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And the "Favorite Book Character Cameo Award" goes to ...
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.
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Whenever I pick up Wonder Boys, and I do pick it up quite often, I'm reminded of why I love writing and writers and the kind of people who love both. Chabon's voice is so lyrical and sentimental, so generous and loving towards its subjects, that I can't help but feel inspired to keep on practicing my feeble talents, initially corn-fed on 5-paragraph short-story analysis in highschool, torqued this-way-and-that through two years of horribly overwritten Blog essays, and finally settling down in the none-too-prestigious, yet lively, neighborhood of scriptwriting.
Incidentally, isn't "farrago" by far the coolest new word you've come across in a long time? Say it, write it, sneak it into your daily diction whichever way you want, but Good God, that's some tasty verbiage.
*smacks lips*
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