SOURCE: “Fiction in Review,” in Yale Review, Vol. 84, No. 1, January, 1996, pp. 157–65.

In the following excerpt, Birkerts offers a positive assessment of Wonder Boys.

Novelists writing novels about novelists are like doctors taking their own blood pressure and temperature. The thermometer goes straight into the horse's mouth and those who are interested in the health of the art ought to pay close attention.

This past publishing season has been striking in that three novels [Men in Black, The Information, and Wonder Boys], all by seasoned practitioners, have not only featured novelist protagonists but have, each in its own way, used the erosion of writerly dreams as a way to look at the larger context of literary culture in our day. Martin Amis and Scott Spencer, both in their forties—writing about novelists in their forties—are, as perhaps is fitting, more attuned to the corrosive forces of the whole...