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    Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
    Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
    Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
    Ebook285 pages5 hours

    Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son

    By Michael Chabon

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect.

    A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

    What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as -- simply because -- it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon’s memories of childhood, of his parents’ marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played -- on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key -- by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.

    At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is destined to become a classic.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 24, 2012
    ISBN9780062124593
    Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
    Author

    Michael Chabon

    Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels – including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union – two collections of short stories, and one other work of non-fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.

    Read more from Michael Chabon

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    Reviews for Manhood for Amateurs

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    • 3/5
      fun and thoughtful
    • 5/5
      Most of these short essays were written for Details, a men's clothing and lifestyle magazine. That audience allows Chabon terrific range -- in a single paragraph he can roam back and forth from coarse to erudite. Reading these essays is like sitting at ease with a guy who is a close enough friend to be emotionally open, in an environment sufficiently informal that he can say exactly what he means, without circumlocutions or euphemisms. But of course they're essays, so that mood is the product not of actual intimacy, but of skilled and careful writing, however effortless it seems. Shining through all the essays is Chabon's astoundingly precise word choice, which lets the meaning of a paragraph - or an entire essay - pivot on a single phrase. An example of that precision is the book's title, which sounds self-deprecating at first take, but in light of the penultimate essay ('The Amateur Family'), has a different, much richer significance: "The closest I have ever come [to defining the kind of people I have raised my children to be] is amateur, in all the original best senses of the word: a lover, a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it -- to explore the imaginary world - oneself."The essays in the collection I found most moving include 'The Hand on My Shoulder', about Chabon's relationship with the father of his ex-wife; 'The Heartbreak Kid', which knits together mirth and self-inflicted suffering; 'A Woman of Valor', in praise of Chabon's wife; 'Xmas', a Jewish take on Christmas; and 'Daughter of the Commandment', on time and family, and which brought a lump to my throat, not that I'm particularly sentimental.
    • 4/5
      It was a great pleasure to read this book. There were such a lot of déjà vu for me. All those funny little experiences with own children which I've remembered could be really identically to the authors one. The only differences are that in my country children are still able to play out in the neighbourhood without any parental survey as well the cycling on the roads is still possible here. It was a marvellous and humorously reading.
    • 5/5
      I have been and always will be a sucker for any kind of how-to manual for the human race that anyone wants to put on a bookshelf. The fact that Chabon is one of my favorite authors is just icing on the cake.

      The sad truth of the matter, of course, is that these books never live up to their billing. At best, one is left with a particularly obscure set of ikea-like illustrations, suggesting that while there is some particular road upon which one can tread, finding it will require luck more than words.

      But although Chabon's book does little to explain "manhood" to the rest of us amateurs, it was still a great read. Even though he comes off as far more of a superdad than I suspect he actually is, his honest acknowledgment of his flaws in the other areas of his life give the book a groundedness that makes it both accessible and entertaining.
    • 4/5
      Reliably funny, occasionally hilarious, sometimes painful to read. His descriptions of his kids, and of his interactions with them, are delightful.
    • 4/5
      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.Rated at: 4.0
    • 5/5
      While I was already a fairly big fan of Chabon, I was very pleasantly surprised by this collection of essays on fatherhood, masculinity, and generally speaking life that made me laugh, cry, and ponder the world. His nostalgia is contagious and makes for a highly entertaining, informative, and thought provoking read.
    • 5/5
      I don't usually read memoirs and didn't know what to expect when I picked up Manhood for Amateurs (aside from having read and enjoyed The Yiddish Policeman's Union), but I was pleasantly surprised by how fun of a read this was. Chabon describes his life in a style that's vivid and has just the right amount of wit, and I was amazed at how much I felt I could relate to his essays despite the generation gap between us. And I might have even learned a thing or two.I was planning to list my favorite essays, but I don't think I can: there are simply too many to list.
    • 4/5
      The good; He’s a really good writer, funny, interesting, and has some good insights. His language can be on the clever side, but never hard to read or obtuse. Overall a good read.

      The bad; a little too much "I’m an Enlightened Male". A lot of his thoughts are about being a parent and I’m just not that interested. Not enough to put me off.

      Except…he has a couple of essays about children today (including his own) and how they’re too sheltered, and not allowed to get into their own trouble enough. It’s an opinion I share, and I’ve never heard it put better, all sides of it.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audio book read by the author. There's something very boyish about his voice that really resonates in the reading. I felt like this was a love story to his generation - my generation - as much as a love story to his family. Sure, he has his gripes, things are not as cool as when WE were kids, yadda yadda... but there's way more joy than curmudgeon in him. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable collection of essays on a modern family.
    • 2/5
      He still writes delightfuly but I'd much rather a new novel than these essays & memoirs - they're mostly quite dull.
    • 2/5
      I was completely and utterly disappointed by this collection. I greatly enjoy Chabon's writing with Kavalier and Yiddish Policemen's two of my favorite novels. I also greatly enjoy essays. However, I had forgotten a lesson I learned long ago; the combined attraction of a favored author writing essays does not always result in a pleasing experience.What goes wrong here?Well, that is a hard one to put a finger on. (If we could figure out the answers to all failures, none of us would ever have to fail, right?) One thing I feel is that these essays are far too aware of themselves. Most come from one source and it is as if the author became more and more aware that he had an agenda – the attempt to lightheartedly be the butt of jokes about the foibles of manhood. And, here is problem number two. Yes the book contains the title manhood, but it is much more about fatherhood. (Face it, how can any author separate the two.) And, with that emphasis, the pieces constantly struggle with the temptation to fall into the territory of maudlin writing.Oh, they are written well enough. But under the precept that brevity can contain great depth, they skim over subjects, lightheartedly pretending that they mean much more. What results is the picture of an author with foibles that match our own, but an author who just looks back at them over his shoulder and laughs, "Well, ha-ha, I guess there's nothing we can do" and travels blithely on.Rereading the above, I believe I've come on too heavy handed – the critic who enjoys the task of vilifying while the positive qualities are forgotten. There are some decent essays in the collection. And they show the depth that Chabon has exhibited in his longer writings. And some of that depth speaks to remorse and joy in life. And there's the thing; that's what I wanted in all these essays. But for a few instanced, I did not get that. And that is the root of my disappointment.
    • 4/5
      A very enjoyable collection of Michael Chabon's various essays throughout the years, loosely organized into chapters about different stages of his life. I am big fan of Chabon and I credit him with injecting recent mainstream American fiction with a shot of respectable geekiness. Reading these essays also helps one understand a little of Chabon's background and the impetus for many of the themes found in his novels. I started reading this with Amber in the early morning hours while we were hanging out with Sebastian in the NICU before I had to go to work. We had been reading various books on parenting or childhood. Our routine of reading aloud to each other soon became hampered however when we came to Chabon's nostalgic stories regarding his adolescence. I won't go into the subject matter but let's just say they shouldn't be read out loud in the presence of polite company, such as the tender ears of the NICU nurses. That's not to say they aren't highly entertaining and full of proverbial and familial insight. Although Chabon is a good decade older than me, his way of describing the hallmarks of childhood is eerily similar to my memories. For example, there is a great essay on the differences between what I was allowed to do when I was a child (ride bikes around the neighborhood, build tree forts in the distant woods, roam the streets of the Kimberlin subdivision for hours with other kids) and how that freedom and risk is rarely tolerated by modern parents. The paranoia of kidnapping, the fear of unfettered freedom and of unsupervised exploration has overwhelmingly trumped the practice of letting kids just go outside to play in the woods for most of the day. Now there are the endless lessons, activities, and play dates arranged and structured throughout the week. Chabon laments the disappearance of this freedom but also admits that he can barely manage to let his own kids out of his sight. Now that I have a very young child in my life, I sympathize with the dilemma. Has rates of kidnapping gone up since the 80's? No, of course not, but the emphasis on the possibility has. The blame for something like that happening falls more on the parents now, not the kidnapper.Chabon also shares some humorous stories about making friends, sustaining romantic relationships, his parents, marriage, divorce, being Jewish, fatherhood vs. motherhood, and so on. Many of the subjects are mixed together. He has an essay on trying to explain the concept of feminism to his young sons while drawing super hero characters. The boys are having trouble drawing super heroines and Chabon is in the difficult position of describing exactly how women are physically different which leads into a contemplation of how super heroines are different from their male counterparts on an emotional level. There is another story about explaining to his young children about drug use and whether or not to lie to them regarding his own drug use as a teenager in the 70's. There is seven page lament for the evolution of Lego. Again, well written and funny. Ultimately, if you like Chabon's novels, you will probably enjoy this collection, especially if you are a geeky parent. If you are unfamiliar with Chabon, than you may still enjoy this series of essays but I highly recommend you read his novels eventually.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      This review is for the unabridged CD version of the book, read by the author. Manhood for Amateurs is the most delightful, insightful work of non-fiction I’ve read in years. A series of essays drawing from Michael Chabon’s experiences, it chronicles his efforts to be a competent husband, father, and man. Chabon appears to possess one of the most valuable attributes for a writer, a memory for detail. Either that or he kept diaries since he was ten. His anecdotes are fully true-to-life descriptions of incidents that are sometimes joyful, but often painful. His narration is so conversational that playing the CD’s as I drove about town was like a very witty friend telling me his life story. One can never be sure about such things, but I didn’t sense a bit of deception (self- or otherwise) or ego while I listened. Chabon is a generation younger than I am, but I found a good deal to identify with in his experiences. This is one work that I would definitely opt for the CD version if you can do so.
    • 5/5
      Witty erudite writing, slightly tarnished by a tiny but discernable smugness. I found myself completely agreeing with him about the fear of strangers destroying a child's ability to explore the outside world alone (or with friends). There's very little of Chabon's work that I won't read. This didn't disappoint.
    • 2/5
      Often had an overwrought style, both in terms of vocabulary and analysis of his topics. Mostly just "too much," even when I understood and agreed with the point he was making. Stopped reading at page 58.
    • 4/5
      Although Chabon's fairly constant mentioning of his political/religious ideas, which certainly do not align with mine, slightly ruffled my feathers, I really enjoyed this book. I loved his views on men meeting the woman they will spend the rest of their life with and how that affects friendships, responsibility, etc. I also loved his stories concerning divorce and his children talking about the Beatles was adorable.
    • 5/5
      This is a delightful collection of essays ruminating on both childhood and adulthood and the various roles we play in others' lives. Chabon is particularly wonderful at evoking the magic and wonder of childhood, and several of the essays detail incidents from his growing up. He is also very funny, as in the excellent "I Feel Good About My Murse," as well as deeply thoughtful as in the moving "Xmas." Dealing with a wide array of subjects, from circumcision to cooking to Legos, Chabon is a wonderful chronicler of his own life and makes unexpected connections to his readers' lives along the way.I would also note that the audio is read by Chabon himself, and is very, very good.
    • 5/5
      I don't like that description, referencing 'hectic' and 'divorces' etc, very much. This book does have adult material, but it's handled with calm courage and grace, and plenty of humor (muchly of the self-deprecating kind). And, mostly, the issues and ideas he explores are universal - even Gentile Women will feel not just sympathy, but empathy. Moreover, he has that special way with words that makes him popular among critics and Literary folk, but also accessible to ordinary readers like me.

      One example of the humor, this time not self-deprecating but compassionate, about a woman at the grocery store who looked fondly at the author & the author's litte son. She had on rainbow leggings, and I thought she might be a little bit crazy and therefore fond of everyone."

      One warning - the author is an agnostic 'bacon-eating' Jew, who lives in Berkeley and hates GW Bush. So, if you're not fond of those kinds of people, you might feel a bit alienated at times.

      I admit I'm having trouble deciding whether to encourage you to read this. I do think it's wonderful. I'd push it on my son if he were grown, but at 15 I don't think he's ready. I can't see my husband or dad or brother reading it. And yet, I do want to emphasize that I enjoyed it *a lot* and suspect you would too, if you're ok with the genre and with what I said in the first paragraph. Ok."
    • 4/5
      A non-linear memoir told in vignettes, funny, self-deprecating, nerdy, engaging.
    • 3/5
      It was...OK. I know people really, really like this author, this GUY, but he just strikes me as yet another egocentric writer whose essays revolve around him and his take on life, his concerns, his mistakes and triumphs. Two essays of note for me were the one on the "murse", in which he realizes just how practical a bag of some sort is, and so he enlists the aid of a friend to find him a proper bag that, well, is masculine enough. The other essay, "The Wilderness of Childhood", was thought-provoking. Chabon discusses his own childhood spent exploring the green space behind his house, riding his bike around the neighborhood, and roaming freely with his friends, then bemoans the fact that his own children appear to be uninterested in doing the same...for whatever reason. Is it the fault of adults, who have become over-protective of their kids? Is it society in general that has decided that the world of a child must be regimented? I believe that each generation bemoans the fact their children won't experience the same childhood they had. In some cases, that is a good thing.
    • 2/5
      By the end of this book I was rather severely disliking Michael Chabon. I really liked Bad Mother, his wife's book, which got criticized because she sort of said she loved her husband more than her children (this was a mean interpretation, I believe), and I was thinking that if it were true, it was understandable since she was married to this great writer - although I couldn't get through Cavalier and Clay either.I don't like his writing - it's too essayish; and for some reason I found him oddly misogynistic. And so by the end I was saying to myself you know what? I don't really care what Chabon thinks about this.Sorry for this immature review, but it just struck me the wrong way!
    • 4/5
      The Good Stuff * The essay entitled "The Amateur Family" about being a family of geeks -- please adopt me I belong with you guys * Essays are wonderfully written, interesting and extremely witty at times * The author is obviously a geek -- and you know what they say "The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth" -- in your face oh husband of mine who is soooo not a geek * Book starts with a great essay * The Essay entitled "The Memory Hole" about children's artwork -- trust me if you are a parent you will definitely understand it! * The Essay "The Wilderness of Childhood" I very much agree with the author -- now we have to figure out what to do about itThe Not so Good Stuff * Some of the essays are a little dry and over my head -- nothing against the author, I am just not that intelligent * Chapter on Baseball -- but that's because I am a chick and I don't get the passion for the sportWhat I Learned * All men seem to really like Baseball * That I really need to watch Dr Who, the 1970's Dr creeped me out so much I never tried any of the other versions * A better understanding of men -- well except I still don't get the baseball thing or the stooges for that matterFavorite Quotes/Passages"I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother-doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit" (Jen's note -- I AGREE)"I like a good sitcom as much as anybody , but did any kids ever try to get up a game of Murphy Brown""the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head, when deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh s**t""I don't know what you need to truly understand brassieres, and what's more, I don't want to know. I'm sorry. Go ask your mother.""I am a liberal agnostic empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew, and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlie religious fundamentalism of every flavor."Who Should Read * Men and Women over the age of 13 (women just skip over baseball chapter)
    • 4/5
      "Manhood for Amateurs" is a collection of beautifully-written, autobiographical essays by Michael Chabon. Like its title, the book is separated into multiple wittily-named sections (e.g. Exercises in Masculine Affection) and covers topics from growing up in the wild to being a father. On the whole, most essays are short yet all manage to end with a satisfying thud.Having read his fiction, Chabon surprised me with the amount of reflective grace embedded within each of these essays. Not only are they peppered with his insights about the world, but they almost always end with a particular point or conclusion. However, its conclusion-heavy nature became a little old midway through the book as every anecdote ended with a pretty moral. Or perhaps it's that the end of the first half also marked the end of his first set of essays on fatherhood, which I found brilliant.Read if: The title appeals to your sense of humor.Avoid if: You're looking for drama.
    • 4/5
      An enjoyable collection of light and accessible essays about being an American boy, man and Dad in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
    • 4/5
      Have you ever gotten a bit of a crush on an author after reading a few of his books? Have you ever thought that someone who write with such insight and compassion must be a truly kind person? And have you then, having attended a lecture or read an interview of the author, found out he was really kind of a pretentious jackass? The opposite thing happened to me as I read Manhood for Amateurs. I've read a few of Michael Chabon's books and formed an image of him, not of a pretentious jackass, but of being a guy's guy and somewhat testosterone-fueled. Not quite Hunter S. Thompson, but moving in that direction. Which, it turns out, is utterly the wrong impression.Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of Chabon's personal essays, in which he talks about childhood and marriage and having children of his own. In Willam and I he talks about his reaction to being commended on his parenting skills by a stranger:I don't know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child with simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks' worth of healthy but appealing breaktime snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr.. In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family. If she wipes her kid's nose or tear-stained cheeks, if she holds her kids tight, entertains her kid's nonsensical claims, buys her kid the organic non-GMO whole-grain version of Honey Nut Cheerios, it adds no useful data to our assessment of her. Such an act is statistically insignificant. Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby's gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself.So I'm not sure how I'll view the next novel of his that I read. I'm sure it will be just as full of male protagonists behaving like guys and engaging in manly adventures, but I wonder if I'll be reading it a bit differently, knowing that the author is a guy who cooks the meals and loves his family. Then again, maybe I'll run into an interview with him on Larry King or npr and discover that he actually is a bit full of himself. I hope not.
    • 3/5
      By turns interesting and enlightening, and then occasionally quite pretentiously irritating. The jury's out on this one until I finish the whole thing.
    • 4/5
      Michael Chabon, dear thing, was in the grocery store one day with a baby and a toddler. He was, and I want to emphasize this, SHOPPING. Just like mothers do every day of the week. But Chabon is a father, not a mother, so when he got to the checkout, a completely strange woman stopped him to say, "I can tell you're a really good father." Chabon says, (and I paraphrase), "What would a mother have to do to earn this unsolicited praise? Perform an emergency tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen?" Bless his heart. Already I love him. This series of essays cover a number of topics: parenting, relationships, fatherhood, man purses. I found the essay about his former father-in-law, "The Hand on My Shoulder," particularly poignant, but Chabon writes with insight and tenderness about many aspects of manhood; each essay has something worthwhile to harvest. I should note that Chabon is married to writer Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother, and it is delightful to read the two books together; their tenderness and admiration for each other simply shines.
    • 2/5
      I just could not get into this book, sorry.

    Book preview

    Manhood for Amateurs - Michael Chabon

    I typed the inaugural newsletter of the Columbia Comic Book Club on my mother’s 1960 Smith Corona, modeling it on the monthly Stan’s Soapbox pages through which Stan Lee created and sustained the idea of Marvel Comics fandom in the sixties and early seventies. I wrote it in breathless homage, rich in exclamation points, to Lee’s prose style, that intoxicating smartass amalgam of Oscar Levant, Walter Winchell, Mad magazine, and thirty-year-old U.S. Army slang. Doing the typeset and layout with nothing but the carriage return (how old-fashioned that term sounds!), the tabulation key, and a gallon of Wite-Out, I divided my newsletter into columns and sidebars, filling each one with breezy accounts of the news, proceedings, and ongoing projects of the C.C.B.C. These included an announcement of the first meeting of the club. The meeting would be open to the public, with the price of admission covering enrollment.

    For a fee of twenty-five dollars, my mother rented me a multipurpose room in the Wilde Lake Village Center, and I placed an advertisement in the local newspaper, the Columbia Flier. On the appointed Saturday, my mother drove me to the Village Center. She helped me set up a long conference table, surrounding it with a dozen and a half folding chairs. There were more tables ready if I needed them, but I didn’t kid myself. One would probably be enough. I had lettered a sign, and we taped it to the door. It read: COLUMBIA COMIC BOOK CLUB. MEMBERSHIP/ADMISSION $1.

    Then my mother went off to run errands, leaving me alone in the big, bare, linoleum-tiled multipurpose room. Half the room was closed off by an accordion-fold door that might, should the need arise, be collapsed to give way to multitudes. I sat behind a stack of newsletters and an El Producto cash box, ready to preside over the fellowship I had called into being.

    In its tiny way, this gesture of baseless optimism mirrored the feat of Stan Lee himself. In the early sixties, when Stan’s Soapbox began to apostrophize Marvel fandom, there was no such thing as Marvel fandom. Marvel was a failing company, crushed, strangled, and bullied in the marketplace by its giant rival, DC. Creating The Fantastic Four—the first new Marvel title—with Jack Kirby was a last-ditch effort by Lee, a mad flapping of the arms before the barrel sailed over the falls.

    But in the pages of the Marvel comic books, Lee behaved from the start as if a vast, passionate readership awaited each issue that he and his key collaborators, Kirby and Steve Ditko, churned out. And in a fairly short period of time, this chutzpah—as in all those accounts of magical chutzpah so beloved by solitary boys like me—was rewarded. By pretending to have a vast network of fans, former fan Stanley Leiber found himself in possession of a vast network of fans. In conjuring, out of typewriter ribbon and folding chairs, the C.C.B.C., I hoped to accomplish a similar alchemy. By pretending to have friends, maybe I could invent some.

    This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city—in every cranium—in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

    After I had been sitting at that big empty conference table for what felt like quite a long time, the door opened and a woman stuck her head in. I can still see her in my memory: her short blond hair parted in the center, her eyes metering the depth and density of the room, the tug of disappointment at the corners of her mouth.

    Oh, she said, seeing how things were with the Columbia Comic Book Club.

    A moment later, her son pushed past her into the room. He was a kid about my age, blond like his mother, skinny, maybe a little girlish. For a moment he stared at me as if I puzzled him. Then he gazed up at his mother. She put her hands on his shoulders.

    I have a newsletter, I said at last, sliding the stack across the table.

    The woman hesitated, then urged her son toward me, figuring or hoping, I suppose, that something could be salvaged, some kind of club business transacted. But the boy pushed back. That multipurpose room was not anywhere he wanted to be. God knows what kind of Araby he had erected, what fabulous tents he had pitched, in his own imagination of the event. A wordless argument followed, conducted by the bones of his shoulders and the fingers of her hands. At last she gave in to the force of his disappointment or to the barrage of failure rays that were pouring from the kid across the room.

    One dollar, she said seriously, considering the sign I had taped to the door with the same kind of black electrician’s tape that was holding my eyeglasses together. I think that might be a little too much for us.

    I don’t remember what kind of shape I was in when my own mother returned, or how she comforted me. I was a stoical kid, even an inexpressive one, given to elaborate displays of shrugging things off. In looking back at that day, I see now how much the brief existence of the C.C.B.C. had to do with mothers and sons, what a huge, even overwhelming maternal task is implied by that worn-out word encouragement. In spite of whatever consolation my mother may have offered, that was the moment when I began to think of myself as a failure. It’s a habit I never lost. Anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the memory of a favorable word. In my heart, to this day, I am always sitting at a big table in a roomful of chairs, behind a pile of errors, lies, and exclamation points, watching an empty doorway. 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.

    Though I derive a sense of strength and confidence from writing and from my life as a husband and father, those pursuits are notoriously subject to endless setbacks and the steady exposure of shortcoming, weakness, and insufficiency—in particular in the raising of children. A father is a man who fails every day. Sometimes things work out: Your flashed message is received and read, your song is rerecorded by another band and goes straight to No. 1, your son blesses the memory of the day you helped him arrange the empty chairs of his foredoomed dream, your act of last-ditch desperation sends your comic-book company to the top of the industry. Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. But you always knew that. Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge. Welcome to the club.

    [ II ]

    The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low. One day a few years back I took my youngest son to the market around the corner from our house in Berkeley, California, a town where, in my estimation, fathers generally do a passable job, with some fathers having been known to go a little overboard. I was holding my twenty-month-old in one arm and unloading the shopping cart onto the checkout counter with the other. I don’t remember what I was thinking about at the time, but it is as likely to have been the original 1979 jingle for Honey Nut Cheerios or nothing at all as it was the needs, demands, or ineffable wonder of my son. I wasn’t quite sure why the woman in line behind us—when I became aware of her—kept beaming so fondly in our direction. She had on rainbow leggings, and I thought she might be a little bit crazy and therefore fond of everyone.

    You are such a good dad, she said finally. I can tell.

    I looked at my son. He was chewing on the paper coating of a wire twist tie. A choking hazard, without a doubt; the wire could have pierced his lip or tongue. His hairstyle tended to the cartoonier pole of the Woodstock-Einstein continuum. His face was probably a tad on the smudgy side. Dirty, even. One might have been tempted to employ the word crust.

    Oh, this isn’t my child, I told her. I found him in the back.

    Actually, I thanked her. I went off with my boy in one arm and a bag of groceries in the other, and when we got home I put a plastic bowl filled with Honey Nut Cheerios in front of him and checked my e-mail. I was a really good dad.

    I don’t know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform 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 break-time snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr. In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family. If she wipes her kid’s nose or tear-stained cheeks, if she holds her kid tight, entertains her kid’s nonsensical claims, buys her kid the organic non-GMO whole-grain version of Honey Nut Cheerios, it adds no useful data to our assessment of her. Such an act is statistically insignificant. Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby’s gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself. We do not judge mothers by snapshots but by years of images painstakingly accumulated from the orbiting satellite of memory. Once a year, maybe, and on certain fatal birthdays, and at our weddings or her funeral, we might collate all the available data, analyze it, and offer our irrefutable judgment: good mother.

    In the intervals—just ask my wife—all mothers are (in their own view) bad. Because the paradoxical thing, or one of the paradoxical things, about the low standard to which fathers are held (with the concomitant minimal effort required to exceed the standard and win the sobriquet of good dad) is that your basic garden-variety mother, not only working hard at her own end of the child-rearing enterprise (not to mention at her actual job) but so often taxed with the slack from the paternal side of things, tends in my experience to see her career as one of perennial insufficiency and self-doubt. This is partly because mothers are attuned, in a way that most fathers have a hard time managing, to the specter of calamity that haunts their children. Fathers are popularly supposed to serve as protectors of their children, but in fact men lack the capacity for identifying danger except in the most narrow spectrum of the band. It is women—mothers—whose organs of anxiety can detect the vast invisible flow of peril through which their children are obliged daily to make their way. The father on a camping trip who manages to beat a rattlesnake to death with a can of Dinty Moore in a tube sock may rest for decades on the ensuing laurels yet somehow snore peacefully every night beside his sleepless wife, even though he knows perfectly well that the Polly Pocket toys may be tainted with lead-based paint, and the Rite-Aid was out of test kits, and somebody had better go order them online, overnight delivery, even though it is four in the morning. It is in part the monumental open-endedness of the job, with its infinite number of infinitely small pieces, that routinely leads mothers to see themselves as inadequate, therefore making the task of recognizing their goodness, at any given moment, so hard.

    I know there’s a double standard at work; I suppose if I’m honest, I would have to acknowledge that in my worst moments, I’m grateful for it, for the easy credit that people—mothers, for God’s sake—are willing to extend to me for doing very little at all. It’s like pulling into a parking space with a nickel in your pocket to find that somebody left you an hour’s worth of quarters in the meter. This double standard has been in place for a long time now, though over the past few decades a handful of items—generally having to do with cooking and caring for babies—have been added to the list of minimum expectations for a good father. My father, more or less like all the men of his era, class, and cultural background, went for a certain amount of spasmodically enthusiastic fathering, parachuting in from time to time with some new pursuit or project, engaging like an overweening superpower in a program of parental nation-building in the far-off land of his children before losing interest or running out of emotional capital and leaving us once more to the regime of our mother, a kind of ancient, all-pervasive folkway, a source of attention and control and structure so reliable as to be imperceptible, like the air. My father educated me in appreciating the things he appreciated, and in ridiculing those he found laughable, and in disbelieving the things he found dubious. When I was a small boy, tractable and respectful and preternaturally adult, with my big black glasses and careful phraseology, he would take me on house calls and at-home insurance physicals along with his stethoscope and Taylor hammer. When he was done being a father for the time being, he would leave me in my corner of his life, tucked into the black bag of his affections. At night sometimes, if he made it home from the hospital, he would come in and lean down and brush my soft cheek with his scratchy one.

    If the lady in the rainbow tights had seen us walking down a street in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1966, with me swinging my plastic doctor bag full of candy pills and deneedled hypos and trying to match my stride to his, she probably would have told him that he was a good dad, too. And she would not have been saying very much less or more than she was saying to me.

    My father, born in the gray-and-silver Movietone year of 1938, was part of the generation of Americans who, in their twenties and thirties, approached the concepts of intimacy, of authenticity and open emotion, with a certain tentative abruptness, like people used to automatic transmission learning how to drive a stick shift. They wanted intimacy, but they were not sure how far they could trust it to take them. My father didn’t hug me a lot or kiss me. I don’t remember holding his hand past the age of three or four. When I got older and took an interest in the art of becoming a grown-up, it proved hard to find other, nonphysical kinds of intimacy with him. He didn’t like to share his anxieties about his work, relationships, or life, rarely took me into his confidence, never dared to admit the deepest intimacy of all—that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

    In 1974 I saw a musical cartoon called William’s Doll. It was a segment in that echt-seventies, ungrammatically titled children’s television special created by Marlo Thomas, Free to Be You and Me. The segment, based on a book by Charlotte Zolotow, was about a boy who begs his bemused parents to buy him a baby doll, a request to which they are nonplussed if not, in the case of William’s father, outright hostile. William is mocked, scolded, and bullied for his desire, and his parents try to bribe him out of it. But William persists, and in the end his wise grandmother overrules his father and buys him a doll.

    Even as a boy of ten, I could feel the radical nature of the mode of being a father that William’s Doll was holding out to me:

    William wants a doll

    So that when he has a baby someday

    He’ll learn how to dress it

    Put diapers on double

    And gently caress it

    To bring up a bubble

    And care for his baby

    Like every good father should learn to do.

    I was moved by the sight of the animated William reveling, grooving, in the presence of the baby doll that his grandmother placed in his waiting arms. There was a promise in the song and the sight of him of a different way of being a father, a physical, quiet, tender, and quotidian way free of projects and agendas, and there was a suggestion that this way was something not merely possible or commendable but long-desired. Something was missing from William’s life before his grandmother stepped in and bought him a doll, and by implication, something was missing from the life of William’s father, and of my father, and of all the other men who were not allowed to play with dolls. Every time I listened to the song on the record album, I felt the lack in myself and in my father.

    My dad did what was expected of him, but like most men of the time, he didn’t do very much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn’t take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn’t make the appointments. He didn’t shop for my clothes. He didn’t make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mother did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.

    The fact of the matter is that—and fuck the woman in the rainbow tights for her compliment—there’s nothing I work harder at than being a good father, unless it’s being a good husband, which doesn’t come any easier but tends not to get remarked on when I’m standing in line at the supermarket. I cook and clean, do the dishes, get the kids to their appointments, etc. Many times over, I have lived entire days whose only leitmotifs were the vomitus and excrement of my offspring and whose only plot was the removal and disposal thereof. I have made their Halloween costumes and baked their birthday cakes and prepared a dozen trays of my mother-in-law’s garlic chicken wings for class potlucks because last names starting with A–F had to bring the hors d’oeuvres. In other words, I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother—doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit. And like good mothers all around the world, I fail every day in my ambition to do the work, to make it count, to think ahead and hang in there through the tedium and really see, really feel, all the pitfalls that threaten my children, rattlesnakes included. How could I not fail when I can check out any time I want to and know that my wife will still be there making those dentist appointments and ensuring that there’s a wrapped, age-appropriate birthday present for next Saturday’s pool party? All I need to do is hold my kid in the checkout line—all I need to do is stick around—and the world will crown me and favor me with smiles.

    So, all right, it isn’t fair. But the truth is that I don’t want to be a good father out of egalitarian feminist principles. Those principles—though I cherish them—are only the means to an end for me.

    The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.

    If you are a Jew, eight days

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