WRITER'S BLOCK

By John Skow

Write about what you know. Sure. And if what you know is that you are stuck on Chapter 1, Page 1 of your third book, with critics and editors lurking and no idea in sight--what then, O most eloquent new voice (New York Times)? What now, O expert flyer of literary kites in swirling narrative flights (Philadelphia Inquirer)?

Michael Chabon's likable first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a lighthearted account of a young man growing up gay, was received with glad cries, and these still reverberated when his short story collection, A Model World, appeared. And then? Hmmm, let's see. The white whale's been done. Down the Mississippi on a raft? That too. Okay, lots of plots out there; maybe something about a dwarf in Germany who beats a drum ...

In some such doldrum, adrift in giddiness or despair, Chabon decided to write about a novelist who can't get his next novel written. Sure enough, Wonder Boys (Villard; 368 pages; $23) is, rather too cutely, not just the title of Chabon's book, but of the novel his hero Grady Tripp can't bring himself to finish. Tripp's well-reviewed early books are receding into the distant past, and he feels fraudulent when his writing students admire them. He pretends optimism to his editor, but the truth is that his half-written book is an unreadable mass of unstrung chapters.

Chabon's chapters aren't unreadable, but they are unstrung: a series of funny scenes about not writing a novel that somehow don't hang together as a novel. Chabon seems to be winking at friends: Look, here's a ridiculous bit in which Tripp gets the dean of students pregnant. And here's Miss Sloviak, the transvestite, and here's Tripp's car with a dead dog and a tuba in the trunk. Some of this is worth a smile, some a raised eyebrow, but let's agree with Chabon's publisher that he has actually written his third book. Now, about that fourth: well, maybe an old guy, far out in the Gulf Stream, who catches this huge fish ...