For those of us who looked forward to and were somewhat disappointed with The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon's follow up to his Pulitzer Prize winner, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, his latest book, Manhood for Amateurs, is more like it. Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of personal essays investigating what it means to be a man, a husband and a father raising a family at the start of the twenty first century. Taken together the essays form a kind of autobiographical memoir explaining how Chabon became the man he feels he has become and, perhaps more importantly, how he can become the man he would like to be. He is a product of a world that in some sense no longer exists, and while much that has changed has changed for the best, there has been change to regret. Manhood for Amateurs looks to reclaim some of the best of those past values, to see if there is not still a place for them in this changed world.

He writes about his childhood, about the freedom he had to roam the "wilderness" behind his home in Maryland, about his fascination with comic books and super heroes, about playing Planet of the Apes at the Megginsons' disorderly house. It was a freedom which encouraged exploration and creativity; it was a freedom to use his imagination. One has to wonder if it is not just this kind of freedom that is the essential element in the creation of writer.

On the other hand, he talks about his parents' divorce, his mother's boyfriends, his father's move to Pittsburgh. He admits of a fetish for collecting father figures. He writes about his early sexual experiences and his own marriages and divorce. He describes his dalliance with pot. He talks about his own children and his role as a parent.

Every so often he gets into more public kinds of topics: his short acquaintance with David Foster Wallace at a John Kerry rally, his feelings about Jose Conseco after the revelations about steroids, his feelings about self-centered artists like Henry Miller. He considers the changing roles of men in the rearing of children. He comments on the value of creative writing programs. He talks about religion and having his children take part in a Nativity play; he describes his daughter's bat mitzvah.

But most importantly, whatever he writes about, he writes about with wit and style. He is fond of using the ordinary occurrence, the everyday situation as a metaphor. In the essay "Subterranean," he uses the terrified excitement he feels in his grandfather's basement as a metaphor for his life as a writer. Rummaging and snooping in that basement helped form, he says, the basis for his "life as a writer," made him "a denizen of the basement of my soul." A child's inability to draw a picture of a woman becomes a figure for the writer's inability to create realistic female characters. An old fashioned set of Lego building blocks is a signifier of creativity, while the proscriptive model kits that fill the shelves of Toys 'R Us today are creative dead ends.

Article Author: Jack Goodstein

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