Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs Unveils an Essayist

Few authors are as successful in shape-shifting and genre-hopping as Michael Chabon. From the epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to the mind-boggling Jewish-Alaskan homage to crime noir, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, to the sword-swinging adventure tale, Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon has always shown an incredible knack for adopting and reinventing whatever writing style he takes on.

Chabon's newest book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, shows off Chabon the essayist, thoughtfully dissecting and reflecting upon what it means to be a man in modern America.

"A father is a man who fails every day," Chabon writes in the book's first essay, "The Loser's Club." It is a line that serves as both a wonderful introduction to the stories ahead and as an invitation to the rest of us to go ahead and join the club. Nothing to be ashamed of in here.

While Manhood for Amateurs is certainly told from a male perspective, the book is by no means a boys-only tree house of stories. In fact, many of the essays are either about, or are at least inspired by, the women in Chabon's life. From his mother's support and eventual consolation following a failed comic book club, to the dazzling pride and adoration he feels for his own daughter during her bat mitzvah, Manhood for Amateurs is as much about being a man as it is an ode to the women we love, who have the patience enough to love us back.

In "A Woman of Valor," Chabon reminisces about one of his first flames, the little-known DC Comics superheroine, Big Barda. For nine edifying pages, Chabon takes us on a journey through the history of Barda and her contemporaries (Wonder Woman, Super Girl, Sheena) and proclaims, after much rumination and analysis, Barda to be the most perfect of the super heroines.

Lacking the usual chauvinist cliches--the "tininess" of Shrinking Violet, or the "insubstantiality" of Phantom Girl, or the nonsensical narratives (or lack thereof) of Wonder Woman and Super Girl--Barda was, according to Chabon, the first true female role model in the world of comics. Not only was she strong and vigilant and fully capable of kicking some ass, she was also intelligent, thoughtful, empathetic, and vulnerable only to those who had earned her trust and her love. Most importantly, Barda was submissive to no one.

It is at first humorous (and boyishly charming) to consider the amount of time Chabon has clearly spent thinking about these heroines, but then one remembers that comics have always been, for better or for worse, a reflection of our society's glories, failures, and prejudices.

And there is another side to all of Chabon's brooding on the subject; in the end it's all very much a love letter to his wife, Ayelet Waldman (author of Bad Mother). The best parts of Manhood for Amateurs are when Chabon speaks of childhood--that of his own and of his four children--and of imagination.

In "The Wilderness of Childhood," Chabon writes of a seemingly bygone era in which children had the run of the streets, the fields, the neighboring yards, and had all the time in the world. A time when it was okay to be gone for hours, returning home only for dinner and then disappearing yet again until nightfall. "The Wilderness of Childhood is dead," Chabon laments, before admitting to his own hypocrisy as he hesitates to allow his daughter to ride her bike to the market by herself, which is just around the corner.

And in one of my favorite pieces, "To the Legoland Station," Chabon declares that today's Legos, with their custom shapes and colors, only depress the imagination of children. He argues, quite convincingly, that Legos were never meant to look exactly like what you were building. What you were building was beside the point.

It's not all gummy bears and nods to feminism, however. There are plenty of made-for-men tales in Manhood for Amateurs. Sex, baseball, home improvement, circumcision, and man-purses--it's all here, in Chabon's rich, humorous, deliberative prose. I will leave it to you to discover the passage describing, in such wonderful language, Chabon's first encounter with an actual real-life vagina.

When my time came to meet Michael Chabon in the signing line following his recent appearance at Elliott Bay Book Company, I told him that his book had come out at a good time for me. I said that I was currently floating around in that strange cloudy region of Manhood, clinging to my freedom, while also looking forward to fatherhood. He simply shook my hand, smiled, and said, "Good luck. It really is a lot of fun."

• Michael Chabon will appear at Benaroya Hall on March 9, 2010, at 7:30 p.m., as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures.