SOURCE: “A Novelist's Nightmare,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 21, 1995, p. 20.

In the following review, Tandon offers a generally favorable assessment of Wonder Boys.

Henry James exhorted the potential novelist “to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” Grady Tripp, the narrator of Michael Chabon's second novel, a literary enfant terrible turned embarrassing adult, is less sanguine about the sensitivity of artists:

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all round him the neighbours soundly sleep.

Much of Wonder Boys possesses...