Book review: Michael Chabon tackles the greater meaning of being a man

Review: Michael Chabon explores manhood in book

“Manhood for Amateurs” (Harper, 320 pages, $25.99), by Michael Chabon: The singular experience of becoming a father can change everything. This seems to include — for literary papas — what you want to write about.

How else to explain the cavalcade of Daddy literature? With the arrival of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon’s new memoir, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son,” another venerable author has chimed in with his take on the greater meaning of being a man and, of course, being a father.

Like the unchanged diaper, there is a real risk for over-saturation here. Ignore the fact that fatherhood is a deeply personal experience that is at least as inchoate as it is universal. The more these books pile up, the more there’s a risk of the who cares factor: Your precocious child is capable of saying things that are both cute and cutting in that larger-truth-of-parenting kind of way? So what! I’ve got a certain somebody I need to pick up from soccer practice now.

The odds say we’re surely approaching a tipping point for this stuff — but, alas, by the grace of Chabon’s glittering prose, it’s not here yet.

Chabon’s frenetic, sometimes lovely, rambles in “Amateurs” manage to be, for the most part, both entertaining and thoughtful. And in an increasingly crowded genre this collection — which includes many essays that first appeared in Details magazine — stands out for a laudable lack of oversharing as well as Chabon’s characteristic zaniness. (An essay about the virtues of his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, is wrapped in the elaborate metaphor of the cartoon heroine Big Barda.)

Part of why this collection works well is down to the author himself. Chabon is a highly successful novelist whose past books, including the “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” are works of terrific creative endeavor. It turns out he has some fascinating (Real!) stories to tell.

They include: Chabon’s teenage affair with a much older woman, a gripping account of the moment he knew his first marriage was over, and his son’s struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder that is sparse in the best possible way.

There are, to be sure, some clunkers. Some are a bit preachy and overly romantic about the notion of childhood’s growing lack of “wilderness.” Others are just blah. An essay about Chabon learning to “act like a man,” or fake it, anyway, reads a lot more like a middle-aged guy congratulating himself for installing a Restoration Hardware towel rack. Time might be better spent installing one of your own.

More characteristic of “Amateurs” are insightful reminisces about growing into a father and a quirky middle-aged man. Stories that readers will recognize as a common experience are blessed with some added verve by a supremely talented writer. One luminescent passage, in an essay about losing a friend over a woman:

“(T)here is something in the guy, something crucial and irreducible, that you do not understand at all, and She is proof. You have no access to that innermost kernel of him, and you never did. And, in turn, this leads you to question everything you ever thought you knew, not only about the man you thought you knew as well as you knew your best friend — yourself.”

As long as dads keep writing like this, we’ll keep reading.