Manhood for Amateurs
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon 4th Estate HK$208
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon specialises in a certain kind of contemplation. Forever dazzled by the philosophical immensity of individuals, events and themes, he prefers to throw his hands up and surrender to imaginings as contoured by marijuana smoke as they are by comic books, genre fiction and the Western canon.
'When it came to the art of living,' he notes in his first memoir and second anthology of essays, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, 'the only medium susceptible to my genius was inertia. If someone wanted to get married, I would marry her. If she wanted out, then it was time for a divorce.'
Other than Chabon's affecting and songlike tribute to bipolar novelist Ayelet Waldman, his wife of 16 years and the mother of his four children, every essay in the book concerns what can only be described as the successful failures of manhood. Nostalgia too is a theme, as is the encroachment of age. Chabon calmly observes that his story and his stories are all the same: tales of isolation, 'the grand pursuit of connection', and, in the end, the universal foreordination of defeat. 'Anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the memory of a favourable word,' he explains. 'In my heart, to this day, I am always sitting at a big table in a roomful of chairs, behind a pile of errors, lies, and exclamation points, watching an empty doorway.'
Chabon's meditations on fatherhood are both transpicuous and oblique; he writes from the perspective of a son and also the paternal 'mountaintop' from which he issues 'arbitrary and contradictory demands' to his children, forestalling and neglecting their desires 'in the name of something I told myself merited the sacrifice'. There is in him no shame or rancour about his fallibility; as he points out, the 'handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low'. (His own father left when Chabon was on the cusp of adolescence; attended by 'all the usual guilt and bitterness and recrimination' the two moved, 'in modern and terrible fashion, to opposite ends of the continent'.)
Chabon tenderly reviles Americans of his father's generation, 'who, in their 20s and 30s, approached the concepts of intimacy, of authenticity and open emotion, with a certain tentative abruptness, like people used to automatic transmission learning how to drive a stick shift'. He prefers his relationships intense, entangled, affectionate and true.
Manhood for Amateurs is, like all Chabon works, stylistically untouchable. Filtering a modernist's lassitude through Nabokov's highly coloured lyrical specificity, Chabon is sometimes obtuse, mostly wise, and always elegant.
