How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood [Paperback]

Thomas Beller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 2005

From strip clubs to the Academy Awards to the basketball court—a ride through the landscape of guyhood.

Acclaimed fiction writer Thomas Beller digs deep into his own history in this humorous and insightful collection about the state of masculinity. With sharp and engaging eloquence he discourses on T-shirts; being your mother's date at the Academy Awards; life at a bagel factory; the irrational pleasures of old American cars—and the mysterious disappearance of the author's own particular vehicle from a street in downtown Manhattan; love, sex, and breakups in an office environment; the social ecology of street basketball—including the sudden peril befalling a particular court in Manhattan and the heartwarming efforts of previously disparate community members to save it; coaches; the death of a parent; getting over J. D. Salinger; and an attempt to build a complicated piece of furniture for a beloved. Through stints as a bike messenger, a drummer, a boyfriend and—possibly, potentially, finally—a husband, Beller writes about the life-changing effects of love and marriage—past, present, and future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Old cars, custom carpentry and chemistry sets are just some of the topics novelist Beller (The Sleep-Over Artist) uses to explore his own emotional maturation. In spare, crisp language, his descriptions of items and tasks slowly become excavations of memories. The best sections of his book—which is largely assembled from pieces that first appeared in magazines like the New Yorker and Elle—call to mind Raymond Carver in their clarity of language and subdued emotion. In one essay, Beller's fond recall of his 1977 Thunderbird morphs into a meditation on the difficulty of letting go of the romantic notions of youth. In another, a girlfriend's constant purchases of clothing for the author eventually become occasions for melancholy (the gifts began to feel like apologies). A third piece addresses the "paradoxical reality" of strip clubs: they're "one of the few remaining places men can go to not think about women." The only blot on this otherwise excellent book is the chapter in which Beller describes the end of a relationship between the cofounders of Nerve.com; its reportorial tone feels jarring and out-of-place. The rest of the book is thoughtful and controlled; overall, Beller has penned a fine collection of essays that will resonate with many.
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Review

Beller casts himself as both hero and hapless sidekick—just the guide you want for a jaunt down memory lane. -- Adena Spingarn, Vogue

I absolutely loved this book. -- Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!

These quite marvelous and darkly hilarious personal essays derive their power from shameless honesty, often about the most shameful moments. -- Phillip Lopate

[Beller] can write his butt off. -- Donnell Alexander, San Francisco Chronicle

[Beller] is disarmingly self-deprecatory and gets his laughs, of which the book has a number, mainly at his own expense. -- Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (August 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393326837
• ISBN-13: 978-0393326833
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,620,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thomas Beller was born and raised in New York City. He has worked as Chief-of-Inventory at H&H Bagels (Broadway and 80th Street) and a staff writer at the New Yorker, the two jobs briefly overlapping. Other jobs include Bike Messenger and contributing writer to Elle, The Cambodia Daily, Spin, and Travel and Leisure Magazine. He founded and co-edited Open City Magazine for its twenty year run, and created a website, Mrbellersneighborhood.com, devoted to the urban sketch. He lives in New York and New Orleans, where he teaches at Tulane University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Art of the Essay, July 12, 2006

By 

Patricia Margolis (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood (Paperback)

Ironic that Beller's exploration of maturity, or lasck of maturity, should be presented in a series of vignettes that are so intricately woven and so insightful. I enjoyed every page but particularly appreciated the deftness and subtlety of his conclusions. We used a piece from this book in a class on memoir writing: students responded to it as they did to no other reading in the course.
Read it!
Teach with it!

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read Cool New York Essays!, August 14, 2006

By 

Iverson 28 (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood (Paperback)

Reading this book of essays was a real joy. The subjects that Beller explores-trying out for a basketball league run by John Starks, visiting a sex addicts recovery camp, the life of a bike messenger in New York- are fascinating in and of themselves, and Beller writes about them with great style. His metaphors and insights on things as varied as the nostalgic attachment to a t-shirt or a doomed road trip with a girlfriend are fantastic, and you find yourself marveling actually at how often he is able to reveal the absurd and the poignant in life, often in the same moment. Some of the writing sounds like great conversations that you could see Woody Allen wanting to steal, or even something that Adam Gopnik might riff on if he were only a little cooler. I highly recommend this book.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Was That a Yes? I said, June 9, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood (Paperback)

Very few reviews on the site for a book written by one of today's top writers. Wonder if something about the strange boy photo on the front made people shirk away as though afraid to be spotted reading it on the subway, in fear of being thought a pedophile or something worse.

Anyhow once I wrapped a brown paper cover over the front image I enjoyed this book ever so much, and going in, when Beller has placed one, two, three, four top pieces right in a row, I had the notion that he'd hit on something henuinely new under the sun, a way to tell one's life story through a jumping scale of all different places, times in one's life, emotional states. In the first story, "Manhattan Ate My Car," Beller takes a simple fact of life, having one's car towed away, and through sheer storytelling magic made it seem like a rite of passage, an episode from a South American "magic realism" novel from the 1970s. In the follow-up, "The Costume Party," we are suddenly with Tom at age 13, all nervous about friends and girls and absolutely riveted by the supermodel who's moved into his building and seems to like him. Next up, Tom goes with his mother to the Oscars where she loses the "best documentary" award to someone *seated at the end row of the aisle,* confirming the mother's worst suspicions about Oscar voting. You get the picture, it is a dazzling run of beautifully told stories, but then somewhere halfway through when he goes to a sex addiction workshop, not because he's a sex addict but because he's on the job, the discouragement begins, the scales drop off, and you realize what you had thought to be a Nabokovian experiment in "Take Three Tenses" is really only a collection of journalism pieces slopped together and tarted up a bit.

A glance back at the "acknowledgements" page confirms this, take a look at the glossy magazines that sent Beller all over for his wizened takes on this, that, whatever they're paying for. It stopped being about him, and began to be an informal survey of, what's hot in magazine coverage nowadays.

However, Beller is so talented a writer he manages to end the book on the same rising note of exhilaration and wonder with which it began, so it definitely finishes strong, with the very best occasional essays in the whole book, leaving this reader with the feeling that Beller has laid his own self out bare, warts and all, as have few American writers since Benjamin Franklin or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And plus, he is so good looking that actually he could just write down every name in the phone book a la Kenneth Goldsmith and I'd be pretty enraptured.