Ayelet Waldman’s Husband Is a Very Happy Man

Michael Chabon might be America's happiest and most well-adjusted man, and in his collection of essays,
Manhood for Amateurs [2], this attitude starts to wear after a while. Early on, in "The Heartbreak Kid," Chabon describes a boozy undergrad evening when a friend told him, "You have no tristeza," or soulful sadness. Chabon sheepishly confesses that he was, and is, cheerful by nature, a possibly fatal quality for writers. So rather than go forth to find his bliss, as most of us do, Chabon embarked on a long search for tristeza, which culminated in his ill-starred first marriage to an older, often miserable woman. But somehow Chabon's tristeza never lasts. We learn, in a later essay, that though the divorce sent Chabon into a deep funk, he snapped out of it after meeting the extraordinary woman who would become his second wife, Ayelet Waldman. His talent, it seems, is snapping out of it. Chabon has been surrounded by real emotional torment, from the ur-tragedy of his parents' divorce to Waldman's struggles with bipolar disorder. Nevertheless, he seems almost entirely unscathed. Indeed, Manhood for Amateurs could just as easily be titled The Power of Positive Thinking.

But Manhood for Amateurs is more than an exercise in nostalgia and personal-growth-ism. Chabon's happiness is a kind of political statement. While many Generation Xers look back on the 1970s with embarrassment—this was the Reagan Generation, lest we forget—Chabon is a believer in that much-maligned decade and the sexual revolution that was at the heart of it. In "Like, Cosmic," Chabon opens with seemingly out-of-the-blue reflections on Voyager 2, the 1970s-era space probe that was sent forth to reach out and touch intelligent extraterrestrial life. The essay ends with an unexpected and almost convincing defense of the 1970s for its Voyager-like "universal message of love and desire and willingness to explore," which he contrasts with the narrowness and frustrated ambitions of our own cultural moment.

Chabon compares the two eras partly by writing about his own childhood. Over the course of several essays, Chabon's mother emerges as a formidable woman with a full life who raised two boys alone after a divorce. Rather than resent his mother for pursuing her professional ambitions and for dating and dabbling in marijuana, Chabon holds her in awe, and for good reason. She is the source of much of Chabon's fatherly wisdom and, in light of her entirely sane refusal to make hot meals after a long and exhausting day at work, his better-than-passable cooking skills. Plenty of the sexual revolution's sharpest critics were also battered and bruised by the aftermath of parental divorce. But Chabon remains unscathed. For such a keenly observant writer, he seems almost blind to the unsavory parts of the '70s, choosing instead to see it as a freewheeling era lost to history. But not all of the sex was joyful, and not all of the drug use was mind-expanding. A lot of it was a way of masking the pain of a cultural upheaval that, however necessary, exacted a stiff price on millions of kids and half-formed adults.

Now, as a husband and father, Chabon is striving to live up to those 1970s ideals. In the gap between his ideals and reality lie the only tiny bits of tristeza—although they point more to a slightly blinkered, privileged life than any actual tragedy. Chabon's love for his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, is one of the central themes of the book, captured most vividly in an essay that begins as an ode to the bruiser-ish comic-book superheroine Big Barda. A friend set him up with Waldman, thinking that his enthusiasm for performing oral sex made him a promising partner for her. Now their life includes four children, a dog, and a pleasantly chaotic house in Berkeley, Calif. Rather than fret about the excesses of the sexual revolution, Chabon worries that we've failed to live up to it. In "William and I," one of my favorite essays in the book, Chabon writes that "the handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low," noting that he was once praised for going to the supermarket with one of his kids—something most mothers do without any recognition or complaint.

One of Chabon’s chief complaints is about modern masculinity, which remains, in his view, a stultifying monoculture. Among Chabon's gentle transgressions against prevailing gender norms is his use of a fawn-colored suede murse, or male purse, which he vividly describes in "I Feel Good About My Murse." (Forgive me while I criminally overanalyze this lighthearted essay.) "As I get older," Chabon writes, "I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think or say about me." But of course the men who are quickest to deride murse-wearers are those who carefully guard their masculinity as a defense against the confusions and humiliations of not-so-charmed lives. Having worn many a murse in my day, I get where Chabon is coming from. I'm not so sure, however, that the murse-haters are assholes, or rather that they are simply assholes. Chabon wears his moral certainty, which derives as much from the underdog heroism celebrated in Marvel Comics as from familiar liberal pieties, pretty well. As far as I can tell, he doesn't intend to engage in moral point-scoring at the expense of less enlightened men. Yet my own subjective experience, growing up among outer-borough immigrants and ethnics for whom traditional gender roles were a lifeline, inclines me to be more—perhaps too—forgiving of the murse-haters.

And that's what I found unconvincing about Manhood for Amateurs. Taken together, the essays offer a cultural history of the sexual revolution in miniature, but it's one written from the perspective of the winner's circle. If Chabon weren't so congenitally cheerful, it'd be easy to imagine him drawing different conclusions from his experiences. Incredibly, Chabon's mother never registered that her son had a brief sexual relationship at 15 with one of her thirtysomething friends. Granted, this relationship wasn't tawdry or damaging in the Mary Kay LeTourneau sense, and perhaps we as a culture are too prudish or protective of the sexual innocence of 15-year-old boys. All the same, the fact that Chabon takes this experience so lightly is worthy of note. Though Chabon is at great pains to establish his early-in-life geekiness, he seems to have had a varied and full sex life from the ninth grade on. Overall, sexual laissez-faire worked out pretty well for Chabon. So of course he's a believer in the dream of Voyager 2.  

Some of the best essays in Manhood for Amateurs are about childhood and how Chabon badly wants his children to experience the shambolic anarchy of his own youth that's been lost to bobo paranoia. At the tail-end of the book, Chabon wrestles with his own protectiveness regarding his oldest daughter's potential involvement with boys. You get the distinct impression that he'd be less than pleased if one of his thirtysomething friends slept with his one of his kids in a few years' time. What Chabon doesn't fully acknowledge is that the case for guardrails, for too-rigid taboos around sex, gender, and love, aren't meant to protect the wise, precocious, and cheerful-by-nature: They're meant to protect everyone else.