Published: January 01. 2010 2:00AM

By Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

It would be stupid here for me to pretend I understand what he’s talking about. But I like men, in general and in specific the one I live with, and when he came home from the bookstore and consumed this book in a single sitting, laughing, making those pleasurable reading sounds, reading lines aloud, and once, when the children were out of the room, reading a whole passage on the vagaries of Chabon’s recollection of once having had sex with a friend of his mother’s, I figured I needed to see for myself.

“Manhood for Amateurs” is a collection of mostly short, previously published essays on the nature of being a father, husband, son and writer. And it’s one of the smarter books I’ve seen on the subject, written if not by a professional man, at least one of the gender’s great savants, Michael Chabon of “Wonder Boys,” “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” and the Pulitzer Prize.

Chabon’s tone is affable and self-effacing: “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.” This observation opens an essay spurred on by a time Chabon’s parenting skills were complimented in a grocery store when the only observable parenting he was doing was holding a baby. And this is not a book about men at the expense of women; Chabon sees his relationship with the women in his life as integral to the versions of manhood he’s chosen for himself. He delves freely and fearlessly into his own biography, detailing his parents’ divorce, his own failed first marriage, choices wise and not so very that he made in the realms of love and lust on his way to the steadfast relationship he shares now with the mother of his four kids. He mourns the loss of freedom in childhood, time spent outside the sway of adults, in the woods, in the creepy basements, with power tools and a kitchen’s worth of pots and pans.

It’s this essay, “Hypocritical Theory”, that most seemed to dovetail with something I’d been thinking lately. Chabon begins by confessing how much he hates the Captain Underpants books, (a series written for elementary schoolers) precisely because it legitimizes the kind of gross-out humor he used to love as a kid, used to love because of the way a fart joke signaled that the coast was clear of parents and their kind. Gross-out humor was a private language, and now it’s the province of Disney movies, thus allowing adults “out of the adult business, and into the business of selling childhood.”

I was thinking about this business of selling childhood a couple of months ago, when I took a whole bunch of teenagers to see Spike Jones’ film of “Where the Wild Things Are.” Here was a feature film made from one of the most beloved bedtime stories ever, but that film was clearly not made for children. It was not quite made for adults either, but a story that explored with real intellectual nostalgia what it was like to be a child. In the best sense, it was a kind of “Big Chill” or “The Ice Storm,” but for a much younger, hipper, smarter audience, about a past not so far behind them. And what that film did was move everybody to tears.

This is to say, I think there is room for the kind of inversion and reflection on who and how we are, when it's done with an appreciation of intellect rather than dollars. In a sense, “Manhood for Amateurs” is the same kind of circuit, a selling of smart men back to smart men. And the women who love them.