SOURCE: “Novel Complications: Michael Chabon's ‘Wildly Funny’ Tale of a Problem-Plagued Writer's Final Fling,” in Chicago Tribune Books, April 2, 1995, p. 5.

In the following review, Hearon offers a positive assessment of Wonder Boys.

At the start of Michael Chabon's second novel, Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp, a fat, 40ish, 6-foot-3 academic in small-town Pennsylvania, is laboring on his fourth novel, Wonder Boys, already over a thousand pages long and with five possible endings involving biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths. He's trying to complete it before his best friend and longtime editor, Terry Crabtree, arrives to give a lecture at the college where Tripp is trapped in the chicken coop of teaching fiction.

This, then, is that agreeable and ironic staple, the novelist's novel about a novelist and his novel. What makes this wise, wildly funny story much more than that is the fact that Chabon is a flat-out wonderful writer...