LIT FOR LIVING: Father Knows Best

 

Although one is told never to judge a book by its cover, one is also told that there is always the exception that proves the rule. Case in point: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Resembling a colorful board game, complete with one of those dials and a spinner that lands on such topics as hypocrisy, sexuality, innocence, regret, sincerity, nostalgia, experience, and play (and a subtitle, “The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son”), the cover presents Manhood for Amateurs as a funhouse of vignettes concerning contemporary male issues. And that’s pretty much what you get: thirty-nine essays under ten not-so-typical subheadings as disparate as: Exercises in Masculine Affection, Patterns of Early Enchantment, and Tactics of Wonder and Loss. There is the promise of more than enough goodies inside to go around, and, like our New England weather, if you don’t like what you’re reading, just wait a moment or two and this will soon change.
Despite the vast array of ground that the book pledges to (and then does) cover, it’s still not hard to picture the marketing folks at HarperCollins glancing nervously at one another and wondering who the hell is going to buy such a book. And then, of course, realizing, oh, it’s written by Michael Chabon. Never mind, then.

 

For those who have been living under a rock somewhere, or perhaps simply in a world far, far away from what’s left of our literary one, Chabon is the author of ten previous books that include The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; Wonder Boys (made into a terrific film starring Michael Douglas); and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (made into a not-so-terrific film). Ever since his debut in 1988 with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon has more or less been the darling of the literati, a more reliable successor to Jay McInerney, one who will never fall, or even stumble momentarily, from grace.

 

The very embodiment of the smart, good-looking, successful, sensitive (if a little too sincere), contemporary family man (Chabon has four children and is married to the novelist Ayelet Waldman), who better than Chabon to address and explore so articulately and interestingly the ever-changing questions of how to be a man today? What better candidate than Chabon to explore whether one should or should not carry a purse; what it’s like to be a first-time father; how to bounce back from a fraught and failed starter marriage; whether to drive your family through a snowstorm or wait it out; or to weigh in on which is better: new or old Legos? The answer, after reading this fun and varied collection, is … maybe no one. (And, for the record: the old Legos.)

 

While over-earnestness might be an occasional shortcoming, modesty is one of the collection’s prevailing strengths. To set the tone, Chabon begins with a quote from G.K. Chesterton: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” One of his early essays begins, “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” And in the book’s opening essay, “The Loser’s Club”—wherein Chabon describes his boyhood attempt to jump-start a comic book appreciation club that led to him sitting in an empty room with unoccupied chairs and tables—he writes, “My story and my stories are all, in one way or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.”

 

Despite such pessimism, genuine or otherwise, Chabon’s grand pursuit for connection continues here with his most self-revelatory book to date. All in all, it’s a pleasant and more than occasionally comic mix of stuff that’s been on the author’s mind since becoming a somewhat famous writer and father of four, living in Berkeley, California, after surviving a childhood in Maryland that included a divorce and a conspicuously absent father, with a younger brother named Steve, to whom, incidentally, Chabon dedicates the book.

 

Who knew, for instance, that Chabon likes to bake, or that he learned how to cook for his family, mostly out of necessity, when he was a teenager and his mother was too tired to do so when she returned home after a long day at the office. Chabon also confesses to making a habit of acquiring father figures; tossing his children’s artwork in the trash on the sly; having a secretive and short-lived affair with one of his mother’s friends (when he was a teen); not being particularly handy around the house; and weathering his wife’s bipolar-induced flirtation with suicide.

 

We might not really care about any of this, except that the chief topic of these essays is rarely Chabon himself. He is, of course, there—observing, thinking, remembering, and writing it all down—but he and the other people who populate these stories are there only to serve some larger point or theme or particular line of inquiry. For example, Chabon writes in “The Wilderness of Childhood” about the potential consequences of the overly restricted lives most children seem to endure today; after his daughter learns how to ride a bike, the two of them take a depressing ride around his neighborhood where it dawns on both of them that there is no one else to ride with, and nowhere to ride to—“nowhere that I was willing to let her go.”

What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn’t encounter a single other child.

 

Chabon, as it turns out, is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud—embodying a characteristic typical of many men and often a source of frustration for their spouses, that of inactivity. Clearly it’s Chabon’s wife who stirs the couple’s drink. He describes himself as someone who, before meeting his wife, had “nothing to do, nobody to do it with.”

When it came to the art of living, the only medium susceptible to my genius was inertia. If someone wanted to get married, I would marry her. If she wanted out, then it was time to get a divorce. Otherwise, in either case, I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. 

 

Get out, for better or worse, his wife has certainly helped him to do. Though he doesn’t court trouble, he confesses to liking troublemakers. And he seems forever grateful to his own troublemaking wife, because if it were not for her, “I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It’s too much bother. It’s dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don’t speak English there, it’s too far away, they’re closed for the day, they’re full, they said we can’t, it’s too much bother with children along. She will have none of that.”

 

Under the rather roomy umbrella of what it means to be a man, there is much for Chabon to mine, most of it transcending his own experience. And while at no more than eight pages a shot, many of the pieces are, arguably, a bit forgettable, like a late-night snack one eats in front of a ballgame, they can be just what one is in the mood for: comfort food for any man seeking a bit of reassurance and solidarity. [JAN/FEB 2010]

 

Managing editor Chris Newbound writes about books and occasionally
his own life as a parent, husband, and man in these pages and at
www.berkshireliving.com.

 

THE GOODS

Manhood for Amateurs:
The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon
HarperCollins
 

PHOTO BY STEPHANIE RAUSSER/CORBIS OUTLINE