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With the old status of society's authoritarians vanishing, writer takes hilarious, moving look at what's happening now
By Jeremy Adam Smith
San Francisco Chronicle
Published on Sunday, Nov 01, 2009
Manhood today is much like Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
Does that analogy sound preposterous? Consider: As in the lands of the Soviet imperium, men once had an authoritarian ideology that tied them together and told them how to behave. The forces that destroyed that ideology did not come from outside of manhood. Instead, manhood was destroyed from within by the very same forces that undermined the Soviet Union: hypocrisy, corruption, ineptitude, brutality and alienation.
In short, manhood collapsed because men stopped believing in it — and it shattered, as did the formerly communist countries, into a Babel of smaller nations: patriarchal conservatism, metrosexualism, hip-hop hedonism, stay-at-home fatherhood, a dozen gay subcultures and more.
Across this ruined landscape strides Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon, a nebbish colossus, essays in hand. But in Manhood for Amateurs, Chabon is not concerned with why manhood fell. No utopian, he is not even explicitly interested in building some shiny new city on the ruins of
the old.
He'd rather play the role of pith-helmeted archaeologist, excavating the sites of his own private Sahara in search of fragments — Lego bricks, Wacky Packages, baseball cards, Jack Kirby comic books, his father's stethoscope — around which he can weave clever little stories.
The results are hilarious, moving, pleasurable, disturbing, transcendent, restless and sometimes a trifle cantankerous — but almost never dull. This energy arises mainly because Chabon seems drawn to his opposites, the masculine tribes to which he doesn't belong. When Chabon defends the legacy of disgraced ballplayer Jose Canseco, he doesn't address steroids, domestic violence or gambling. Instead, Chabon wants to know: ''How come I still like the guy so much?''
The answer, he says, is that Canseco is a true rogue who broke promises and shirked responsibilities with the same joie de vivre that he threw out runners at home plate ''with a dead strike from deep right field.''
It's this indifference, writes Chabon, which marks you as a genuine rogue: ''Above all, you must do these things . . . because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn.''
In the end, Chabon admires Canseco because he is his own man — and precisely because he is a different kind of man from Chabon himself. As is made abundantly clear in Manhood for Amateurs, Chabon does, in fact, give a damn.
''There's nothing I work harder at than being a good father, unless it's being a good husband, which doesn't come any easier,'' he writes in another piece. ''I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother — doing my part to . . . stay on top of the endless parade of piddly [stuff].''
Against Chabon's mundane duties as a husband, father and son, jerks like Canseco loom as cockeyed heroes. ''They were the ones, the Ulysseses and Sinbads and Raleighs, who sailed to places we couldn't imagine,'' he writes. ''When they came back, they carried a truth in their baggage that no one else would be clown enough, or rogue enough, and hero enough, to speak.''
This imbues Canseco with a certain style, one that Chabon appreciates at a distance but does not — cannot — emulate. ''We have no style, you and I; only people who don't give a damn have style,'' he writes. The glory of Canseco (in Chabon's eyes) is that he is the id to Chabon's superego, the swaggering, cruel Serbia to his white-wine-sipping Slovenia — but, above all, Canseco is one of those forces undermining manhood from within, striking cracks in the masculine edifice in which, paradoxically, a geeky and caring guy like Chabon can flourish.
As a result, we live in a time when both Canseco and Chabon, so different from each other, can both be considered ''manly.''
And seemingly by accident, Chabon ultimately does create a composite image of ideal manhood, one that is modest, responsible, bemused, empathetic and thoughtful. In his own way, Chabon is a masculine conformist, a ''walking cliche,'' as he says at one point. He plays by the rules of 21st-century manhood, but those rules, these essays suggest, allow for more richness and deviation than the manhood of our grandfathers and fathers.
''Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women,'' Chabon writes, speaking for many fathers with equal parts of joy and resentment. ''Lucky me.''
Manhood today is much like Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
Get the full article here.
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