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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.
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Comments
But the thing is, Salam seems
By: lorikay4 | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 17:14
But the thing is, Salam seems to be disappointed that Chabon doesn't want to sling dirt at something that Salam finds to be problematic. His disappointment is beside the point, and not something that it is Chabon's job to address. Not every divorce with children is an unmitigated catastrophe from which all involved will have to be in therapy for the next 10 years. It is unfashionable to say this, but it is true.
I come away from the review feeling that Salam liked the book against his better judgment, because he found Chabon to be an appealing and persuasive writer. Which is probably in a weird way a particularly ringing endorsement of Chabon's writing, I guess.
@lorikay4
By: rcwilliams83 | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 17:01
Are we even reading the same book review? I think Salam achieves a reasonably evenhanded (albeit contrarian) review of Chabon's work. Far from criticizing Chabon's mother, Salam writes that Chabon had "good reason" to "hold her in awe." Salam calls her refusal to cook "entirely sane." Not an endorsement per se, but a cession of the point at any rate. And of the "murse," Salam writes that he disagrees with Chabon--but goes on to admit that maybe he (Salam) is the one who is being too forgiving of others' foibles.
Frankly, Salam again and again admits that Chabon has a point. I don't know how a reviewer could be any more charitable. Salam never says or implies that Chabon is not a "serious writer," and I have a hard time seeing from whence you draw that conclusion. The only substantive criticism that he makes is that perhaps Chabon is sui generis, and accordingly, not the sort of person from whose experience we ought to draw general conclusions about humanity. In other words, IF the sexual revolution had a dark side (and it almost certainly did, though people can disagree about its magnitude), then that dark side existed regardless of whether Michael Chabon emerged from it unscathed.
Now I haven't read Manhood for Amateurs yet, but I doubt that Chabon intended it as anachronistic political spin for the sexual revolution. Chabon is (I think) too good a writer to be drawn into that kind of self-conscious hack-work. So the farthest that I will go in criticizing Salam is to say that by viewing the work only through the lens of politics, his review is almost certainly non-responsive to most of the themes in Manhood.
Just silly
By: lorikay4 | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 11:04
Having a conservative political and cultural commentator review Chabon is like having an Amish person review science fiction. Guaranteed not to get the point.
The 70s didn't destroy everything it touched, but our crabbed, narrow, and judgmental present moment is stifling in its passion to criticize lives and families that do anything but hew to an obsessively careful bourgeois set of practices. (example: the recent frenzy to take Balloon Boy away from his dingbat but not dangerous parents) This writer is clearly disappointed that Chabon didn't want to toe (his) party line and trash his mother's life choices as part and parcel of an evil, self-indulgent, (feminist, we can say it) failure to give him a cookie-cutter 2 parent upbringing. But Chabon is honest enough to tell us what was good about his young life, not just what was missing.
I also totally don't buy the idea that cheerfulness and an ability to 'get over it' somehow disqualify a writer from being considered 'serious'. I know a passel of whiny self-involved folks who would benefit enormously from acquiring that skill.