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Chabon presents himself as a lovable loser, a guy I can really relate to. I read this on another reader's recommendation shortly after I became a first-time father. I think the concept of masculinity as a whole is very confusing in our modern times, as we both aspire to and reject the traditional machismo of Hemingway and both embrace and feel uncomfortable towards the sensitive new age male of the early 90s. Things haven't gelled very satisfactorily for American male identity, but we men are still breeding and raising our little progeny with the hope that they'll do better than ourselves.
While Chabon writes admirably well, he doesn't have a lot of keen insights. "Legos were better in my day, when we didn't get instructions and had to use our imaginations, dagnabit." "Kids used to go exploring wtihout adult supervision and we turned out just fine, dagnabit." It is in the generic nostalgia pieces, as a parent pining for a childhood experience now either lost or co-opted by commercialization, that he is at his worst, his most predictable, and his preachiest. But he redeems himself in his explorations of the father/son dynamic, the intimate and the one-on-one, that he presents with a genuine and heartfelt sentimentality.
3 stars out of 5.
While Chabon writes admirably well, he doesn't have a lot of keen insights. "Legos were better in my day, when we didn't get instructions and had to use our imaginations, dagnabit." "Kids used to go exploring wtihout adult supervision and we turned out just fine, dagnabit." It is in the generic nostalgia pieces, as a parent pining for a childhood experience now either lost or co-opted by commercialization, that he is at his worst, his most predictable, and his preachiest. But he redeems himself in his explorations of the father/son dynamic, the intimate and the one-on-one, that he presents with a genuine and heartfelt sentimentality.
3 stars out of 5.