Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys is the sort of book I shouldn’t like. Set on the campus of a liberal arts college (I think unnamed?) in Pittsburg with a prominent creative writing program, taking place during one weekend when said program is hosting a literary expo called WordFest, and populated by characters who are almost exclusively writers or writer-adjacent figures, its almost aggressive focus on authors and the Art of Writing is something I normally find self-congratulatory and cloying.

And yet I adore this book, liked it even better the second time, reading it as a jadedly middle-aged semi-pro writer instead of a grad student in a creative writing program with eyes on literary immortality. The key, I think, is that Chabon, while obviously an admirer of great writers and a keen lifelong student of the written word, doesn’t gloss the subject with the air of haughty reverence I often sense in similar work.

Grady Tripp, the narrator and protagonist, is a rake and a pothead who moves through the world like a bull busting through a rotten old barn, leaving a trail of psychic debris to trip up and besliver everybody unfortunate enough to cross his path. This is a trope common enough to be cliché, the drunken genius to pure and broken for society, except that with Grady none of this seems romantic. He’s a likeable guy, but his recklessness isn’t the engine of his genius. If anything, it’s his biggest roadblock. WordFest spurs on a reunion with his long-suffering editor, who has expected a finished copy of Grady’s novel (the eponymous Wonder Boys) for years and is finally slapping down an unspoken but clearly sensed deadline. Only Grady is up to 2,100 pages and nowhere near finished, the constant flood of detail drowning his story and the characters within it.

The same feels true of the other characters, who are in their own ways flawed, but in a manner that seems relatable and human. Chabon cues this idea thematically through the successful writer Q., who gives a pompous lecture stating that every writer has a doppelganger that emerges periodically, torpedoing the hapless writer’s life to ensure a rich source of material to draw from. Precisely the sentiment I find so annoying, but I get the sense Chabon does, too; Q. emerges from the book as a garden variety asshole.

I also enjoyed rereading Chabon for his prose, which, with its effortless erudition and insistence on grandiose imagery, is probably a bigger influence on my own writing than I’d realized. But it’s the characters that really sell the book for me. I enjoyed spending time with these people—even if I would hesitate to invite any of them to my house.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure - Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind neatly summarizes its thesis in its subtitle. The authors come from different backgrounds, Lukianoff as a lawyer and first amendment activist and Haidt as a social psychologist and academic, but are united over their concern with some of the trends appearing on modern liberal arts college campuses. They chronicle a shift in belief in a university’s core mandate from challenging students to protecting them, and argue that this change harms students by leaving them fragile and unprepared for life beyond school.

The subject matter is inherently inflammatory, but Lukianoff and Haidt take great pains to avoid turning their book into a polemic. The language is calm, circumspect, and reasoned, proffering explanations for this shift that include the political and social landscape these students came of age in and avoiding broad value judgments. There’s no bandying about terms like “snowflake.” The book’s focus on cognitive behavioral therapy struck me as bizarre at first, but the authors make a convincing case that speaker bans and trigger warnings feed into the negative thoughts CBT attempts to combat.

The structure of the book betrays their background in advocacy and academia, reading like a cross between a white paper and a textbook (albeit a pared down, accessible one). Chapters end with bullet point synopses, and the authors pause on a number of occasions to reiterate what they have discussed so far and tie it back to their original argument. Overall, I found it an interesting read, especially as someone who left university just a few years before these changes took hold.