Columbia native Michael Chabon, whose quirky novels have featured unlikely characters such as golems and a colony of Alaskan Jews, takes a close look at his own family life in his new book, "Manhood for Amateurs." In a review in today's Baltimore Sun, Steve Almond describes the book as "a raft of shortish essays that traces his progression from a lonely, bookish boy to a thoughtful if addled husband and father." Here's an excerpt from Almond's review:
His focus swivels from unrepentant geekitude (comic books, Carl Sagan, "Planet of the Apes") to the sorrows of divorce, with welcome excursions into the wonders of Bisquick, telescopes, basement lairs and Roberto Clemente. Chabon is more or less incapable of writing a boring sentence. Like Updike, he is an inveterate noticer, and the central appeal of his style lies in its lyric precision, whether he's describing a pack of stickers "scented with the sweet dust of bubble gum" or a fudge upside-down cake "floating like the earth's mantle on a glutinous brown magma." If the book has a unifying theme, it is the need to preserve our sense of wonder against an incessant tide of marketing. Chabon takes direct aim at the forces eroding our cultural imagination. He is especially good at diagnosing the neuroses of what used to be called the bourgeoisie. Here's his take on the paranoia that plagues modern parenthood.
Of course, one of the occupational hazards of writing about children, particularly one's own children, is the slippery descent into sentiment. Chabon -- who has four kids, God bless him -- is not immune to spells of earnest contemplation. But more often he's sensationally funny, as when his 10-year-old son, having established that Chabon smoked pot, asks how many times: "So far, even blindsided as I had been by the abrupt onset of this conversation, I hadn't violated the guiding principle my wife and I had decided on for its eventual proper conduct: I had been honest. But now I had a moment's pause before replying, unwilling to pronounce those two simple words: one million."