Because publishers are idiots, the wall of women’s studies books at
Elliott Bay Book Company is a shockingly bright shade of pink.
“Because,” you can imagine the marketing departments reasoning, “girls
won’t know if a book is about girly stuff unless it’s pink.” If
you spend any amount of time dipping into the enormous and somewhat
insulting pinkness, you’ll find serious books about the deplorable
state of women’s rights in various countries around the world, and
humorous books about body image, and just about any female-centric
topic you can imagine. But lurking over in the corner of the women’s
studies section, cancerlike, are a couple of shelves of old, floppy,
forgotten books. Most of them are brown and are either by Robert Bly or
about shaving.
This is the men’s studies section.
It’s not surprising that there are so few books about manhood and
manliness, or that so few people are reading them. For one thing:
Maleness has been the default category in American culture forever. For
another thing: Reading about a privileged group isn’t very interesting.
And in general, reading is not considered to be an especially masculine
trait. Very few writers can write about manhood without sounding like
a Tucker Max–style douche. Which is why it would be a
misstep for just about any writer except Michael Chabon to write a
men’s studies book called Manhood for Amateurs. It’s hard to
imagine anyone but the universally adored, tremendously popular author
of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The
Yiddish Policemen’s Union approaching a book about manhood without
becoming some kind of hairy-man laughingstock.
Chabon’s prose is as ornate as ever:
The baby popped off the breast, and sighed, and considered one of the
anemone wisps of drifting smoke, like the aftermath of a bursting
skyrocket, that I imagined his thoughts to resemble. At seven days he
gave evidence of a melancholy or even mournful nature. He sighed
again, and so I sighed, thinking that we were about to confirm, in
the worst possible way, all the lugubrious ideas about the world that
he already seemed to have formed.
His thoughtfulness makes Manhood stand out from the men’s
studies crowd. Chabon doesn’t traffic in clichés about men and
women being from different planets and men needing a poker night in
their man caves to talk about football and bond. Instead, he
unveils a series of meditations about what it means to be a father and
a son and a brother and a reader of comic books and a half-hearted
collector of baseball cards. It’s a shame to think of this book
moldering away in the corner, surrounded by mediocre texts. But that
won’t happen; Chabon has the power to elevate an entire genre just by
contributing a single book. 
Pink women’s studies covers. Guns on mystery novels that don’t feature shootings. Changing the first four titles of the Temeraire books to names largely resembling hybrid bodice-ripper/historical-thrillers.
Argh.
Wonderful critique of publisher’s marketing depts (seriously guys, you had to change the Harry Potter title in America because we couldn’t handle ‘Philosopher‘s Stone’?).
Not so great reasoning why I should check out the Chabon penis book, unless I’m a rabid Chabon fan already.
Luckily for Mr. Chabon, I may be.
I keep reading his books because I can’t deny the quality of the prose, but I hate his characterizations and the fact that he wouldn’t know how to write a strong female if Kate Chopin rose from the grave and wrote the story for him.
@j.lee: I’ve only read 2 of his books, but my impression is that he doesn’t write “strong” characters very much at all – at least not main characters. I don’t know if Bina from the “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” was a strong female, but she was certainly stronger than the male protagonist…
Did you see Chabon interviewed on the News Hour? Two observations. He should stop talking with his hands, especially since what both his mouth and his hands say is invariably, narcissistically, all about “me.”