No man, ever, ought to carry a purse
MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS
The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon Harper
Available at select National Book Store Branches
According to Michael Chabon’s hilariously candid “William and I” essay, “the handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” In contrast to the much aggrieved, or as the author puts it, “tedious and invisible” role of classic motherhood, fathers are traditionally relegated the tasks of bread-winning and some minimal cosseting of the children. On the other hand, mothers must concern themselves occasionally with performing “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 breakfast snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr.” To this end, the science of good mothering hinges on, he observes, “a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone,” and whatever deliberations we cast on her performance come only at the end of this thankless, mirthless role.
The unwritten handbook on parenting tells us that the enterprise of childrearing, while ideally resting between the shoulders of husband and wife, ultimately remains, by merit of performance, in distaff territory. Mothers must impel themselves to lord over the household with an eye trained for disaster, detecting “the vast invisible flow of peril through which their children are obliged daily to make their way”; conversely, fathers adopt a more casual approach, often brazenly oblivious to the “specter of calamity that haunts their children.”
However, considering the cultural changes of the last few decades, it is now not uncommon to see more mothers assuming the post of the materfamilias while fathers play the part of the Gen X housedad — milkless and endowed with a shade less testosterone, but skilled in laundering, folding, cleaning, and most importantly, cooking. That said, society at large still revolves around a familiar and well-established norm — dad finances the family, whereas mom, though now employed and ambidextrously equipped for paternal substitution, still tends to the children’s needs.
Like many of the pieces in Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon extrapolates on the revisions made on this proverbial handbook of the male trifecta, outlining manhood’s inherent flaws, behavioral theories and egotistical dispositions; about cultural dialogues with popular art that shape its intractable methodology, illustrated with artifacts as diverse as Lego’s, comic book characters, baseball cards, kiddie paraphernalia, and sci-fi films like Star Trek; and on tidbits lifted from his personal history that govern the raison d’être’s of his writing, his artistry, and moreover, the cruces of manhood that challenge him to refine his approach to the ever-evolving craft.
Readers familiar with his finest novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union will find much that resonates thematically with these essays—particularly, how he stitches elements of popular art into the fabric of fiction, shaping not only his characters’ imaginations and impulses, but also how these influences throttle them into universes molded on emotions and relationships mirrored by these cultural relics. Elsewhere, as he relates his own past experiences (his flirtations with the opposite sex, his children’s bar and bat mitzvah’s, and his fascination with celestial bodies, to name just a few), we also get a glimpse into Chabon the puppeteer and the obsessive-compulsive tick that underlines his tendencies to fashion characters with a precious, self-conscious penchant for control and order.
The medium of the essay, however, affords Chabon the luxury to burrow deeply into the more intimate dimensions of his thoughts, allowing his equally comic and wistful raconteur skills to regale us with well-accepted truths remastered in his energetic, richly drawn prose. For instance, in “Hypocritical Theory,” which discusses capitalism’s hegemony on childhood imagination, he is confounded by the realization that kid culture, described once as “that compound of lore and play,” has now transformed into the “trademarked product and property of adults,” robbing its activity of the individuality and the freeform fantasies of a lost decade.
When his son wallows in the joys of commercialized, uniformly banal books like Captain Underpants, he regards his disapproval of them as a “small, feeble attempt to reestablish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague, disregarded, abused,” all the while deeming himself hypocritical as he had once indulged in very similar passions. In an almost identical grain, he relates to us his disgruntlement with the present culture’s unimaginative, even grim sketches of the future — once the arena for dreams of fantasized technocracies replete with engineering marvels like the Jetsons, Star Trek, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He prods us to “unreservedly and dreamingly” believe in the future, rather than “living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange, and bewildering book.”
While this memoir stylistically represents a departure from Chabon’s usual outlet of fiction, it ultimately echoes many of the inquests explored by characters like the escapist Josef Kavalier (his aspirations for heroism concomitant with the social travails of his race) and Meyer Landman’s existential obsessions with sleuthing and problem solving, in a way paralleling the author’s own lifelong meditations. In one piece, “Exercises in Masculine Affection,” he waxes lyrical about his in-laws, cherishing their “rootedness, with this visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle.”
In “Studies in Pink and Blue,” when writing of an incident that reflects the violence boys are naturally given to, he questions both “the great lost freedom of childhood” and, in retrospection of his reaction to it, “the morality, indeed the sanity, of my gender itself.” And as he pensively evaluates and distills his matured understanding of the father-and-son affair, he declares, “No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be.”
It is both fascinating and edifying to read such an introspective and unflinchingly honest memoir — a refreshing change of pace indeed from the maudlin sphere of Dad Lit, fraught with hammy displays of venereal bravado, self-deprecating and narcissistic tableaus of dirtying one’s hands in the primordial mess of diapers and baby poop, and neurotic, often flat-footed overexaminations of familial life and parenthood.
Well, Chabon occasionally lapses into awkwardly phallic and hilarious phrases that, in retrospect, sound cutesy and tart (“A wallet is a man’s totem, his distillation…the necessary corollary to this inviolate principle is that no man, ever, ought to carry a purse. Purses are for women; a purse is basically a vagina with a strap”), but for the most part skirts the sentimentality while beautifully tackling the larger subjects of love, family, remembrance, and nostalgia.
In the end, Manhood for Amateurs really offers no straightforward conclusions about the art of manhood, but the author’s analysis of it, whether venturing into any of its three turbulent tributaries, offers judgment that is sound, wise, and
