Manhood for Amateurs

A few months ago, I stumbled across this new Michael Chabon book at the local book megalopolis and bought it without hesitation, even though I was still in the middle of reading "Maps and Legends" (reviewed here earlier). Surprisingly, although the book was published in October, there isn't much online for it. Rather, the book seems to have arrived without much fanfare or comment. (In fact, if you closely examine Chabon's Wikipedia page, there's still nothing about it.)

The full title of the book is "Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son." The cover depicts a type of "compass" for manhood, which pretty well

Essentially, the book is a collection of essays (and most of them very short) on the topic of "manhood" (at once a dubious term, after finishing reading). The essays are broken into four "movements," beginning generally with childhood and moving through life - young adulthood, marriage (and divorce), fatherhood, and ending with some thoughts on human mortality (not unlike the Joyce classic "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.")

What is amazing about Michael Chabon's work, as always, is his ability to use the mundane and common to signify something much deeper about the human condition. For example, in one essay he uses a description of a gift his father gave him - some old baseball cards - to launch into a reflection on how his father symbolically passed on to him the All-American-Man game of baseball. In another, a question from one of his little sons about how to draw a girl leads into a larger discussion as to whether or not, as men, we can ever truly understand women.

The weakest phase in the book is in regards to middle-age and beyond, though I attribute this to his lack of experience and perspective on those matters.

Whereas the essays in "Maps and Legends" discussed larger cultural issues - the value of genre fiction - the essays in "Manhood" are much shorter and incredibly personal. This is a new side of Michael Chabon. Until now, his novels have remained largely impersonal. We've been forced to interpret him through his plots and characters - such as Grady Tripp's struggles with writing his book in "Wonder Boys" as a reflection of Chabon's own attempts to finish his second novel "Fountain City." (And, as a would-be critic, this reasoning is weak at best and irresponsible at worst.) Still, even here - when Chabon seems to be revealing everything to us - he still hides behind a thin mist of symbolism and metaphor - as though he can't exactly tell us some things directly.

Chabon's writing is still masterful and entertaining. I'm happy to pass this book on to my dad, as well as to re-read it in the years and years to come.