As with age studies more generally, greater attention is paid to female experiences of midlife; Kathleen Woodward has argued that the onset of aging at around fifty years old (tied to the biological marker of menopause) is “an experience that does not have the same counterpart in men and thus the same psychological, social, and economics consequences for men” (xiii). Woodward avers that while midlife is, of course, too early to be associated with old age, it is the point at which women are considered no longer young, and, with age so often considered a binary, therefore old. However, it is the very fact that men are not supposed to show any stress or discomfort as they go through life (Beneke 4–5) and are taught to concentrate on outward markers of success rather than any emotional life that creates the conditions for crisis in midlife. John Clay outlines two responses to midlife and impending age that men often take:
Denial, by pretending that nothing has changed or, at the other extreme, by intensifying activity, is often a first reaction. Others make a desperate bid to escape by defying time, having an affair with a younger woman or, even more extreme, pitching themselves into a final bid for self-enhancement through gambling, drink, drugs or sex. (1)
Clay conceives of midlife crises in terms of a challenge, and a positive or negative response to it: “Meet it right and you can come out on the other side with renewed vigour and insight” (4). While Clay accepts that the majority of men will not face a crisis as such in their midlife period, he maintains that all will face “a period of transition” if not transformation (44). If the former is the case, the structure of their lives will remain very similar, but they may attempt to improve certain relationships or become more involved in the community in an altruistic way. Nonetheless, whether it is transition or transformation, if the man successfully navigates the period, “the mood is a calmer one and the emphasis more on giving out” (87).
Although Grady’s chronological age puts him in midlife, his conception of his own age, his individual age or self-image, seems to be much younger. Or at least, his actions and behavior put him outside of what is expected for his social age. Clay notes that “adulthood is surrounded by myths. A central one is that maturity is an inevitable part of the ageing process, the older you get the more mature you necessarily become” (1). In some respects, then, Grady conforms to Jung’s puer aeternus archetype. While eternal youth might seem like a positive attribute, Marie-Louise von Franz cautions that it is “all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen continued into later life” (qtd. in Porterfield et al. 7) where they are considered abnormal. If Grady does not appear to carry responsibilities appropriate to his maturity, perhaps his generation is somewhat to blame. Grady is a baby boomer, a demographic that, as Gullette notes, has been repeatedly reminded of their age: “‘Aging’ in a world of Xer hustlers, people in their thirties and forties were told that they were ‘clinging’ to youth—or should try to” (Aged by Culture 44). Harry R. Moody and Jennifer R. Sasser contend that Grady’s generation is associated with a self-centered outlook; often termed the “me” generation, they are equated with “consumerism, narcissism, rebellion, and openness to change” (441). Further, Wonder Boys’ liberal arts college environment, in which Grady is surrounded by young minds and bodies, normalizes his arrested development to some extent and perhaps suspends or delays the necessity of an age-appropriate lifestyle.
Nonetheless, when the reader meets Grady, he has matured to some extent. In his twenties and thirties, Grady “exercised [his] appetites freely, with a young man’s wild discipline” (Boys 98). By midlife, he has “surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs,” though he still smokes marijuana regularly; as he puts it, joints are his “steadfast companions” (Boys 7). For much of the novel, he exists in a stoned fugue-state. In his New York Times review, Robert Ward highlights Grady’s adolescent demeanor, arguing that the reader and other characters indulge it:
Though Grady Tripp is a mess as a man and an artist, he’s very much a loveable mess. . . . He can’t bear getting older, doesn’t want to become an official adult and is trying to find some way to hang on to the sweet anarchy of youth. Like everyone else in this academic-bohemian setting, Grady’s lovers not only endorse his wildness but tacitly encourage it. Deep down, they don’t want to become old squares or work-machines either.
Yet there is sadness and melancholy inherent is Grady’s behavior. His drug use is an escape; if he is high, his responsibilities fade:
The warm ache of codeine there felt sad and appropriate. I wasn’t worrying about the tiny zygote rolling like a satellite through the starry dome of Sara’s womb, or about the marriage that was falling apart around me, or about the derailment of Crabtree’s career, or about the dead animal turning hard in the trunk of my car; and most of all I was not thinking about Wonder Boys. (77)
With every facet of his life demanding some kind of decision, his drug use accelerates; for example, on his drive back to Pittsburgh from Kinship, he smokes three joints, and when his car is stolen, it is his pot that he is most concerned about losing: “I felt a thrill of despair in my belly. There was no way the little bagful of Humboldt County would still be there” (Boys 315). The desperation and reliance here undercuts any envy the reader might feel for Grady’s freedom from responsibility.
While the reader may find Grady a sympathetic character and amusing, Chabon implies that his lifestyle choices are not commensurate with his age and role. This seems to be reflective of Chabon’s own choices as he entered midlife and fatherhood. In Manhood for Amateurs (2009), he relates how he stopped smoking marijuana in 2005 after being “unexpectedly called upon to engage in some urgent full-on parenting: There was an abortive sleepover and a necessary stretch of late-night driving to be done” (35). Although he was able to drive and collect his child, he “spent the next hour fighting off the knowledge that I was not up to the task, and I vowed that I would never risk putting my children or myself in that position again. On some fundamental level, I was no longer willing to endure, or capable of enjoying, that kind of fun” (35). Similarly, Grady begins to see that although he can get by while high, he is not giving those who depend on him the attention they deserve, and if he continues to use drugs as a means of escape, there will be no one waiting for him, and the decisions that he puts off will be made for him by default. If anything, this is the lesson Grady must learn before he can transition into a new period of his life. This is his formative experience.
Grady’s past relationship history reflects a lack of focus, too. He is facing the end of his third marriage, and as he notes, “each time the dissolution was my own fault, clearly and incontrovertibly” (Boys 33). Even five years into an affair with Sara, he still finds himself lusting after the young women who attend his classes. Hannah Green is symbolic of all who have gone before her; he describes her as “the most brilliant writer in the department. She was twenty years old, very pretty. . . . I was desperately in love with her” (48). The fact that he has not begun an affair with her, having installed her in the basement of his marital home, seems to him something of an achievement:
I was always backing off from Hannah Green . . . with an admirable and highly unlikely steadfastness that I had a hard time explaining to myself. I suppose that I derived some kind of comfort from the fact that my relationship with young Hannah Green remained a disaster waiting to happen and not, as would normally have been the case by this time, the usual disaster. (54–55)
Grady’s inability to commit fully is a symptom of his immaturity. Von Franz expands on the puer aeternus archetype, arguing that commitment is a common sticking point:
The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the singular human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again. (qtd. in Porterhouse et a
l. 7)
Clay contends that a usual crisis ground for middle age is marriage, that the “classic male example is the husband who flies the coop, going off with a younger woman in search of renewal and rejuvenation” (43). Yet Grady’s infidelity with Sara is represented, not as a pathetic attempt to recapture anything, but rather as a mature, caring relationship, if he can commit to it. With Sara forty-five to his forty-one years, the dynamic is altered. Furthermore, since neither Sara and Walter Gaskell nor Grady and Emily have children, and Sara and Grady have now fallen pregnant together, this seems to be the legitimized relationship; their responsibilities should be toward each other rather than tied to their failed pasts.
Reflecting Clay’s assertion that middle-aged men will often look to escape what they feel as their confines, Grady begins the WordFest weekend by feeling trapped by Sara. She tells him that she is pregnant and, after he has confided that Emily has left him, half jokes, half hopes that what they will do is “divorce [their] spouses, marry each other, and have this baby” (Boys 42). The scene ends with him saying, “I’m stuck. . . . You’re lying on my arm,” and her reply that “I guess you’re going to have to chew it off, then” (43); either outcome will cause him pain, it would seem. Grady presumes Sara will have an abortion, and this is her automatic response, too, as to have it will disrupt all their lives, but when Grady tries to commiserate with her, saying that he understands that it would be her last chance for a baby, she becomes angry with him for the first and only time in the novel. This rage not only highlights her awareness of her own age but also offers him a way out of his coasting to begin a new period of his life as a father. Yet with the pressure of a decision or commitment hanging over his head, Grady takes the cowardly route and leaves the conversation and area to visit his estranged wife, setting off on a road trip with James Leer: “I felt as if James and I were setting out together to fish for steelhead in a flashing Idaho stream, and at the same time that we were lighting out for Tampico with a ten-minute head start on the police” (145). Indeed, he packs snacks, his weed, and camping equipment, further underlining not just his flight from responsibility but his retreat into more adolescent behavior.
Despite Grady’s need for escape, he, like the other characters, does yearn for connection and family. Even while he and Sara are in the midst of their affair, Grady describes it as containing the kind of companionship more often found in marriages than clandestine trysts: they have moved from “crazed fumbling” to “the installation in the Guest Apartment of cable television so that [they] could lie on the bed in [their] underwear and watch old movies on Wednesday afternoons” (33). Indeed, Sara’s pregnancy leads him to some sense of realization: his life does not meet his own expectations:
I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny. Instead here I was, forty-one years old, having left behind dozens of houses, spent a lot of money on vanished possessions and momentary entertainments, fallen desperately in and abruptly out of love with a least seventeen women. (45)
Grady’s crisis, then, stems from a life that has not happened. His is a gradual crisis that builds as he does nothing, which, juxtaposed against James’s sudden decisions—to shoot the dog, to kill himself, to steal the jacket—shows a lack of conviction and focus, like his philandering and drug use.
Grady has, however, begun to comprehend that his comportment is inappropriate. Throughout the novel, there are episodes that jolt Grady to this awareness; for example, when he leaves James in a darkened classroom, he reflects, “I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together” (6). This shows a lack of sympathy rather than cruelty, but it certainly emphasizes Grady’s self-involvement; his resulting emotion indicates that he no longer wants to be perceived or conceive of himself in this way. His honesty regarding his drug habit is a catchall pronouncement about his behavior; Grady realizes: “I was sorry I’d smoked it. Sooner or later I was always sorry I’d smoked it” (330).
On a more physical level, too, his drug use and his general lack of self-care have taken their toll. Featherstone and Hepworth state that “putting on weight, baldness, reduced energy, impaired vision and hearing, sexual lassitude” are all considered “normal” consequences of living for a certain number of years (326). Indeed, Anthony Synnott argues that men are much more likely than women to allow themselves to slip into ill health or an unhealthy lifestyle. He suggests that this “apparent failure in self-care” has two interrelated causes: “traditional male values of stoicism and self-reliance”; and employment and attached family responsibilities that do not allow for time off to seek medical help (226). Grady’s lack of self-care seems to stem from denial that there is anything wrong at all, and in this way, his attitude about his drug use reflects a common stance that men take in midlife.
At forty-one, it is clear that beyond showing signs of aging, Grady has not looked after himself. On catching sight of himself in the mirror, his description of himself is “an overweight, hobbled, bespectacled, aging, lank-haired, stoop-shouldered Sasquatch, his furry eye sockets dim, his gait unsteady” (Boys 110). He even realizes that his lack of self-care is damaging: “I felt weak in my arms and legs, and tried to remember the last time I’d had something to eat. I’d been forgetting to take my meals lately, which is a dangerous sign in a man of my girth and capacity” (66). In addition, he is suffering anxiety attacks probably not helped by his self-medication. Although he seems disturbed by his symptoms—“The air before my eyes was suddenly filled with spangles, and I felt my knees knock against each other” (51); “I was unable to clear my head of a thick blue smog that had begun to form inside it” (66)—he also seems rather accepting of them: “The whiff of static, the burst of red blood in my nose, the nausea, none of these symptoms was new to me. They had gripped me at odd moments for the past month or so, along with an attendant sense of weird elation, a feeling of weightlessness, of making my way across the shimmering mesh of sunshine in a swimming pool” (79). Grady is further hampered by the dog bite on his ankle that is going septic. In his analysis of Stumpy in Rio Bravo, Peter Lehman argues that “Stumpy’s age has eroded his masculinity” and that “his limp is a physical sign of his loss of masculine power” (63). Similarly, Grady’s limp makes it difficult for him to get around and to keep up with James and Crabtree. Yet clearly it is not just his physical speed that is being questioned here; rather, it is his capacity to remain relevant when compared against younger talents.
Although Grady shows some concern for his health, it is his book that seems to worry him most frequently. He has spent over seven years and two thousand pages trying to tie together the plot of his Wonder Boys. Clay argues that “[a] man may seem to be coasting along serene in his understanding that all is well and looks set to continue that way. Suddenly something unexpected happens—a loss of a job, bust up of a marriage, a personal tragedy—and he is plunged into crisis” (3). Comparably, Grady has been stuck in a routine of adding more and more words, pages, and asides to the novel, and it is only with the WordFest weekend, which coalesces his marriage breakup, ultimatum from his girlfriend, and demands from his editor, that the pattern breaks and he is able to see the futility of continuing the never-ending story. For Grady, the coasting—the constant writing—is the crisis; it is not writer’s block, he identifies, but the opposite: “I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within” (Boys 12). He seems unable to leave any detail unwritten; every aspect must be explored until he realize
s that he is “nowhere near the end” (12), because there can be no end when he writes in this way. He has tried to finish the novel, has written five different concluding chapters, but is unhappy with all of them.
Hannah believes the cause of this obsession with minutiae is his marijuana habit; she wonders “what this book would be like—if you didn’t—if you weren’t always so stoned all the time when you write” (302). After reading the first two hundred pages, she is impressed, but beyond that the prose, though “still wonderful” becomes “all spread out” or “jammed too full” (301). She critiques his work much like a creative writing teacher might, highlighting his absence of character progression, leading him to realize that “on a certain crucial level—how strange!—I had no idea of what the book was really about, and not the faintest notion of how it would strike a reader” (302). After spending the weekend with James and seeing again what accomplished, contained writing is, Grady realizes, “I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex–wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car” (275). His feeling of inadequacy is only exacerbated by Crabtree’s shift in focus from his mess of a novel to James’s “brilliant” manuscript (291). Crabtree confirms Hannah’s evaluation, gently at first, saying that he will publish it but to save his career he needs “something fresh. Something snappy and fast” (313), something, they both agree, like James’s novel. However, Grady’s reprieve is given finality, when, in a farcical scene, the only complete draft of the novel flies out the door of a moving car.
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