I would never admit it to my wife, but I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK I’M DOING. Neither do any of my friends, married or otherwise. Bros everywhere share a secret; that of being completely terrified in the face of life’s expectations as a grown-ass man. To that end, Michael Chabon has broken the code of silence, and provided a manifesto, disguised as a loose narrative built from short essays, to help us all earn our beards.
METAL AS FUCK.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that Chabon is easily my favorite contemporary writer. He is the most consistently engaging and entertaining author I have read, and he manages the tricky business of telling compelling stories within a highly crafted literary structure. You usually get one or the other; rarely do you find both working together so seamlessly. Manhood for Amateurs is by far the most casual and familiar book he’s written, I’m sure due to the fact that it’s his first major non-fiction/autobiographical book.
It’s roughly assembled into ten sections, each dealing with different aspects of manhood-being a son, a father, a brother, etc. Early on, I made the prediction that I would cry like a baby at some point in the book, and though that never happened, it’s certainly not any knock against the writing, which vacillates between deeply affecting and pants-crappingly hilarious. I would venture that a good 60% of the book speaks directly to me as an experience I have had, and the remaining 40% will no doubt be waiting for me in the next few years. From the essay ‘Faking It’:
I sat down on the tile floor with the new chrome towel rack from Restoration Hardware and its gnomic instruction sheet, and I ran the fingers of one hand across the designated stretch of beadboard while sagely stroking my whiskers with the fingers of the other. I strongly suspect that I may well have looked as if I knew what I was doing.
I knew how to use my tools, more or less. I understood the rudimentary physics of tension and load that were supposed to hold the rack together and keep it fixed to the wall. And yet on both the deepest and the most practical levels, I had no reason to believe, no evidence from prior experience of myself, physics, or life itself, that I knew how or would be able to pull off the job. In fact I had encountered a certain amount of tragedy in my dealings with molly bolts over the years.
That is a verbose and well-written version of a conversation we’ve all had with ourselves. On any given day, most of us will fall somewhere between ,“The pilgrims didn’t need towel racks. Hang that shit on the doorknob.” and “If I keep enough towels on there, she’ll never see where my fist went.”
The collection tends to lose focus in the last quarter or so, as the theme of manhood tends to give way to just some interesting stories Chabon wants to tell about himself. I guess you could make the argument that his life’s narrative contributes to the greater thematic arc, and really, the later stories are just as good as the earlier ones. Regardless, there is guaranteed to be something in here to make you feel better about being such a mess.
Score
Manhood for Amateurs gets 4 out of 5.
