Sherry F. (sherryfair) reviewed on 9/22/2005 + 55 more book reviews

You'll be more amused by Chabon's take on the familiar "campus novel" if you've ever lived through a college-level creative writing program or summer writers' conference. But no experience is required for following the nightmarish weekend that Grady Tripp, novelist and teacher, lives through when his campus hosts its annual WordFest writers conference. The least of it involves driving around Pittsburgh and its environs in a green '66 Galaxie ragtop with a bag of pot stashed in the glove compartment, the dented imprint of someone's butt on the hood, and a tuba, a dead dog and a squashed python stowed in its capacious trunk. The dialogue is witty and dead-on. Author Chabon's observations are lush but accurate, and they never hold up the action. (Just make a list of the smells he describes, for example, of an auditorium smelling of "mildewed flag.") This writer just lays down amazing sentences, one after the other. My one problem is that I kept imagining the movie while I was reading -- which had a wonderful cast, and is true to the book in some ways, but not all ways. First-person narrator Grady suffers the most from this disparity. In the book, he's a weighty stoner with bloodshot eyes. In the movie, he's Michael Douglas of the indestructible Douglas family chin and profile. Even with the ghost of the movie hovering over it, I thought this was a damn good book.

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