As an avid reader, I am always reluctant to acknowledge that I discovered a book through its movie adaptation. It always feels like an admission of guilt to say that I first experienced “Lord of the Rings” through Peter Jackson instead of Tolkien, or that I nearly cried during Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” but have never once touched the book. Literary adaptations, be they film, television or musical, are often derided or dismissed as both extensions of the original and works in their own right.
So it pains me to confess that it took watching the film version of Michael Chabon’s “Wonder Boys” a full three times before I decided to read the book. In my defense, the adaptation has a lot going for it. There’s the acting, for one. It’s hard to pick out a single standout performance, from Frances McDormand’s (“Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted”) acerbic wit to the gloomy Tobey Maguire (“The Boss Baby”) to a charming appearance by Alan Tudyk (“Lego Star Wars: All-Stars”). The script is also well-handled. Where possible, screenwriter Steve Kloves lifted whole lines of dialogue from the book, and the result perfectly preserves the loveliness of Chabon’s warm, high-mythologized prose.
What surprised me when I finally read the book was that the main message of “Wonder Boys” — the novel, at least, not its adaptation — wasn’t about writing, hidden love or really anything else that survived into the movie. Instead, it’s a narrative about protagonist Grady Tripp’s search for belonging, held together by a scene that isn’t in the film at all.
On its surface, “Wonder Boys” is a story about writers, plagued by what Grady calls “the midnight disease.” Chabon’s characters are a bundle of self-destructive insomniacs juggling depressive episodes and careers as novelists or publicists. The book begins with a small-time, H.P. Lovecraft-esque author of short stories. Two novels are critical to the plot. It even takes place during Wordfest, a fictional writing conference.
Central to the book is Grady, played on the silver screen by Michael Douglas (“Green Eggs and Ham”), a Pittsburgh English teacher struggling to finish his next novel. Aptly titled “Wonder Boys,” the mammoth creature of the book lurks over Grady’s life, overshadowing the failure of his marriage, the arrival of his editor and the pregnancy of his lover.
About halfway through the book, he escapes the gravity of his novel and leaves Pittsburgh, ostensibly to break off his marriage with his wife, Emily. He soon finds himself pulled into the orbit of Emily’s family, the Warshaws, for what is possibly the most uncomfortable seder dinner in literary history.
The focus of the novel pulls back. It’s no longer about a small cast of writers and the literary scene of Pittsburgh, but a small adopted family of gentiles and converts living in a cramped farmhouse of clashing aesthetics and personalities. This is where the hidden brilliance of “Wonder Boys” lives, divorced from Grady’s career as a professor or novelist.
The richness of the Warshaws’ emotional bonds, which are fraught with the same resentment, joy and loss that undercut any conventional family, serves as a painful reminder of the absence of those in Grady’s own life. His only close friend, his editor, lives in New York City and visits rarely. He seeks out companionship through romantic trysts — Emily is his third wife, not to mention his affair — that have a tendency to implode in on themselves. Most of his days are spent in a solitary, drug-addled haze trying to cobble together an ending for his novel.
Grady is, in short, lonely. As he confesses, his desire to belong to a family, whether by blood or not, is part of why he married Emily in the first place. His genuine affection for the Warshaws is clear through his lengthy intellectual discussions with Emily’s father and his strange alliance with her sister.
In this regard, he isn’t too different from his student, James Leer, an enigmatic writer with a fixation on Hollywood suicides. James accompanies Grady to the Warshaws’ home and both are taken aback by the family’s ready acceptance of them: Grady because of his mistreatment of Emily — he concedes to pushing her away throughout the course of their entire marriage — and James because of the contrast it strikes from his own supposedly frigid parents.
During dinner, Grady and James find a dubious companionship in each other. This kinship soon falls apart when Grady surrenders James to his mother and father, breaking the trust between the two. Shortly before this, Emily leaves him for good. With these two connections severed, his last chance to remain within the protected circle of the Warshaw family dissipates. Grady returns to Pittsburgh without the friendship of his student or the safety of his found family.
It isn’t until the third act that Grady starts to reclaim that feeling of belonging for himself. No longer burdened by the weight of his manuscript, which flew out the window during a frantic car chase with a mobster (a typical weekend in Pittsburgh, I’m sure), he resolves to marry his lover and raise their child, and the epilogue finds Grady a little older and a little happier. Importantly, it isn’t his writing career that brings this fulfillment, but the bonds he has built with his own little family.
Though Grady’s part in their family is short-lived, with the Warshaws he recognizes his need to “tie (himself) to the artillery sphere of a family.” In the book, his conclusion as a character feels inevitable and satisfying. Without the Warshaws, the film’s epilogue is hokey and contrived, the one blemish on an otherwise “wonder”-ful adaptation.
Daily Arts Writer Alex Hetzler can be reached at alexhetz@umich.edu.