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Michael Chabon - Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide


NPR looks at Chabon's Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide.


Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide
by Heller McAlpin

In a controversial New York Times "Modern Love" column, Michael Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, confessed that she'd have a harder time losing her husband than one of their children. After reading Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, you'll understand why.

He emerges from these 39 beautifully written personal essays as a prince among men. Not only does he produce dazzling novels that have given genre fiction literary cachet — including The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001) — he also cooks, cleans, markets and gets his children to their appointments — and counts himself fortunate to be in a position to do so.

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son
By Michael Chabon
Hardcover, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99

Read An Excerpt
There have been no shortage of books on motherhood, but daddy diaries are a growing phenomenon. Chabon raises the bar with his often poignant meditations on manhood, fatherhood and aspects of his own childhood. Most of these loosely connected essays, which add up to an episodic autobiography of sorts, first appeared in Details magazine. In addition to the gorgeous prose for which he is celebrated, several lovely qualities shine through.

For starters, Chabon clearly adores and respects his mother. After his parents divorced when he was 12, his mother got her law degree and a federal job in D.C. Chabon took over dinner preparations. Instead of feeling put-upon, he expresses gratitude at having grown up "during a time of dissolving boundaries," when it was all right for a boy to want to emulate his mother.

Michael Chabon Reads 'The Hand On My Shoulder'
[15 min 46 sec]
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As for his wife, in an essay titled "Looking for Trouble," Chabon offers a tribute to "quick, mercurial, intemperate" Waldman. In marrying her, he says he "answered the call of adventure," and he's thankful he did. In another nod to Waldman, he notes the disparity between expectations for fathers and mothers: "The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low."

More than marriage or writing, these essays focus on the wonders of childhood and parenting. Chabon loves the intimacy of domesticity — though he is circumspect with private details. He writes movingly that in his four children he has found "a band of companions" with whom to share various enthusiasms, something he pointedly missed when his pediatrician father moved away after his parents' divorce.


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Michael Chabon told the Weekly Reader that he knew he wanted to be a writer when his first short story, a class assignment, about Sherlock Holmes got an A. "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do. I can do this.' And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."


Chabon takes his kids to junky movies and erects elaborate Lego constructions with them, but he is concerned that today's kids, deprived of the open-ended play, unsupervised landscapes and vast stretches of free time that characterized his own childhood, have too little room for imagination. He worries that he is bringing up "free-range children" who, like chickens raised to near-maturity in a controlled environment, don't actually "range" much even when the doors of freedom are thrown open.

Although Chabon's subjects range from sex at 15 with a divorced friend of his mother's to pocketbooks for men, the thread that ties Manhood for Amateurs together isn't a purse string, but the idea that fandom — being an amateur "driven by passion and obsession" to "explore the imaginary world" — is what connects him not only to his children, but to his writing.

Excerpt: 'Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son'
by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon Reads "The Hand On My Shoulder"
[15 min 46 sec]
Add to Playlist
Transcript
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon
Paperback, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99

The Hand on My Shoulder

I didn't play golf, and he had never smoked marijuana. I was a nail chewer, inclined to brood, and dubious of the motives of other people. He was big and placid, uniformly kind to strangers and friends, and never went anywhere without whistling a little song. I minored in philosophy. He fell asleep watching television. He fell asleep in movie theaters, too, and occasionally, I suspected, while driving. He had been in the navy during World War II, which taught him, he said, to sleep whenever he could. I, still troubled no doubt by perplexing questions of ontology and epistemology raised during my brief flirtation with logical positivism ten years earlier, was an insomniac. I was also a Jew, of a sort; he was, when required, an Episcopalian.

He was not a big man, but his voice boomed, and his hands were meaty, and in repose there was something august about his heavy midwestern features: pale blue eyes that, in the absence of hopefulness, might have looked severe; prominent, straight nose and heavy jowls that, in the absence of mirth, might have seemed imperious and disapproving. Mirth and hopefulness, however, were never absent from his face. Some people, one imagines, may be naturally dauntless and buoyant of heart, but with him, good spirits always seemed, far more admirably, to be the product of a strict program of self-improvement in his youth — he believed, like most truly modest men, in the absolute virtue of self-improvement — which had wrought deep, essential changes in a nature inclined by birth to the darker view and gloominess that cropped up elsewhere in the family tree. He didn't seem to be happy out of some secret knowledge of the essential goodness of the world, or from having fought his way through grief and adversity to a hard-won sense of his place in it; they were simple qualities, his good humor and his optimism, unexamined, automatic, stubborn. I never failed to take comfort in his presence.

The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems — at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington — to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.

When I look back — always an unreliable procedure, I know — it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. I met him, his wife, and their yellow beach house all on the same day. It was a square-pillared bungalow, clapboard and shake, the color of yellow gingham, with a steep pitched roof and a porch that looked out over a frigid but tranquil bay of brackish water. His wife, like him in the last years of a vigorous middle age, had been coming to this stretch of beach since early in her girlhood, and for both her and her daughter, whom I was shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories, associations, artifacts, and stories than any place any member of my own family had lived since we had left Europe seventy years before. Everything about this family was like that. My future mother-in-law lived in the house in Seattle where she had been born. My father-in-law had grown up down the road in Portland. They had met at the University of Washington. Everyone they knew, they had known for longer than I'd been alive. All the restaurants they favored had been in business for years, they were charter members of their country club, and in some cases they did business with the sons of tradesmen they had dealt with in the early days of their marriage. A journey through the drawers, closets, and cabinets of their house in town yielded a virtual commercial and social history of Seattle, in the form of old matchboxes, rulers, pens, memo pads, napkins, shot glasses, candy tins, golf tees, coat hangers; years and years' worth of lagniappes, giveaways, souvenirs, and mementos bearing the names, in typefaces of four decades, of plumbing supply companies, fuel oil dealers, newlyweds, dry cleaners, men and women celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.

God, it was a seductive thing to a deracinated, assimilated, uncertain, wandering young Jew whose own parents had not been married for years and no longer lived anywhere near the house in Maryland where, for want of a truer candidate, he had more or less grown up. They were in many ways classic WASPs, to be sure, golfing, khaki-wearing, gin-drinking WASPs. The appeal of such people and their kind of world to a young man such as I was has been well-documented in film and literature; perhaps enough to seem by now a bit outdated. But it wasn't, finally, a matter of class or style, though they had both. I fell in love with their rootedness, with the visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle, with their ability to bring a box of photographs taken thirty summers earlier and show me the room I was sitting in before it was painted white, the madrone trees that screened the porch before two fell over, the woman I was going to marry digging for geoduck clams on the beach where she had just lain sunbathing.

Of course, they were more than a kind of attractive gift wrap for their photographs, houses, and the historical contents of their drawers. They were ordinary, problematical people, my in-laws, forty years into a complicated marriage, and over the course of my own brief marriage to their daughter, I came to love and appreciate them both as individuals, on their merits and, as my marriage began so quickly to sour, for the endurance of their partnership. They had that blind, towering doggedness of the World War II generation. I suppose it's possible that with two daughters, they'd always wanted a son, my father-in-law especially; I do know for certain that I have never been one to refuse the opportunity to add another father to my collection.

He offered himself completely, without reservation, though in his own particular, not to say limited, way (it is this inherent limited quality of fathers and their love that motivates collectors like me to try to amass a complete set). He took me down to Nordstrom, the original store in downtown Seattle, and introduced me to the man who sold him his suits. I bought myself a few good square-cut, sober-colored numbers in a style that would not have drawn a second glance on Yesler Way in 1954. He introduced me to the woman from whom he bought jewelry for his wife, to the man who took care of his car, to all of the golf buddies and cronies whose sons he had been admiring from afar for the last thirty years. He was a bit barrel chested anyway, but whenever we went anywhere together and, as was all but inevitable, ran into someone he knew, his breast, introducing me, seemed to grow an inch broader, the hand on my shoulder would administer a little fighttrainer massage, and I would feel him — as first the wedding and, later, the putative grandchildren drew nearer — placing, for that moment, all his hopes in me. He took me to football games, basketball games, baseball games. He let me drive his Cadillac; naturally, he never drove anything else. Most of all, however — most important to both of us — he let me hang out in his den.

As the child of divorced parents, myself divorced, and a writer trained by five hundred years of European and American literary history always to search out the worm in the bud, I have, of necessity, become a close observer of other people's marriages. I have noticed that in nearly all the longest-lived ones, if there is space enough in the house, each partner will have a room to flee to. If, however, there is only one room to spare, it will always be the husband's. My in-laws had plenty of room, but while she had her office just off the bedroom (where I would sometimes see her sitting at a Chinese desk, writing a letter or searching for an article clipped from Town & Country about flavoring ice creams with edible flowers), my mother-in-law's appeared to serve a largely ceremonial function.

My father-in-law, on the other hand, sometimes seemed to live down in the basement. His office, like him, was mostly about golf. The carpet was Bermuda-grass green, the walls were hung with maps of St. Andrews and framed New Yorker covers of duffers, and the various hats, ashtrays, hassocks, cigarette lighters, plaques, novelty telephones, and trophies around the room were shaped like golf balls, tees, mashies, mulligans, and I don't know what. In the midst of all this sat an enormous black Robber Baron desk with matching black Captain Nemo chair; an old, vaguely Japanese-looking coffee table on its last tour of duty in the house; a cyclopean television; and a reclining armchair and sofa, both covered in wool patterned with the tartan of some unknown but no doubt staunch, whiskey-drinking, golf-wild highland clan.

It is for just such circumstances, in which two men with little in common may find themselves thrown together with no other recourse than to make friends, that sports were invented. When my wife and I visited I went downstairs, flopped on the sofa, and watched a game with my father-in-law. He made himself a C.C. and soda, and sometimes, to complete the picture, I let him mix one for me. Like many men of my generation, I found solace when unhappy in placing quotation marks around myself and everything I did. There was I, an "unhappy husband," drinking a "cocktail" and "watching the game." This was the only room in the house where I was permitted to smoke — I have long since quit — and I made the most of it (a man's den often serves the same desublimating function in the household as Mardi Gras or Las Vegas in the world; a different law obtains there). We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whiskey and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came home to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I've ever found.

My ex-wife and I — I won't go into the details — had good times and bad times, fought and were silent, tried and gave up and tried some more before finally throwing in the towel, focused, with the special self-absorption of the miserable, on our minute drama and its reverberations in our own chests. All the while, the people who loved us were not sitting there whispering behind their hands like spectators at a chess match. They were putting our photographs in frames on their walls. They were uniting our names over and over on the outsides of envelopes that bore anniversary wishes and recipes clipped from newspapers. They were putting our birthdays in their address books, knitting us socks, studying the fluctuating fortunes of our own favorite hitters every morning in the box scores. They were working us into the fabric of their lives. When at last we broke all those promises that we thought we had made only to each other, in an act of faithlessness whose mutuality appeared somehow to make it all right, we tore that fabric, not irrecoverably but deeply. We had no idea how quickly two families can work to weave themselves together. When I saw him sometime later at his mother's funeral in Portland, my father-in-law told me that the day my divorce from his daughter came through was the saddest one in his life. Maybe that was when I started to understand what had happened.

What was I now to him? How can it have felt to have been divorced by someone he treated like a son? These are not considerations that comfort me or make me especially proud. I try to remind myself that in the long course of his life, I occupied only a tiny span of years toward the end, when everything gleams with an unconvincing luster, moving too quickly to be real. And I try to forget that for a short while I formed a layer, however thin, in the deep stratigraphy of his family, so that some later explorer, rummaging through the drawers of his big old desk, might brush aside a scorecard from the 1967 PGA Pacific Northwest Open signed by Arnold Palmer, or an old pencil-style typewriter eraser with a stiff brush on one end, stamped queen city ribbon co., and turn up a faded photograph of me, in my sober blue suit, flower in my lapel, looking as if I knew what I was doing.

From Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2009 by Michael Chabon. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.


Posted by WH at 8:05 AM
Labels: culture, fiction, masculinity