Customer Reviews

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (P.S.)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Moms who like to read (and write) about motherhood have had it pretty good over the last decade or so. Led by a cadre of "mom bloggers" and others, women have found new ways to connect over the minutiae, the often thankless drudgery, and even the dark side of modern motherhood. No longer are images of motherhood isolated to the hazy pink aisles of Hallmark's Mother's Day section; instead, moms have discovered camaraderie amid chaos as they read brutally honest confessions of the anguish, boredom and terrifying love to which mothers can now admit. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon's own wife, Ayelet Waldman, has become famous (or, in some circles, notorious) for her own brilliantly written but painfully honest writings about marriage and motherhood.

And while it's fantastic that moms have avenues for them to connect and to converse, dads have had to work much harder to find thoughtful writing about fatherhood that doesn't idealize, essentialize, or talk down to them. Now, Chabon has filled that niche admirably with MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS, a wide-ranging but thematically focused collection of his autobiographical writings (many previously published in Details magazine and elsewhere). Here, Chabon touches on many of the motifs that he has explored in his other nonfiction writing and in his novels --- baseball, comics, sex, writing, religion --- but inevitably circles back to what is, for him, at the center of it all: his family.

Chabon, a father of four young children, uses his writing to constantly define what it means --- and what it could mean --- to be a husband, a father, and a man in the early years of the 21st century. He defines his own role in comparison to his well-meaning but distant father and also in the context of society's (embarrassingly low) expectations of what fathers can and should accomplish. Chabon's writing is unapologetically male-oriented (female readers will learn what fanboys are really thinking when looking at those buxom, Amazonian comic book heroines). But he writes in a way that continually questions the implications of masculinity. For example, he speaks appreciatively of his forced adolescent introduction into the culinary arts when his mother returned to work and of the implications of a man carrying a (gulp) man purse, or "murse."

Throughout, Chabon utilizes the kind of wry observations and exquisite literary craft that have made his novels both popular and critical sensations. Almost all the essays are simultaneously thoughtful, cohesive, and very, very funny. But Chabon's writing is most affecting and emotionally open when he's writing passionately about his wife and beloved children (even when he's commenting on their odorousness or their tendency to ask difficult questions about embarrassing subjects). His observations on marriage and parenthood are specific enough to resonate with other parents but universal enough to speak to any reader who has considered thoughtfully the role of the family in American life or the changing responsibilities and expectations of the sexes.

I used to have a hard time finding gifts for friends about to embark on the journey of fatherhood; most in my circle would just roll their eyes at a sugary gift book about the meaning of fatherhood. But Michael Chabon's new memoir is so much more than that: it is an exquisite blend of the mundane and the mind-blowing, all broken down into short essays just the right length to read while giving Theo a bottle or waiting for Sadie's soccer game to start --- the perfect book for young dads to stash in their murses.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

I'm a father in my late 30s with two daughters and have had plenty of the "I don't know what the hell I'm doing!" moments in my life, but reading 300 pages of someone else saying the same thing is hard to take. It starts out great with an essay on the insultingly low expectations for fathers, and maybe that got my hopes up too high for more great insights. There were some fine moments - a memory of Chabon's relationship with his ex-father in law that touched me, how a random song on the radio can bring you back like a time machine, how no one seems to think about the future any more and a comic book testimonial to the fighting spirit of his wife were some of my favorites. However, some of the essays about animal cruelty, Jose Conseco (huh?) and having sex with his mother's drunk friend at age 15 just left me scratching my head. Obviously everyone's life experience bring you different insight, but this book really wasn't as enlightening as I might have hoped, or the rave reviews might lead you to believe. Glad I borrowed it from the library instead of buying it.

Chabon's book is basically a collection of essays on being a man. The subtitle is "The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son." The theme is a perfect counterpoint to his wife's book (Ayelet Waldman's "Bad Mother"), but while Waldman's book stayed on track, Chabon's book takes delightful side-trips into the lands of comic books, baseball and listening to the radio.

My Thoughts

As much as I didn't want to compare their writing (which strikes me as horribly unfair), I got a lot of food for thought from Waldman's book but I fell in love with Chabon's book. His writing pleased me immensely. The way he puts words together thrilled me and amused me and touched me. So much so that I think I'll just spend the rest of this review cramming as many little excerpts in as I can. Why listen to me go on and on about how much I loved this book when you can experience it for yourself?

Consider his essay the "Splendors of Crap." Have you ever heard a more accurate description of modern children's movies than this:

At least once a month I take my kids to see a new "family movie"--the latest computer-generated piece of animated crap. Please don't oblige me to revisit the last one even long enough to name the film, let alone describe it. Anyway, you know the one I mean: set in a zoo, or in a forest, or on farm, or under the sea, or in "Africa," or in an effortlessly hilarious StorybookLandTM where magic, wonder and make-believe are ironized and mocked except at the moments when they are tenderly invoked to move units. I believe but am not prepared to swear that the lead in this weekend's version may have been a neurotic lion, or a neurotic bear, or a neurotic rat, or a neurotic chicken. Chances are good that the thing featured penguins; for a while, the movies have all been featuring penguins. Naturally, there were the legally required 5.5 incidences of humor-stimulating flatulence per hour of running time. A raft of bright pop-punk tunes on the soundtrack, alternating with familiar numbers culled with art and cruelty from the storehouse of parental nostalgia.

Chabon has a gift for writing about the little moments of life and making them instantly familiar and relatable but then layering on his own unique style and viewpoint in a way that makes these essays as delicious and satisfying to read as dark chocolate or a warm roll with butter (or substitute your guilty delight here). As my Little One embarks on his school career, I've begun to realize that the sheer amount of papers he'll generate in the coming years could account for an entire forest of trees dying. So I thoroughly enjoyed "The Memory Hole," in which Chabon writes about dealing with the creative works of four children. Let's read a little of it, shall we?

Almost every school day, at least one of my four children comes home with art: a drawing, a painting, a piece of handicraft, a construction-paper assemblage, an enigmatic apparatus made from pipe cleaners, sparkles and clay. And almost every bit of it ends up in the trash. My wife and I have to remember to shove the things down deep, lest one of the kids stumble across the ruin of his or her laboriously stapled paper-plate-and-dried-bean maraca wedged in with the junk mail and the collapsed packaging from a twelve-pack of squeezable yogurt. But there is so much of the stuff; we don't know what else to do with it. We don't toss all of it. We keep the good stuff--or what strikes us, in the Zen of the instant between scraping out the lunch box and sorting the mail, as good. As worthier somehow; more vivid, more elaborate, more accurate, more sweated over.

In typing that last excerpt, I realized that what makes Chabon's writing so good is how specific he is. He doesn't just say "We throw it in the trash and make sure it is buried deep." He describes the art ("laboriously stapled paper-plate-and-dried-bean maraca"--who among us has NOT made one of these or had one given to us?) and the trash ("the collapsed packaging from a twelve-pack of squeezable yogurt"). It is this specificity and detail that delights me and creates such memorable and relatable writing.

Yet I think Chabon's true genius is taking a specific event like dealing with the flood of artwork from your children and turning it into a deeper, more philosophical musing. Consider the end of the essay excerpted above:

The truth is that in every way, I am squandering the treasure of my life. It's not that I don't take enough pictures, though I don't, or that I don't keep a diary, though iCal and my monthly Visa bill are the closest I come to a thoughtful prose record of events. Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.

I wish I could keep going; I must have marked at least 30 other passages that I thought were particularly memorable or amazing or just spoke to me. Like his essay "Radio Silence," which talks about how listening to the radio can suddenly make you a time traveler--winging you back to the first moment you heard that song.

I had every intention of giving this book away for a giveaway when I was done with it, but I can't. This is a keeper. This is a book I want to keep close by: to dip into when I need to be reminded what good writing is, or when I face the inevitable moment when my son asks me about my past and I need to walk the same tightrope Chabon does when his kids ask him whether he's ever tried drugs1, or when I just want to relax and revel in what a gifted writer can do with English language.

If I were just ten or fifteen years younger I'd probably have given this book 5 stars (vs the 4 I assigned). Because the truth is this guy is so hip and knowledgeable about all things related to pop culture of the past thirty years or so, that, quite frankly, there are references here I probably didn't "get" at all. I probably could have researched some of this stuff online, but I didn't, so I stayed uncomfortably in the dark here and there. And I was okay with that, honest.

I have only read one other Michael Chabon book, his first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh - probably 15 or 20 years ago, and I really enjoyed it. Of course, I was younger then. The thing is, I seem to have gotten so much older since then; Chabon has only aged at about half-speed while I was full-speed ahead. Or so it seemed as I was reading these lovely essays. And they really are wonderful examples of writing - wise, witty, funny, moving and just plain GOOD, ya know? But what impressed me the most were the things he had to say about his mom and dad, who divorced when the author was only 11 or 12, and yet he still has such loving things to say about both of them, and how much he owes to them. So many children of divorce tend to whine about how awful it was for them and blame all their problems on them. Not Chabon. He figures he owes his slight OCD tendencies to his dad, who was a collector and a man of eclectic and idiosyncratic interests. Now Chabon is that kind of man, and is passing the excitement of such interests along to his own children. He even appreciates his mom's ex-boyfriends, who filled certain voids for him while they were around. He credits his mom with turning him into something of a cook and baker, because she was working, and left him to feed the family. There's other stuff like that in here, but the thing is he so obviously STILL LOVES his mom and dad. His brother, five years younger, also gets some print here. Same thing. The guys seem to genuinely LOVE each other.

He even has kind things to say about his first wife and his first father-in-law. This is a guy who confesses to being perhaps too much of an optimist for most of his life, who is made content and happy by simple things. How can you not like a guy like this. His devotion to his wife and four children shine through almost everything he says about them in these pieces, though he is brutally honest about how they all function - or don't - as a family.

I am a person who reads encyclopedically and in great volume. For the first 50 years or so of my reading life I read mostly fiction. Now I read a bit more non-fiction, mostly memoirs. This book, Manhood for Amateurs, is probably about as close as you'll get to a memoir by Chabon. And maybe it's enough. What a talent this guy has!

In one essay, "I Feel Good About My Murse," it hit me why I like this guy and his writing so much. He talks about wishing for a bag to carry his stuff in and finally getting one, a man-purse, or 'murse.'

"It holds my essential stuff, including a book - for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times ..."

There it is. Chabon loves books. Me too. Now I know I'm gonna have to start reading his other novels. I know my son has the one that won the Pulitzer, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I'll start with that one. Or maybe first I'll try his other collection of essays - the one about books and writing, called Maps and Legends.

Damn! My to-read list just keeps growing. Ain't life grand? - Tim Bazzett, author of BOOKLOVER

Let's face it: being a great writer doesn't make a man a great husband, father, or son. There are, in fact, some famous examples of quite the opposite. With this in mind, I wondered what might be discovered in Chabon's "first sustained work of personal writing."

"Manhood for Amateurs" starts off with wit and humor, then segues into hard-earned wisdom and poignancy. Chabon sets the bar low from the onset (with a wink of the eye), letting us in on the well known secret that a man doesn't need to do half as much as his fairer counterpart to be considered a good parent. Even while poking fun, while making wry and laugh-out-loud observations, he manages to give us fresh perspective on the power of memory, of living in the moment, of fear and aggression and sensitivity. He admits his own shortcomings, hints at--and sometimes revels a bit in--the wild times of his own youth. From his odes to comic books, Velvet Crumb Cake, and Big Barda (yeah, I'd never heard of her), to his loving references to his mother and his wife, Chabon gives us plenty of reasons to celebrate being a man--whether young or old.

Women may enjoy this book as a peek into the male mindset, good and/or bad, while men may enjoy it as a sometimes raucous, sometimes reverential, look at what it means to be a father in the twenty-first century. There's less here than I had hoped about being a husband, but Chabon does offer some heartfelt words of advise from his failed first marriage.

Throughout, I found myself laughing, sighing, sometimes disagreeing, often relating, and reading sections aloud to my wife (who, generally, seemed to enjoy it as much as I). Overall, I found myself looking forward to more years of fatherhood--with all the pleasures and regrets they are bound to bring. In Chabon's world, to be an "amateur" is to be one driven by passion, as opposed, I assume, to being a professional driven by monetary motives. His passion for his children comes through, and with that perspective, I hope to never forget the joys of being an "amateur" myself.

According to Michael Chabon's hilariously candid essay, "William and I," he writes that "the handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low." In contrast to the much aggrieved, or as the author puts it, "tedious and invisible" role of classic motherhood, fathers are traditionally relegated the tasks of bread-winning and some minimal cosseting of the children. On the other hand, mothers must concern themselves occasionally with performing "an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks' worth of healthy but appealing breakfast snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr." To this end, the science of good mothering hinges on, he observes, "a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone," and whatever deliberations we cast on her performance come only at the end of this thankless, mirthless role.

The unwritten handbook on parenting tells us that the enterprise of child-rearing, while ideally resting between the shoulders of husband and wife, ultimately remains, by merit of performance, in distaff territory. Mothers must impel themselves to lord over the household with an eye trained for disaster, detecting "the vast invisible flow of peril through which their children are obliged daily to make their way"; conversely, fathers adopt a more casual approach, often brazenly oblivious to the "specter of calamity that haunts their children."

However, considering the cultural changes of the last few decades, it is now not uncommon to see more mothers assuming the post of the materfamilias while fathers play the part of the Gen X housedad--milkless and endowed with a shade less testosterone, but skilled in laundering, folding, cleaning, and most importantly, cooking. That said, society at large still revolves around a familiar and well-established norm--dad finances the family, whereas mom, though now employed and ambidextrously equipped for paternal substitution, still tends to the children's needs.

Like many of the pieces in Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon extrapolates on the revisions made on this proverbial handbook of the male trifecta, outlining manhood's inherent flaws, behavioral theories and egotistical dispositions; about cultural dialogues with popular art that shape its intractable methodology, illustrated with artifacts as diverse as Lego's, comic book characters, baseball cards, kiddie paraphernalia, and sci-fi films like Star Trek; and on tidbits lifted from his personal history that govern the raison d'ętre's of his writing, his artistry, and moreover, the cruces of manhood that challenge him to refine his approach to the ever-evolving craft.

Readers familiar with his finest novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union will find much that resonates thematically with these essays--particularly, how he stitches elements of popular art into the fabric of fiction, shaping not only his characters' imaginations and impulses, but also how these influences throttle them into universes molded on emotions and relationships mirrored by these cultural relics. Elsewhere, as he relates his own past experiences (his flirtations with the opposite sex, his children's bar and bat mitzvah's, and his fascination with celestial bodies, to name just a few), we also get a glimpse into Chabon the puppeteer and the obsessive-compulsive tick that underlines his tendencies to fashion characters with a precious, self-conscious penchant for control and order.

The medium of the essay, however, affords Mr. Chabon the luxury to burrow deeply into the more intimate dimensions of his thoughts, allowing his equally comic and wistful raconteur skills to regale us with well-accepted truths remastered in his energetic, richly drawn prose. For instance, in "Hypocritical Theory," which discusses capitalism's hegemony on childhood imagination, he is confounded by the realization that kid culture, described once as "that compound of lore and play," has now transformed into the "trademarked product and property of adults," robbing its activity of the individuality and the freeform fantasies of a lost decade.

When his son wallows in the joys of commercialized, uniformly banal books like Captain Underpants, he regards his disapproval of them as a "small, feeble attempt to reestablish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague, disregarded, abused," all the while deeming himself hypocritical as he had once indulged in very similar passions. In an almost identical grain, he relates to us his disgruntlement with the present culture's unimaginative, even grim sketches of the future--once the arena for dreams of fantasized technocracies replete with engineering marvels like the Jetsons, Star Trek, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He prods us to "unreservedly and dreamingly" believe in the future, rather than "living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange, and bewildering book."

While this memoir stylistically represents a departure from Chabon's usual outlet of fiction, it ultimately echoes many of the inquests explored by characters like the escapist Josef Kavalier (his aspirations for heroism concomitant with the social travails of his race) and Meyer Landman's existential obsessions with sleuthing and problem solving, in a way paralleling the author's own lifelong meditations. In one piece, "Exercises in Masculine Affection," he waxes lyrical about his in-laws, cherishing their "rootedness, with this visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle."

In "Studies in Pink and Blue," when writing of an incident that reflects the violence boys are naturally given to, he questions both "the great lost freedom of childhood" and, in retrospection of his reaction to it, "the morality, indeed the sanity, of my gender itself." And as he pensively evaluates and distills his matured understanding of the father-and-son affair, he declares, "No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be."

It is both fascinating and edifying to read such an introspective and unflinchingly honest memoir--a refreshing change of pace indeed from the maudlin sphere of Dad Lit, fraught with hammy displays of venereal bravado, self-deprecating and narcissistic tableaus of dirtying one's hands in the primordial mess of diapers and baby poop, and neurotic, often flat-footed overexaminations of familial life and parenthood. Well, Chabon occasionally lapses into awkwardly phallic and hilarious phrases that, in retrospect, sound cutesy and tart ("A wallet is a man's totem, his distillation...the necessary corollary to this inviolate principle is that no man, ever, ought to carry a purse. Purses are for women; a purse is basically a vagina with a strap"), but for the most part skirts the sentimentality while beautifully tackling the larger subjects of love, family, remembrance, and nostalgia.

In the end, Manhood for Amateurs really offers no straightforward conclusions about the art of manhood, but the author's analysis of it, whether venturing into any of its three turbulent tributaries, offers judgment that is sound, wise, and beautiful.

Michael Chabon wrote a volume of essays on family life which manages to avoid falling into tired cliches, or willfully contarian sentiments. Instead, Chabon consistently finds the unique perspective of such well-worn topics as fatherhood, marriage, family.

What comes through is an enthusiasm for life and a relentless need to share that enthusiasm with the reader. Anyone who can write about so traditional a topic as his daughter's Bat Mitzvah, yet cut straight to the heart of the moment in a fresh and vital way is a writer to be reckoned with. This is a wonderful collection.

As I began Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Father, Husband, and Son, I was under the impression that the book was simply a collection of essays on what it means to be a family man in the midst of all of today's craziness. But it is so much more than that. Chabon does give his thoughts on parenting and on being a man burdened with a certain amount of insecurity about his role, but because of all the personal history the author uses to illustrate his points, the book can just as easily be classified as an autobiography or memoir.

Divided into ten sections of 1-6 pieces each, Manhood for Amateurs visits various phases of Chabon's life, beginning with his boyhood and progressing to his relationship with his wife and children in the present (2009). Along the way, Chabon reveals a truth known to most men, if they will only admit it to themselves: they are largely faking it. In fact, the first piece under the section entitled "Styles of Manhood" is called exactly that, "Faking It." Here, Chabon addresses the male tendency to "put up a front," to "pretend" to possess a competence in any given area that may, or may not, exist. The piece begins with his effort to hang a new towel rack in one of his bathrooms, a task during which Chabon says he "managed to sustain the appearance of competence over nearly the entire course of...three hours." He, however, well knew from experience that "dealing with molly bolts" often leads to "tragedy." That it did not happen that way this time, surprised him as much as it did his wife.

Another recurring theme of Manhood for Amateurs is the degree of freedom Chabon enjoyed during his childhood compared to how little freedom today's children experience. Chabon considers the members of his generation to be among the very last children allowed to explore the "Wilderness of Childhood" on their own. This land, once "ruled by children," a place where they could spend hours at a time free from adult supervision, has disappeared from a world in which every childhood activity seems to be strictly supervised and regulated by parents. Chabon explores how this change affects today's children, and society, for the rest of their lives.

Manhood for Amateurs is filled with frank and insightful writing. It is a pleasure to read Chabon's prose and to learn so much about the man responsible for books such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Chabon has a way of gently exposing the little boy in all of us that is sure to make men everywhere smile in recognition.

Anyone who reads Details magazine will recognize many of the essays in this collection as they first appeared there. Even so, it is great to have them collected in one place and a pleasure to read them again. Chabon really is a strong prose stylist, especially in the essay form.

The best thing about these essays is how much they ring true, particularly to a man of Chabon's generation. The flexibility of fact and truth is problematic in his other essay collection, Maps and Legends, but here, almost everything hits close to home.

Essentially, these essays center on what it means to be a man in all his incarnations in 21st century America. All of them are engaging but some were real high points. In "William and I" he takes off from a complement on being a good father to discuss how the standards for good fatherhood are still low compared to what it takes to be considered a good mother. In "I Feel Good About My Murse" his muses over getting a bag in which to carry all his stuff. In "The Amateur Family" he reclaims the meaning of the word amateur to describe his efforts to bring up four children as "geeks". Along the way he also talks deeply about his own childhood, his experiences as a divorced/remarried man, and his writing career, among other things.

Overall, there's hardly a sour note in the book. It is an excellent and easy read, particularly for a man of a certain age (and the women who want to know him better).

A confession... I have little interest in "the pleasures and regrets of a husband, father, and son." I have A LOT of interest in Michael Chabon. And why not? In addition to being one of my favorite authors, we're both 40-something Jews who were raised in suburban Maryland. And we both live in the San Francisco Bay Area and travel in literary circles. Okay, we're acquainted--but in the most superficial way imaginable; just enough to say hello and kibitz a bit. But the fact that he's a nice guy is completely subsumed by the fact that he's one of the greatest writers living today. I am an unabashed fan, and this collection of essays about a subject I'm not particularly interested in (being neither husband, father, son, wife, or mother) was a thrilling read.

Chabon's use of language is magnificent. No matter the subject, it's the sort of text where you want to grab anyone in the vicinity and just start reading aloud. I knew I was hooked when I began tearing up while reading the first essay, "The Loser's Club" which recounts a rejection suffered in his youth. "That was the moment I began to think of myself as a failure," the Pulitzer prize-winner writes. Chabon is vulnerable within these essays, sharing deeply personal details of his life, and letting that streak of neurosis shine through. But don't worry that the collection is one long, drawn out therapy session. There are more laughs than tears and as I noted above, Chabon is a very likeable fellow. "I Feel Good About my Murse," for instance, is delightfully silly. Even so, Chabon's got something real to say about masculine identity amidst the laughs.

Not every single essay is a slam dunk. The Lego one sort of left me cold. For you it might be another. But overall, this collection is so strong that it must surely be a go-to gift for fathers, husbands, sons, and all lovers of great writing for decades to come.

Oh, and I've seen him playing with his kids--he really is a great father.