his mother had died when he was an infant from an infected, overnursed nipple and his father later committed suicide), and, more than that, Tripp is the artist that the Warshaws might have wanted but never had. They fill complementary, if hollow, roles with regard to one another. But understanding this only brings Tripp closer to realizing that he no longer fills the role he once did.
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