Wonder Boys

Gary was alone. He had lost everything: novel, publisher, wife, lover; the admiration of his best student, James Leer; all the fruit of the past decade of his life. He had no family, no friends, no car, and probably, after that weekend, no job.
Immediately he thought of his novel Wonder Boys. It was almost exactly one month since he’d begun his ill-advised attempt to slap an ending onto it. The book had grown to 2600 pages.
Thinking it over, he saw that the spells had increased in both frequency and intensity as the effort went awry and Crabtree’s arrival, drew near.
Terry Crabtree was a longtime friend and also his editor , whose career has just about run out. Crabtree hoped to return to New York with Tripp’s long promised novel, though it didn’t seem like that circumstances would have saved either of them at that point.
Grady had a drug problem, he was a marijuana addict and he hadn't been caring for himself.
He wasn’t happy—he had poured too many years of his life, too many thousands of hard-won images and episodes and elegant turns of phrase, into his novel not to part with it in utter sorrow. Still, he felt light. He felt as if he had been raised in the crushing precincts of the planet Jupiter, and then set free, massive and buoyant, to bound along the streets of Point Breeze, covering nine feet at a stride, with only the tuba to keep him from floating entirely off the earth.
His life was in turmoil and it took him a long time to get back his sense of narrative balance and his writerly perception of depth.