Manhood for Amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon's a great family man, but it's his mistakes that make these essays worth reading, says Michael Sayeau

Despite his claims to the contrary, Michael Chabon clearly is a great dad. Early on in Manhood for Amateurs he writes that "A father is a man who fails every day". If this collection of autobiographical essays shows one thing, it's that he fails better than most men when it comes to the task of parenting.

The author of six novels, including the Hollywood-adapted Wonder Boys (1995) and the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), Chabon nonetheless cooks and cleans and loves his wife, seems to spend countless hours drawing superheroes and watching Doctor Who with his children, and above all else is warmly thoughtful and reflective about the beauty and meaning of these acts. When the time comes to confess his paternal sins, the list is filled with things like answering emails when his children want him to play, and spending a few nights away from home on a book tour.

One feels assured, then, about the welfare of Chabon's children. The problem for his readers is that the stuff of good, stable parenting isn't necessarily the stuff of persuasive, illuminating writing. Many of the essays resolve themselves into enactments of principles shared by all parents – at least the sort who write novels and live in Berkeley, California. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to answering your children's questions about your youthful consumption of drugs. While it's hard to watch your daughter's male classmates begin to ogle her, you have to face facts (and the box of junior-sized tampons in the bathroom) and deal with her emergent sexuality. Sometimes it's good to share your enthusiasms with your kids, but it's also important to give them room to develop their own passions, even if they're disagreeable. All of this is true, but none of it is news.

And while Chabon's fascination with the cultural landscape of his youth during the 1960s and 1970s leads to some valuable insights about popular culture, angling these meditations through the lens of fatherhood far too often leads them toward the same conclusion: a nostalgic, if considerate, regret for the lost freedoms and openness of the America of his childhood. The evolution of Lego from six-colour austerity into Star Wars sets deprives his kids of open-ended imaginative play, just as anxiety about child abduction has foreclosed the freedom he experienced wandering by himself around the streets and woods of suburban Maryland as a boy.

The fact that the most interesting moments in Manhood for Amateurs are those most removed from his present household in a sense proves the point. "Fever" is an abbreviated but intriguingly elusive tale of Rebecca, "the first great love" of Chabon's life, and his temporary rescue of her from "the burning-down house of her brain". "The Heartbreak Kid" details the origin of his tumultuous first marriage, to the poet Lollie Groth, in a moment of half-deliberate perversity: "I looked at her, this woman who was not the one I wanted to talk to, and I wasn't even sure if I really liked her much. I remember thinking, as I stood there weighing her offer, This is going to be a mistake." But mistakes make for interesting narratives. Chabon's descriptions of the spurned lover of his mother's boyfriend, who would sit smouldering in her car outside his boyhood home, or his brief affair, aged 15, with one of his mother's friends, aren't just interesting because they are sensational. Rather, their sensationalness allows them to open on to issues less easily resolved than the question of what to make of his son's fondness for Captain Underpants or the changing musical selection of his favourite radio station.

In 2005, Chabon's wife, novelist Ayelet Waldman, caused a stir (and ended up on Oprah Winfrey's show) when she wrote a piece confessing she loved her husband more than her children – and that, in the end, this was a good thing for all involved. The controversy centred on a thought-experiment she called "the parental pastime known as God forbid", in which she speculated about the effects that the death of her children and the death of her husband would have on her. While "there is always a future beyond the child's death", she admitted that she could "imagine no joy without my husband".

Reading Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs in the light of his wife's essay brings to light a somewhat unsettling truth about the relationship between responsible adulthood and eye-catching writing. Her piece was a luridly packaged argument against the grain of conventional wisdom and perhaps even the best practices of parenting. While Chabon's book, on the other hand, contains flashes of insight, its overarching sanity makes it difficult for it to transcend the level of right-thinking banality. The world would no doubt be a better place, and families would no doubt be happier, if there were more fathers and husbands who acted and thought like he does. But we also remember what Tolstoy wrote about happy families, unhappy families, and the difference between the two.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/14/manhood-for-amateurs-michael-chabon