Book review: ‘Manhood for Amateurs’

At its best, Michael Chabon’s latest book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, is never quite what it purports to be. With the exception of its most predictably didactic moments, it is neither a “shy manifesto” nor “an impractical handbook” of manhood, to quote the back matter. And for this I think we can all be thankful. Whenever the subject of manhood comes up, I’m always reminded of The Dude’s answer to the question of what makes a man in The Big Lebowski: “a pair of testicles.”

In one essay, “Faking It,” Chabon even calls the entire ballgame, defining manhood as a “great radiant arc of bullshit” by which those of us with that aforementioned pair of testicles – and a certain number of years – attempt to present an illusion of flawless control over our surroundings.

Not all of the essays are quite so flip in the questioning of manly motives, however. “The Cut” focuses on Chabon’s decision to have his sons circumcised, even with the knowledge that to do so is genital mutilation and that he possesses no clear reason for doing so, except that perhaps it’s “never too soon for them to start learning what a liar you are.” Then there’s “The Memory Hole,” an essay about one decision all parents must make: what of their child’s art to keep, and what to throw away:

It’s not only her artwork that I’m busy throwing away. Almost every hour that I spend with my children is disposed of just as surely, tossed aside, burned through like money by a man on a spree. The sum total of my clear memories of them—of their unintended aphorisms, gnomic jokes, and the sad plain truths they have expressed about the world; of incidents of precociousness, Gothic madness, sleepwalking, mythomania, and vomiting; of the way light has struck their hair or eyelashes on vanished afternoons; of the stupefying tedium of games we have played on rainy Sundays; of highlights and horrors from their encyclopedic history of odorousness; of the 297,000 minor kvetchings and heartfelt pleas I have responded to over the past eleven years with fury, tenderness, utter lack of interest, or a heartless and automatic compassion—those memories, when combined with the sum total of the photographs that we have managed to take, probably add up, for all four of my children to under 1 percent of everything that we have undergone, lived through, and taken pleasure in together.

It’s a wonderful riff on the old saw about not knowing where the years went. And, it’s as artful and poignant as anything Chabon has every written, fictional or otherwise.

If there is one fault with Manhood for Amateurs, it is that it sometimes reads like the product of a fairly narrow, very upper-middle-class swathe of the population. (The sort of people who might read Details magazine, not coincidentally.) In “The Wilderness of Childhood” Chabon laments the lack of freedom we grant our children – a theme that he revisits throughout the book – but he seems unaware that parental overprotection, although not exclusively a problem of the upper classes, is certainly less prevalent among those parents who aren’t so well-to-do. Parents, that is, without the resources available to bestselling authors. Children of single working parents often still come home to all the freedom they can handle. As do many rural, inner city, and reservation children. For better or worse, there are still plenty of kids who spend most of their childhood outdoors, banging around with their friends, and know all about wilderness. Perhaps even a little more than is entirely healthy.

I suspect the narrowness of vision in Manhood for Amateurs is intentional, however. Chabon doesn’t seem to be trying to give us the whole of parental experience, just a little bit of his own. And it’s nearly impossible to fault the result. Especially towards the end of the collection, when the reader comes to realize that Manhood for Amateurs isn’t so much about manhood at all. Instead, it’s about the second part of that title, amateur, which Chabon defines as “a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it—to explore the imaginary world—oneself.” In his penultimate essay, “The Amateur Family”, Michael Chabon writes that maybe “all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborate, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs.” It’s an evocative and ingenious definition of family, and it provides as delightful a surprise ending as to be found in any of Michael Chabon’s fiction.