How To Be A Man [Paperback]

Ironic that Beller's exploration of maturity, or lasck of maturity, should be presented in a series of vignettes that are so intricately woven and so insightful. I enjoyed every page but particularly appreciated the deftness and subtlety of his conclusions. We used a piece from this book in a class on memoir writing: students responded to it as they did to no other reading in the course.
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Reading this book of essays was a real joy. The subjects that Beller explores-trying out for a basketball league run by John Starks, visiting a sex addicts recovery camp, the life of a bike messenger in New York- are fascinating in and of themselves, and Beller writes about them with great style. His metaphors and insights on things as varied as the nostalgic attachment to a t-shirt or a doomed road trip with a girlfriend are fantastic, and you find yourself marveling actually at how often he is able to reveal the absurd and the poignant in life, often in the same moment. Some of the writing sounds like great conversations that you could see Woody Allen wanting to steal, or even something that Adam Gopnik might riff on if he were only a little cooler. I highly recommend this book.

Very few reviews on the site for a book written by one of today's top writers. Wonder if something about the strange boy photo on the front made people shirk away as though afraid to be spotted reading it on the subway, in fear of being thought a pedophile or something worse.

Anyhow once I wrapped a brown paper cover over the front image I enjoyed this book ever so much, and going in, when Beller has placed one, two, three, four top pieces right in a row, I had the notion that he'd hit on something henuinely new under the sun, a way to tell one's life story through a jumping scale of all different places, times in one's life, emotional states. In the first story, "Manhattan Ate My Car," Beller takes a simple fact of life, having one's car towed away, and through sheer storytelling magic made it seem like a rite of passage, an episode from a South American "magic realism" novel from the 1970s. In the follow-up, "The Costume Party," we are suddenly with Tom at age 13, all nervous about friends and girls and absolutely riveted by the supermodel who's moved into his building and seems to like him. Next up, Tom goes with his mother to the Oscars where she loses the "best documentary" award to someone *seated at the end row of the aisle,* confirming the mother's worst suspicions about Oscar voting. You get the picture, it is a dazzling run of beautifully told stories, but then somewhere halfway through when he goes to a sex addiction workshop, not because he's a sex addict but because he's on the job, the discouragement begins, the scales drop off, and you realize what you had thought to be a Nabokovian experiment in "Take Three Tenses" is really only a collection of journalism pieces slopped together and tarted up a bit.

A glance back at the "acknowledgements" page confirms this, take a look at the glossy magazines that sent Beller all over for his wizened takes on this, that, whatever they're paying for. It stopped being about him, and began to be an informal survey of, what's hot in magazine coverage nowadays.

However, Beller is so talented a writer he manages to end the book on the same rising note of exhilaration and wonder with which it began, so it definitely finishes strong, with the very best occasional essays in the whole book, leaving this reader with the feeling that Beller has laid his own self out bare, warts and all, as have few American writers since Benjamin Franklin or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And plus, he is so good looking that actually he could just write down every name in the phone book a la Kenneth Goldsmith and I'd be pretty enraptured.

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