Read: Manhood for Amateurs
Michael Chabon is an author that I really should adore. He’s quite geeky, he’s into superheros, has a pretty good sense of humour, his wife (Ayelet Waldman) is a writer whose book log I check in on once in a while (I have yet to read her books though!) and who clearly loves him very much. Oh, and he cooks. But somehow his works have never quite struck that note with me. I’ve read some of his works, such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
You know, come to think about it, perhaps some of this might be due to (1) a bad memory or (2) lack of writing reviews. But Maps and Legends was just read a few months ago, and it just didn’t sit well with me.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son was my sister-in-law’s (hello!) Christmas gift to my husband. Having finished my two books (and many other library books besides) while on holiday in Singapore, I nicked this one to read on the long and unfortunately bumpy flight back to SF. Of course I often kid myself about reading on planes – I can’t help but catch up on movies while in flight. As a result, I only finished with Manhood for Amateurs yesterday, having erm, skipped a few of the essays that didn’t quite interest me (such as those that involved baseball…)
The book started out pretty great, with ‘The Losers’ Club’, where Chabon related how he had, as a child, started his own comic book club with his mother’s encouragement, and ‘William and I’, where Chabon is told by a stranger that he is a “good dad”, to which he wonders what a woman has to do to bring up a similar reaction, “Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks’ worth of healthy but appealing break-time snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr“. Yeah, he’s got that kind of sense of humour.
Some of the essays were somewhat forgettable, but the highlight for me was ‘Art of Cake’, located somewhere in the middle, which talks about how he began cooking. And he put into words how I feel about cooking, how one can “find there a sense of history and connectedness” and how
“cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance – maybe even a taste – for last-minute collapse. You have to be able to enjoy the repeated and deliberate following of a more or less legnthy, more or less complicated series of steps whose product is very likely – after all that work, with no warning, right at the end – to curdle, sink, scorch, dry up, congeal, burn, or simply taste bad”.
The result of this book – I think I ought to give Chabon another chance. I might not have enjoyed Maps and Legends but he is undeniably a good writer. And when it comes to being a husband and a father, he is honest and insightful. And for someone who will never be either (duh), what can be better than that?
ha! I like the quote about cooking. Very true.
Try “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” my favorite Chabon novel.
Thanks for the recommendation!
oops…”The Yiddish PoliceMEN’s Union.” Not “man’s.”