“ ‘He’s writing his name in water,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’ It was the half-regretful term – borrowed from the headstone of John Keats – that Crabtree used to describe his own and others’ failure to express a literary gift through any actual writing on paper. Some of them, he said, just told lies; others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution. That had always been Crabtree’s chosen genre – thinking his way into an attractive disaster and then attempting to talk his way out, leaving no record and nothing to show for his efforts but a reckless reputation…” (page 93) With that being said, we are subtly introduced to the entire notion of being a “wonder boy”, a person who achieves success effortlessly and doesn’t have the ability to either analyze their talent or replicate it. Wonder Boys ’ author, Michael Chabon, presents one such unfolding path through the eyes of a writer who has just passed his own experience onto the ...