
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995                   TAG: 9505100091
SECTION: BOOK                    PAGE: D-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

. . . AND TALKING TO AUTHOR MICHAEL CHABON

"Wonder Boys" is receiving a remarkable amount of attention for a piece of serious fiction. It's being prominently displayed in stores, and the publisher is backing the book so strongly that author Michael Chabon is out on a reading/signing/publicity tour. Not bad for a young writer with a well-received first novel, one collection of stories and a handful of magazine pieces to his credit. Among those is a long second book that Chabon began but simply could not bring to a conclusion.

At a recent stop in Washington, he readily admitted that the new novel was born in frustration.

"I began 'Wonder Boys' in January, 1993," he said, "when I was supposed to be working on the sixth draft of a novel called 'Fountain City' that I had been working on for the five years previous to that. I didn't tell anyone that I'd started it. When my wife announced as a surprise that she was going to take the California bar exams six months earlier than she'd planned, I thought I'd take that time to work on an idea that had been floating around in my mind. At the end of that period, when I told my wife what I'd been up to, I had 110 pages and it was going well. She was the only person I told until I'd finished my first draft about seven months after that."

Two drafts later, it was done - a novel called "Wonder Boys" about the writing of a novel called "Wonder Boys." Chabon's protagonist Grady Tripp is more than a thousand pages into his own "Wonder Boys" ("a title invented out of air and brainsparkle") when he realizes how much one of his students, James Leer, reminds him of his younger self.

To Chabon, "James Leer was really the starting point for the whole book. I had a picture in my mind of a young troubled man standing in the back yard of a big house and holding a little gun to his head. I saw someone else watching him and wondering what to do. So although the novel is definitely Grady's, in some ways, James was there from the beginning." And James is a compulsive fabulist.

"I've always been interested in liars. It's a lot of fun to do a character like that. The tradition is a long one in fiction, and it's fun because you get to make multiple narratives with a liar. He doesn't have just one story to tell, he's got a multiple biography. There's that much more potential for stuff for the story."

Within all of that stuff the plot of "Wonder Boys" is sometimes less compelling than it might be, and Chabon understands that.

"I do not really know, in a conscious way, what I'm doing when I'm writing," he explained. "I don't think about thematic concerns at all. I tend to get caught up in what John Gardner called 'the vivid and continuous dream.'

"Language and character are much important to me than plot. The truth is, as soon as I start thinking in terms of plot, it starts feeling fake, contrived and artificial. The whole idea of figuring stuff out in advance kills the pleasure for me.

"I'm paying careful attention to the language, so I write as well as I possibly can [but] I trust in a lot of unconscious processes to get me through a book."

The ending of the novel, or at least the strongest part of it, is an example of those unconscious processes. Without giving the game away, it concerns Grady's finding freedom as he sits by a gutter. Chabon said that he didn't know what was going to happen at that moment until he reached it: "It comes about as a result of paying close attention to what's happening with your mind's eye, and seeing it as clearly as you can, and being aware of all the elements that you've laid into a scene and then [seeing] what would happen, what you would do."

by CNB