Manhood for Amateurs

The title of Chabon’s new collection of essays, largely culled from his column in Details, is worth unpacking. Manhood for Amateurs perfectly nutshells the attitude of its author toward his own life as a son, husband and father. Like a lot of us, he’s most comfortable ironically portraying his personation of each role from within the traditional boundaries. But in posing this as a handbook—which, of course, it isn’t—the title wryly acknowledges that we don’t get to define these roles entirely ourselves. We are all amateurs, are we not?

The essays themselves, then, each manifest this. The loss of his virginity; the failure of his first marriage—these expected milestones are covered, but Chabon also writes on other moments, each ultimately understood in terms of the tension between Chabon’s alternating embrace of an archetypally male role and his alienation from it. That, basically, is (post)modern life, and Chabon might just be one of its most able chroniclers.

Chabon has been called “his generation’s Updike,” but in contrast to Updike’s disappointing attitude toward women, Chabon’s feminism is smart and never feels coached. It takes some marbles to brag about your “murse” from inside a magazine where the cologne sample is never more than a few pages away.

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