In Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, Michael Chabon engages the topic of gender with a impressive lack of professionalism
Manhood for Amateurs is not entirely candid about what it is: a collection of previously published magazine pieces, most of which appeared in Details (a men's magazine more obviously notable for photographs of scantily clad women than insightful social commentary). This is something you only learn by studying the copyright page. The flap copy calls the book an "autobiographical narrative," which comes close to crossing an ethical line: autobiographical, yes; narrative, not really. As a matter of marketing, such camouflaging was probably necessary; while Michael Chabon has a well-deserved reputation as an entertaining literary novelist -- his 1995 book Wonder Boys was made into a pretty good movie five years later, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and his most recent novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007), got good reviews -- he doesn't have the readership of a Maureen Dowd necessary to flaunt the book as a collection of columns. Such ledgermain aside, this is a smart, funny, and cohesive little book, elegantly clustered into segments about sex, gender, parenting, and the like. It's also a remarkable historical document of a life begun in the mid-twentieth century that has carried over to the twenty-first.
Chabon establishes the tone for the 39 pieces as a whole with his first essay, "The Loser's Club," which describes a childhood memory in which his mother helped him establish a comic book club in which no one wished to be a member. This tragicomic anecdote leads to the point of the story: "A father is a man who fails every day," he explains. Occasional successes do "nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. But you always knew that. Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge. Welcome to the club." Yet far from bitterness or self-pity, this message proves oddly liberating. The mood of the book is actually quite buoyant: like the cakes he learned to bake in his mother's kitchen, the journey matters at least as much as the destination, which every once in a while proves to be delicious.
Chabon has the not inconsiderable gift of turning apparent cliches into bracing moments of revelation. He writes about hoisting his son on his shoulders in Grant Park on the night of Barack Obama's victory, and the sad loss of innocence it portends for Obama's daughters as well as his son. An essay about the collapse of his first marriage suggests his greatest regret may well breaking his (very different) father-in-law's heart. Alternatively, enrolling in an MFA program at the University of California not only proves to be a good career move, but helps him grow up (go figure).
A number of themes stitch the book together. Chabon, who was born in 1962, is a child of divorce who came of age in a feminist era. That this has resulted in confusion and anxiety about his relationships, male and female, is less something he laments than it is something to be taken for granted. (It's worth pointing out in this context that Chabon's wife, novelist Ayalet Waldman, has also recently published a book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace.) He writes with a good deal of curiosity and sympathy for a number of women in life, past and present, even as he accepts the criticism he's received in his fiction that he doesn't really portray female characters three-dimensionally.
Chabon also describes, as a number of observers have, the transformation of American childhood, which is now more intensively managed by adults than it ever has been. But few people to make this point are as entertaining as he is on the evolution of Legos from his own childhood to that of his son. In "Hypocritical Theory," Chabon asserts his detestation of Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants books less because he actually hates them than because he needs to give his child a subversive pleasure. He grieves that his children lack the joy of going out and playing after dinner, riding their bicycles in the neighborhood, or exploring dank basements the way he once did. Running through the whole book is Chabon's infectious lifelong infatuation with pop culture, whether it's pop music on FM radio, old television shows, or classic characters from Marvel cartoons (there's a nice piece on cartoon women). Chabon makes clear that the jetsam and flotsam of this culture, which will surface in his consciousness at the oddest moments, is not simply the source of happy childhood memory, but the seedbed of his adult creativity. And seemingly mediocre figures like José Conseco (this from a piece Chabon wrote when the steroid scandal was first breaking) suggests that scoundrels can be genuinely edifying figures. In one of the more moving pieces in the collection, "The Amateur Family," Chabon savors the joy of shared passions -- a joy he lacked as a child but savors with this own children -- before making this moving peroration:
Maybe all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborated, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs on the primal text of the parents' love for each other. Sometimes the original program is canceled by death or separation; sometimes, as with Doctor Who, it endures and flourishes for decades. And maybe love, mortality, and loss, and all the children and mythologies and sorrows they engender, make passionate amateurs -- nerds, geeks, and fanboys -- of us all.
Manhood for Amateurs would make an excellent addition to any number of gender studies courses. Chabon's insights rival those of many academic scholars, and he renders them with a grace and wit that will enliven many a discussion. I suspect this book will become a classic of its kind.
Once upon a time, we thought we knew what it meant to be a father: dads supported the family, typically by going outside the home in order to protect and sustain it (this was the post-1850, post-industrialization, version of the story). This responsibility was the basis of the respect and authority fathers were presumed to command. Of course, not all fathers actually met these responsibilities; some could not, some would not. But whether or not they did, this was the standard both fathers and non-fathers had to live with -- and die with. It could be questioned, but no one thought it could be changed in such a way that any alterations could be thought of as "normal" in any broad or long-term way.
One group of people who were unhappy with this version of the story (though not necessarily the only ones) were those who we have come to know -- and know themselves, beginning almost exactly a hundred years ago -- as feminists. Feminists had a panoply of objections to this story. One obvious objection was the sometimes cavernous gap between the ideal and reality. Another was the way that the ideal itself generated its own problems in terms of saddling people with roles that could feel arbitrary, unnecessary, or simply oppressive.
These objections to the traditional story of fatherhood were part of a larger critique of gender relations that fell under the broad term of "patriarchy." Feminists didn't invent the word, but they gave it a set of valences and a sense of a focused analysis it never had before. And, as part of an ongoing struggle that remains ongoing, they explained that the gender status quo is just that: a mutable set of ideas and circumstances that could, in fact, be changed, resulting in laws (like those granting the right to vote) that ratified those changes. This challenge to the status quo has become a drama, a story, in its own right, and gained momentum and legitimacy as structural changes in society have resulted in a world where men are not the only ones to work outside the home or earn wages, and men are in fact no longer considered indispensable for raising children -- or sperm donation aside (perhaps a temporary obstacle?), for conceiving them.
Opponents of the traditional version of fatherhood have managed to articulate another version of the story, and while it is not quite as clearly chiseled as the old one, it nevertheless has discernible contours, the essence of which is a notion of fathers as partners in an egalitarian process of raising emancipated children. It is no longer remarkable -- or, at least, it is no longer supposed to be remarkable -- to have Dads who cook, vacuum, change diapers, and function as stay-at-home parents while their spouses or partners (gender-neutral terms are preferable) serve as primary wage-earners. Notwithstanding the fact that this scenario remains exceptional, its social legitimacy is nevertheless an amazing accomplishment. Mythologies -- defined here as widely shared about notions about the way the world should work -- are perhaps the most elusive and yet durable products of a civilization.
Sometimes the feminists who managed to imagine this counter-narrative express dismay and exhaustion at just how hard it has been to bring it to life. They note, correctly, the old story has a powerful grip, and that the new one has failed to gain a secure purchase among father and non-father alike. And they note that the transmission of their story has resulted in sometimes ferocious opposition, opposition that is at times entirely out of proportion to what is, after all, only a story.
Actually, as many of them know, the story they have told is not only powerful, but has gained widespread acceptance even among people who might once have been skeptics. (Sometimes, this acceptance has ironic implications, as many fathers have used the feminist critique of patriarchy for self-indulgent ends. If fatherhood is about anything, we all understand, it is not about self-indulgence, whatever else it may be about.) Relatively few people accept the old version of patriarchy in its entirety, and even some of those who say they do cloak that allegiance in the public square or betray it in private.
Yet as many women and men are beginning to understand, the problem with the new story is not so much what it says but what it doesn't. The vision of fatherhood it seems to offer -- a vision of partnership in which gender roles (as opposed to sexual roles) are interchangeable -- lacks the vitality that can command the kind of loyalty that the old one, for better or worse, always has. One of the complexities feminism has struggled with is the messy reality that women tend to want to be recognized simultaneously both with and without regard to gender; they grapple with feminisms of difference as well as equality. Many men want this too, however vague or contradictory their desires.
One striking recent manifestation of this inchoate longing are the string of recent "bromance" movies that focus on intra-gender male relationships and the difficulties men have in navigating contemporary social life. The troubling implication of so many of these movies is that the only alternative to the cosmopolitan vision of heterosexual partnership -- an alternative that is inevitably temporary -- appears to be a kind of arrested development in which sexual men act as gendered boys. The notion of fatherhood is literally laughable (sometimes embodied in secondary characters or failed fathers of the protagonist), and like those eighteenth and nineteenth century novels for women that ended with marriage, these stories are almost invariably ones in which fatherhood is something that takes place offstage.
It seems like there is a space, a gap, for people -- scholars and artists, men and women -- who might ransack the historical closet and imagine a compelling ensemble of fatherhood that both accepts the realities of post-industrial capitalism, feminism, and the need for a sense of parenting truly rooted in a masculine vision. The fact that we live in a time when reproduction has been untethered from sex has done little to lessen the cultural importance of motherhood. Is it possible can find a way to keep a specifically male notion of fatherhood from becoming extinct? We've deconstructed patriarchy; is it possible to reconstruct a daddy we can live with?
e point of the story: "A father is a man who fails every day," he explains. Occasional successes do "nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. But you always knew that. Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge. Welcome to the club." Yet far from bitterness or self-pity, this message proves oddly liberating. The mood of the book is actually quite buoyant: like the cakes he learned to bake in his mother's kitchen, the journey matters at least as much as the destination, which every once in a while proves to be delicious.
