Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys

As much as I loved Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, until recently I hadn't since sought out any of his other books. In particular, Wonder Boys, of which I never saw the movie, either, but whose trailer I was always sort of annoyed by. [1]

But so I read Wonder Boys last weekend, and I really loved it, and wondered again if I might actually enjoy the movie. And so afterwards, I was looking at the movie info, and based on the character list it seems as if a large chunk of the book was omitted from the movie--namely, the scenes where Grady and James visit Emily's family and celebrate Passover.

That would, indeed, be too bad, as those were my favorite passages in the book, including the following:

He inhaled, and exhaled, and then, as he started in on that old rigged four-part quiz we'd all heard Philly reel off, in weary Hebrew, so many times before--asking Irv why, on this night that commemorated a strange assortment of emergencies and miracles, he ate crackers, horseradish, and parsley and sat slumped against a crocheted orange throw pillow--the Warshaws left off their arguments, and their wry asides, and their shifting around in their chairs. Instead they just sat, motionless, listening, while James picked his way carefully through the passage, in his clear, high corrupted-altar-boy voice, as though his Haggadah were an instruction manual and there was some complicated machine there in the living room that we were all trying to assemble.

[1] I'm not a big fan of Michael Douglas, particularly when he's making faces like this. Thankfully, my paperback doesn't have his simpering face on the cover.