SOURCE: A review of Wonder Boys, in Antioch Review, Vol. 53, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 498–99.

In the following review of Wonder Boys, Bick finds the novel's conclusion overly romanticized, but commends Chabon's emotionally complex protagonist.

Chabon has changed the setting of his second novel [Wonder Boys] from the motorcycle milieu of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to an academic one. Although Volvos have replaced motorcycles and central characters have aged, the riotous pace continues.

The novel opens with Grady Tripp, a creative-writing instructor at a Pennsylvania college, facing personal and professional dilemmas. Tripp's novel, slaved over for years, has reached 2,600 pages with no conclusion in sight; Crabtree, his long-time editor and friend, is losing patience and perhaps his job; Grady's third wife has left him; and his lover, the chancellor of the school where he teaches, has discovered she is pregnant.

To the hermetic atmosphere of “Wordfest,” the college's yearly creative-writing...