Amateur Hour

THERE IS A COMFORT to Michael Chabon: The knowledge
that your parents are as likely to have read and enjoyed The
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay as you are, or a sense of
satisfaction, shared among peers, in seeing his latest presiding over
the bestseller shelves at Powell’s. In an age with culture fragmenting
as soon as it emerges—with each blog, torrent, and app narrowing
its market, appealing to fewer and fewer—there’s something
communal and old-school reliable about Chabon. He’s broadly personable,
he’s scary smart, and he’s an excellent writer; that he speaks to so
many of us is proof that the guy’s clear prose and earnest insights
justify his reputation.

Chabon’s latest, Manhood for Amateurs, collects essays he’s
written for the likes of Details, the New York Times
Magazine, and, um, Allure; all of them deal, to various
degrees, with what the jacket sells as “the pleasures and regrets of a
husband, father, and son.” While each of Manhood‘s pieces
involves, in one way or another, Chabon inhabiting those roles, the
overall result is less a parade of thematically arranged essays and
more a memoir. Slowly but powerfully, over the course of different
pieces written for different publications about different things,
Chabon comes to a realization: that the roles of a son, husband, and
father aren’t as disparate as they seem, and as they bleed together,
they hint at something transcendent—a reminder that despite
life’s tireless progression, what matters is not time’s passage, “but
its unfathomable stillness, its immobility, the great universal fiction
that there is such a thing as time.”

To get there, Chabon considers all sorts of things, from the reality
of being a father (“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”), to his gender’s
rarely spoken truths (“This is an essential element of the business of
being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of
bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is
yourself”), to simple day-to-day existence, with the author’s emotions
laid out for both he and his readers to prod at (“The truth is that in
every way, I am squandering the treasure of my life,” Chabon admits in
“The Memory Hole”—an admission brought on by he and his wife’s
tendency to chuck most of their four children’s art in the
garbage).

But in all of Manhood‘s brief, punchy essays, crammed as they
are with encyclopedic recollections and wisps of cultural ephemera
(never before, one suspects, has the short-lived Planet of the
Apes TV show been recalled so lovingly), what emerges from
Manhood is a portrait of a man, growing alongside various
families and slowly understanding that while superheroes, sports,
marijuana, Henry Miller, Dr. Who, and crappy children’s art are
the sort of things that punctuate, inform, and allow us to share our
lives, there is something larger at work, something less temporary.
Sometimes Manhood for Amateurs is heartbreaking, and sometimes
it’s hysterical; throughout, it’s impossible not to enjoy it,
and—still, I find this remarkable—not to think of a dozen
others who will feel the same way. “I have never understood more
(though still very few) of life’s mysteries than I do now, or trusted
my instincts to a greater degree, or written better sentences than the
ones I find myself writing sometimes these days,” the author admits
toward the end, and yep, that sounds about right.