A review of "Manhood for Amateurs."

Michael Chabon might be America's happiest and most well-adjusted man, and in his collection of essays,
Manhood for Amateurs, 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.

Tags: Ayelet Waldman, manhood for amateurs, michael chabon, murse

Reihan Salam , a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the co-author of Grand New Party, a columnist for Forbes.com and The Daily Beast, a contributing editor at National Affairs, and a blogger for National Review Online.

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