MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS
great book
The title of this book, “Manhood for Amateurs,” suggests another entrant in the growing catalog of Dad Lit. This genre, which might also be called Dadsploitation, has in recent times seen such gifted writers as Michael Lewis (”Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood”) and Adam Gopnik (“Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York”) turn their attention to the domestic front - the idea being that in their skilled hands, the non-unique experience of fatherhood can be turned into a rollicking, revelatory ride worthy of your scarce reading time.
Yet Dad Lit is a tricky business, fraught with traps: the putatively self-deprecating vignette that actually demonstrates how pleased the author is with himself; the inordinately delineated neuroses of the overexamined life; the T.M.I. disclosures of sexual proclivities and other familial weirdness; the tone-deaf presentation of some mundane, schleppy aspect of parenthood (e.g., the absence of “me” time, the utility of swim diapers) as some sort of epiphanic discovery.
“The sandlots and creek beds,” Chabon writes, “the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations - Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked Staff Only.”
This wilderness, vanishing as alarmingly fast as the Amazonian rain forest, is not a literal one but simply any place where kids can unmediatedly be kids, without the requisite caregiver security details and OSHA-compliant play spaces. Chabon argues that books like “The Hobbit” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” captivated young readers like himself not because they came off as wildly transporting works of imagination, but because they seemed faithful to kid life as his and previous generations knew it. Done right, it is a journey undertaken with only a “fragmentary map” constructed “out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.”
In the essay The Story of Our Story, he tenderly recalls an episode in which he got himself and his blindly trusting kid brother, Steve, utterly lost in the sand dunes along the Outer Banks of North Carolina - thereby unwittingly engineering an escapade that forever cemented a strong fraternal bond. And in another essay, Chabon makes the case that it’s not only the physical space of childhood that has grown too circumscribed, but the head space. There is no room in them for children.”
I suppose that Chabon could be called out for compounding the very problems he complains of, by simply adding another layer of Dad Lit neurosis: fretfulness over the phenomenon of overly fretful parenting. Ultimately, what makes this collection so melancholically pleasurable is not the modern-dad stuff but Chabon’s ready and vivid access to his own childhood. You could have the book here.
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