too many details

Wonder Boys is about a college professor and a novelist in Pittsburgh that throughout the course of the novel faces a series of crises during one weekend. His wife, Emily, leaves him and his lover of the past five years (who is also already married) is pregnant with his child. The novel that he has been working on for the past seven years remains unfinished and Crabtree, his editor, wants to read it, or at least the ending that is currently not written. And lastly the presence of a talented, but unstable, student, James Leer, completes the crazy weekend.
Even though I liked the novel overall, it was sometimes hard to follow. There were too many crises occurring at once to mention them all here. The work seemed also “too busy,” like when a pattern has too many details to keep track of and takes away from it. Although each separate event by itself is well written and is meaningful to the reader, taken as a whole the novel wandered all over the place.

First you have the pregnancy. Sarah potentially giving birth to Tripp’s baby just seems so out of place. They have been having an affair of over five years and she just happens to find out that she is going to have a baby during the same weekend that Emily decides to leave Tripp. I feel that if he had been single and this occurred it would have been more understandable, but for it just to occur so out of the blue just seems unrealistic. Also, the fact that Tripp just does not seem to care enough about the consequences of Sarah’s pregnancy just was not believable for me. I understand that this lack of emotion may have to do with him always being high so it may not have really hit him yet.

Then you have James Leer. What a crazy kid! He fabricates his life so much that it keeps the reader constantly questioning what is the truth. As readers, we do not know whether to feel sorry for him or to dismiss him as crazy and move on and make peace with that fact. He is just so over-the-top that it is hard to believe that people like him really exist in the world. He has extensive knowledge of movie stars’ suicides and even goes as far to curve “Frank Capra” into his hand. I did not understand the deal with his grandparents/parents. Were they as bad as he claimed or was he just so physiologically disturbed that he needed to make up all those horrid details concerning them, especially regarding the supposed rape of his mother by his grandfather?

Even Miss Sloviak seemed out of place. I wrote my previous blog about how I generally liked this character and I really liked the scene in which Miss Sloviak changes in Tripp’s car. It was a simple scene but I found it almost sensual. But after finishing the novel, I do not quite sees where it fits in when considering the general scheme of the novel.

I feel that for me to fully appreciate the novel, I would need a very in-depth discussion on the novel. I would need to pull apart all the details to get the full picture.