Michael Chabon is one of our favorite contemporary authors.  If you haven’t read his Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in particular, or Wonder Boys, or any of his other novels, do yourselves a huge favor and do so.  Chabon always manages to tell magnificent stories.

Chabon’s most recent offering, Manhood for Amateurs, is a tremendous compendium of essays of modern life as a father, husband and human being.  He assesses his childhood in the 70’s and examines his parents’ divorce, his short first marriage, his happy current marriage, being a father and in general what it’s like to be a modern man.   Chabon impresses throughout with his deft, clever writing, well-examined details and hilarious anecdotes.  Highly recommended for all, not just guys with wives and kids.

We were grabbed immediately in the book’s first chapter, The Loser’s Club, when we read the passage below related to his failed childhood effort to start up a comic book club:

“This is the point, to me,  where art and fandom coincide.  Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing.  Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city–in every cranium–in the world.  Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude.  The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, [Lefort–the blogger,] knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed….

Sometimes things work out: Your flashed message is received and read, your song is rerecorded by another band and goes straight to No. 1, your son blesses the memory of the day you helped him arrange the empty chairs of his foredoomed dream, your act of last-ditch desperation sends your comic-book company to the top of the industry.  Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do.  But you always knew that.  Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge.  Welcome to the club.”

Yes, we suppose we have always have known that.  We just hadn’t seen it put so well.

We reach for a hand, await the password and attempt to flash our signal from that mirror in the window.  We’ve convened the meeting.  We hope for attendees, but we accept that none may attend.  Nonetheless we reach, arms outstretched, while failure stalks.

Chabon delivers epiphanies and good words throughout.  Required reading.