Midnight Disease

Currently, I am reading Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. I saw the movie a few years ago and wasn't particularly impressed, but then last summer I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is, I believe, amazing indeed, so I've wanted to read everything of Chabon's that I could get my hands on. I am also reading his collection of short stories, Werewolves in Their Youth, which is very good, but earlier this year I was disappointed by his novella The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (it was good, but nothing special, in my opinion). So I don't know what I'll think of Wonder Boys.

It's about a writer, which is interesting. Books are often about writers, it seems, but I also know that some writers avoid writing about writers. Maybe because it seems too easy; maybe because it's too hard; maybe because it's too likely to become meta, I don't know. Anyway, the protagonist of the novel claims that writers suffer from "the midnight disease," which 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.

It's a romantic view of writers, I think, even though it is unpleasant. And perhaps it's a clue that the protagonist isn't all that reliable--or that he has a tendency to romanticize everything. I haven't read enough to be sure yet. But when I read descriptions of writers, I compare myself to it, and I'm always tempted to be disappointed if I don't match up. That's silly, though, I know. Still, it's comforting to now have a rationalization for being a total klutz. ;)