Lest some of you expect to see a report on the Neland Women's Book Club meeting tonight, you'll have to wait a few more days for that. I have a little more to read in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer before I write it up. So on to something else.
Just last week I told some friends about my crush on Michael Chabon. I'd read The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and Chabon came to Calvin College two years ago to speak. He was so charming, intelligent and handsome in a tweedy professorial sort of way. The day after my "confession," I started listening to his book Manhood for Amateurs, which is a collection of essays reflecting on, as the cover says, his life as a son, husband and father.
First off, Chabon is a beautiful writer. In his novels, he concocts detailed, imaginative, real-to-the-reader worlds and characters. In these essays, he applies the same talent to describing the worlds of his childhood, teen years, young adulthood and his current role as a husband and father of four children. I found his essay on being the grateful son-in-law of a loving father-in-law, and the sorrow that he caused that father-in-law in the subsequent demise of his first marriage, to be an honest and touching examination of the way brokenness affects us.
But I wouldn't recommend this book to, well, anyone I can think of. I might recommend sections of it. I found myself ping-ponging between disappointment and warm feelings of familiarity and recognition of common experiences.
Disappointment at his contempt for "the God of Abraham" and Christians in general, as well as his honest-to-a-fault descriptions of his long-term use of marijuana and early sexual experience. Close to the beginning, he uses a profane nickname to express his disgust for the God of the Old Testament. While I have thought often that the God of the Old Testament is at times frightening and confusing, this was so disturbing to me that I almost turned it off for good. The fact that I had paid good money for this particular CD is probably the overriding, if not appropriate, reason I continued to listen at all. That and the fact that the story from the Bible he referred to was when Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac, which has always been one of the most difficult stories for me to process. He also refers to the Christmas story, strangely affectionately, as a lie that tells a truth.
And yet, profanity not dismissed but set aside, I also nodded knowingly when he discussed the change in the landscape of childhood, from adventurous wilderness exploration when we were young to the ultrasafe, prescribed bubbles of our own kids' lives. I laughed out loud at his reaction to finding out that the "oldies" station no longer played 50s and 60s music, but was playing Phil Collins and other 70s and 80s music. It gave me food for thought that the Lego sets of our childhoods were collections of uniform, brightly colored blocks that we put into whatever shape we thought up, while the sets that our children play with are designed to be turned into predetermined airships from Star Wars movies or sets from Indiana Jones movies. And Chabon's loving and unvarnished description of his wife, his children and their family life is one of the high points of the book.
In the last week, the only way I could read anything was to listen to it as I drove from place to place. Listening to a book is such a different experience than reading it. The things that offend me most stick in my head in the voice of the author, and the beautiful or humorous things don't. I had the same experience a while back when I listened to the young adult novel Feed by M.T. Anderson. The story had me, but the extreme language was intensified by hearing it spoken. On the other hand, that particular story that revolves around a futuristic world where people have some sort of internet feed in their heads, was quite effective on CD since it felt a bit as though the feed were inside my own head!
To counteract the downsides of Manhood for Amateurs, and to put something on when the kids were in the car and the book wasn't an option, I enjoyed listening to "Welcome to the Welcome Wagon" by the group called, you guessed it, The Welcome Wagon. The Welcome Wagon is headed up by a pastor/husband and wife duo, and their trippy music ranges somewhere between folk music, gospel, Salvation Army Band, and the age of Aquarius. It is often joyful and sometimes beautifully mournful, and it's great for a singalong in the car. A nice break from the musings of a dapper, sort-of-Jewish, liberal agnostic who has little use for me and my beliefs.
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