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Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son

by Michael Chabon

Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.

Hardcover $32.99

“A father is a man who fails every day.”

At least that's what Michael Chabon says in “The Losers Club,” the opening piece in his new non-fiction collection Manhood for Amateurs. Ever since a humiliating attempt to start a comic book club in his teenage years, Chabon has suffered from an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy in his roles as a man, writer and father.

In case you are wondering, yes, this Michael Chabon is the New York Times bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and who wrote the first draft of Spider-man 2, and whose wife, Ayelet Waldman, took considerable heat from Oprah due to her statement that she loves her husband more than her own kids. Yeah, I guess things just haven't worked out for him at all.

It's a weird quote, and one that stands out like a sore thumb in that particular article, which starts off as a humourous remembrace of his youthful nerd-dom but ends up wallowing in a bit of pyrrhic ennui. He tosses that line in and then neglects to fully back it up or contextualize it with something like “because we fathers always try so hard that we can never achieve it all.” It's an odd line with which to open a book about fatherhood, especially since he seems to refute it in every other article in the collection.

Most of the pieces in Manhood for Amateurs originally appeared in Details magazine, in a monthly column that ostensibly dealt with manly issues for the manly sort of men who read Details magazine. That's why it's so interesting to see that most of these articles explore the more gentle and emotional side of fatherhood, as well as the fragile nature of childhood and adolescence, rather than laddish hints on hiding a mistress or how to customize your Porsche Carrera.

Over the course of the collection, Chabon often explores the importance of childhood imagination and the way in which our modern culture seeks to replace it with pre-packaged experiences that leave no room for a young mind to grow. In the hands of a weaker writer, this line of thought might come off sounding a bit like Andy Rooney -- Did ya ever notice that everything was so much better in the Depression and that kids today are a lousy bunch of weak-kneed communists and why are stamps so small? -- but I think Chabon might be on to something here.

In “To the Legoland Station,” he makes an interesting argument against the complex, corporate-intellectual-property-branded Lego sets that dominate today's toy store shelves. He feels that modern Lego kits eliminate the need for creativity and imagination, and that the only skill one attains in building them is the ability to follow the instructions. Thirty years ago, a child was limited to a small assortment of Lego shapes, but with the help of a creative imagination, they could build virtually anything. Today, once you've put together an elaborate Lego Star Wars Millennium Falcon that puts the handmade miniature used the in original movie to shame, why would you build anything else?

The more I thought about my own childhood Lego adventures, the more I understood his point of view. As a kid, I found myself building the same rectangular Lego house again and again and never feeling bored by it at all. Sure, it may have looked a lot like a bomb shelter, but it was my bomb shelter. My two and half year old son was recently introduced to Lego when we found an old shoebox of them at his grandparents' place. Jack had a great time sticking random pieces together and pulling them apart again, with not a single care that it didn't look like a 1:20 scale replica of Thomas the Tank Engine. I found myself reconstructing my old bomb shelter, and damn, if it wasn't still a solid design.Sometimes a man and his children can share a blissful love for something incredibly nerdy -- like Dr. Who.

Chabon earns credits for his Doctorate in Advanced Nerdology in “The Splendors of Crap,” where he admits that he used to reenact scenes from the Planet of the Apes. Not the movies, which is somewhat justifiable, but the atrocious and incredibly short-lived 1970s TV version of it. This thread is picked up later in “Amateur Family,” where he explains in amazement that sometimes a man and his children can share a blissful love for something incredibly nerdy -- in this case a love for Dr. Who. Sometimes the apple doesn't fall far from the TARDIS. My wife does not share my own Whovian tendencies, bless her non-nerdy heart, but you can bet that my son will in a few years time. And yes, "whovian" is a word.

Lest you think that Manhood for Amateurs is an exclusive geek-fest, there are also a number of heartfelt articles that relate to matters of his extended family. “The Hand on my Shoulder” is a very touching story about how Chabon lost a much needed father figure when his first marriage ended and his ex-wife took her father with him, and “The Story of Our Story” looks at Chabon's relationship with his younger brother and the power of filial connection. There are also a couple unfortunate forays into baseball and sports writing that I found skip-worthy. Perhaps that's what he meant when he talked about failing every day. In that case, he can rest assured that it wasn't an epic fail like his teenage comic book club.