Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon
(HarperCollins, October 2009)
Erin Lewenauer
Michael Chabon is a natural charmer. He sells readers something they’re not even aware they’re buying: a whole-hearted belief in his heartbreaking, hilarious, and highly imaginative version of the truth about his past, his writing, and his family. “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,” Chabon bellows with gusto. After starting his career with the sensitive Mysteries of Pittsburgh, following it with the quirky Wonder Boys, and winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for the omniscient The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon continues to prove his sincere dedication to his audience with his comprehensive collection of personal essays. At 46, in a “gesture of baseless optimism,” Chabon uses his eleventh book to reflect on and critique his existence as a fallible yet admirable character in his own adventure tale.
Chabon’s short essays range from the activities of his childhood in Maryland (“cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance—maybe even a taste—for last-minute collapse”) to the awkward pain of adolescence (“only people who don’t give a damn have style”), to his humorous college years (“because I was bright and a would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche”), and finally to the complications of marriage and fatherhood (“It turns out there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland”). These are remembrances of an author who grew up relatively unsupervised and independent, and who realized early on that “for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.”
Still, Chabon remains mysteriously (and somewhat suspiciously) silent on the activity of writing. He concedes that “in almost everything I’ve written, you can find buried treasuries, Batcaves and hidey-holes, half-forgotten underground worlds that perhaps encode the rapture and the bitterness of my own isolation,” but focuses primarily on his childhood experiences and his own children. The Wonder Boy revels in life’s details and surprising outcomes, from his lifelong status as a “geek” to raising two boys and two girls (along with sustaining a marriage and caring for a gigantic Bernese mountain dog). If his new collection has a fault it is that his privacy and urge to protect himself and his family leave the reader wanting to know more.
Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, Chabon works in a lilting yet energetic prose style that harkens back to F. Scott Fitzgerald; he can scrutinize the dark elements of human nature and the hopeless state of the world, and then magically transform them into scenes that radiate romance. Manhood for Amateurs (whose points of focus include Jewish heritage, the escapism of comic books, Chabon’s first sexual escapade, and astronomy) fulfills the author’s promise to completely, albeit temporarily, fill a void with his big-hearted words. “Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude,” Chabon concludes. In uncertain times, in an unstable world, his work is more valuable than ever.
Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.