Wonder Boys Read Online Free

jewelry. It was a remarkable trick for a fifteen-year-old to have performed, but it was unique; Crabtree had written nothing since then, not a line. The story had weird sexual undertones, as, it must be said, did its author. He was then an awkward, frail young man, his face all forehead and teeth, and he kept to himself, at the back of the class, dressed in a tight, unfashionable suit and tie, a red cashmere scarf tucked like an ascot into his raised lapels when the weather turned cool. I sat in my own corner of the room, sporting a new beard and a pair of little round wire-rims, and took careful notes on everything the teacher had to say.
    The teacher was a real writer, too, a lean, handsome cowboy writer from an old Central Valley ranching family, who revered Faulkner and who in his younger days had published a fat, controversial novel that was made into a movie with Robert Mitchum and Mercedes McCambridge. He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook, since lost, with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.
    It was in this man’s class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder—from what I’ve since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.
    But these are observations I made only later, over the course of many years’ exposure to the workings of the midnight disease. At the time I was simply intimidated, by our teacher’s fame, by his snakeskin boots, and by the secrets of the craft which I believed him to possess. The class covered two stories every session, and in the first go-around I held the last slot on the schedule, along with Crabtree, who, I noticed, made no effort whatever to write down the axioms that filled the smoky air of the classroom, nor ever had anything to contribute to the class beyond an occasional terse but unfailingly polite comment on the banality of the work under discussion that afternoon. Naturally his aloofness was taken for arrogance, and he was thought to be a snob, in particular when he wore his cashmere scarf; but I had noticed from the first how bitten were his nails, how soft and unimposing his voice, how he flinched whenever someone addressed him. He stayed in his corner, in his ill-fitting suit, looking forever pale and faintly queasy, as though our company disgusted him but he was too kind to let on.
    He was suffering from the