Wonder Boys

Once Grady Tripp's novels got this sort of press. Once he too was a wonder boy. Now he's a pothead, potbellied has-been. Between his disintegrating private life and his collapsing career, it's hard to say which is the more completely out of control. Wife number three is currently leaving him; novel number four, Wonder Boys, gets longer by the month and ever more tortuous; it accumulates characters like dandruff and just refuses to get finished. 'It's done,' he says of this work-in-regress. 'It's basically done. I'm just sort of, you know, tinkering with it now.' He might be talking about his life....
Fortunately or is it? - Grady's editor is as untogether as he is.. Terry Crabtree pulled off the coup of his career when he signed Grady in those distant days when signing Grady was a coup. Back then they were good friends; now their relationship seems more like the embrace of drowning men. Meanwhile Terry busies himself trying to embrace any transvestite he can find, not to mention Grady's less-than-star student James Leer. Genius or nerd? Leer is deeply screwed up. Deeply in love with the films of Frank Capra. But perhaps his warped outpourings are the shape. of fiction to come?
While speakers at the university's annual WordFest gravely ponder the issues facing the postmodern novel, this unlikely trio is out living life at its most extravagantly, ridiculously real. One disaster follows another as the trunk of Grady's car fills up with the trophies of their preposterous progress through Pittsburgh and its environs. And following them everywhere they go is a decidedly sinister-looking tuba...
Wonder Boys is shockingly daring, irrepressibly inventive and above all gloriously, outrageously funny.