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Thomas Beller

How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood Paperback – August 17, 2005

by Thomas Beller (Author)

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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.

Print length

246 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

August 17, 2005
Dimensions

5.4 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

0393326837
ISBN-13

978-0393326833
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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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (August 17, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 246 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393326837
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393326833
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,595,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,069 in Men's Gender Studies
- #2,134 in American Literature Criticism
- #5,725 in Essays (Books)

Customer Reviews:
8 ratings

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Thomas Beller

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Thomas Beller's most recent book, "J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist," won the New York City Book Award for Biographer/Memoir. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Cathleen Schine called the book "sensitive and irresistible," "lyrical and precise," and concluded, "'J. D. Salinger' is the story of the resonance of its subject, but it is also the story of a generous, humorous, sensitive writer, which is to say, Thomas Beller. Not much escapes him."

Beller's previous books are a collection of stories, "Seduction Theory," "The Sleep-Over Artist," a novel; and "How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood," a collection of personal essays, many of which appeared in the New Yorker and The New York Times, publications to which he contributes regularly.

In addition to his writing, Beller has edited several anthologies, including two drawn from his website, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. Through the literary journal he co-founded and edited from 1990 until its close in 2010, Open City Magazine and Books, he published a diverse array of authors, from Said Sayrafiezedeh and Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte and Edward St. Aubyn, among many others. He teaches creative writing at Tulane University and lives in New Orleans with his wife and two children.

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S. Haines

must read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 12, 2014

Verified Purchase

This collection of stories/vignettes drawn from TB's life is rich in the common experience of growing up male in the U.S. Considering giving it as a XMAS gift to my brother and a few close friends

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

thank you

Helpful

Was That a Yes? I said

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 10, 2006

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.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Patricia Margolis

Art of the Essay

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2006

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!

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

D. C. Berding

Entertaining and Insightful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 11, 2006

You don't have to be a New Yorker to enjoy this book. The author provides a humorous and honest look at his human relationships over the years, to which we can all relate. For anyone who has ever been in a failing relationship (or a budding relationship), several of the stories will strike home. The allegories are sharp and insightful, the stories honest and concise.

I recommend this book.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Iverson 28

Must Read Cool New York Essays!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 15, 2006

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.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

bumbles

attn: BogWoz

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 21, 2005

what's in that bag of chips you've got on your shoulder? get over YOURself. beller's book is great and thougthful and inspiring and, as a narrator, he's not the least bit self-absorbed! in fact it's his modesty that i find most attractive about him in these essays: he deflects attention away from himself at every turn. he never boasts a hard-won male wisdom. and as for his so-called pampered life? i say to you: look who's talking! that you have time enough to take the time to write such disparaging reviews suggests to me that you're the one still in diapers, mister!

10 people found this helpful

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