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by Chuck Kinder
In a word (or two or three): Kinder was Chabon's inspiration for Wonder
Boys--it has to be good
From Mr. Hipster:
Certainly not the first book to be written
about heavy drinking writers and their exploits. The difference here
is that Kinder lived the life, and he lived it with other famous authors
like Raymond Carver, on whom he based one of his two main characters.
These men aren't heroes. They are juvenille miscreants with warped
senses of reality and selfish streaks a mile wide. Especially the
Carver character, Ralph, who can't manage his money, his family, his
marriage or his fame. He flails through life, ruining anything good
that is given to him. The sad thing is that he uses his life as the
basis of his stories. The question becomes: is life imitating art,
or is art imitating life? He is praised for his unflinching look at
regular life (much as Carver was), so he almost needs to continue
the drama in order to stay afloat. It's a vicious cyle that drives
our protagonist to his wits end. He cries like a baby, and seems at
time to have the common sense of a small child. Honestly, it's bizarre.
While there is very little plot in this story, it does give us an
interesting look at a group of extremely dysfunctional adults that
seem to have no sense of anything outside of their own lives. They
drink. They fight. They screw. The original manuscript for this book
was supposedly 2,000 or so pages, and I'm trying to figure out for
the life of me what was in it. There couldn't be any more scenes of
them boozing it up. There couldn't have been any more pathetic scenes
of the characters talking about sleeping with each other, dumping
each other and crawling back to each other. It wasn't the heavy read
I was expecting, but I was entertained by the whole thing--if not
kinda depressed.
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