from patriarch to patsy

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From Patriarch to Patsy BOOKS MAY 16, 2009

A father of three young children discovers the humiliations of being a modern dad

By TOBY YOUNG

Home Game By Michael Lewis Norton, 190 pages, $23.95

Jerry Seinfeld once joked that if a Martian landed in New York and saw a bunch of humans following behind their dogs, scooping up poop and placing it in little plastic bags, he would conclude that dogs are in charge on this planet. He would think the same if he observed kids and their dads in any city in America. And unlike in the Seinfeld example, the Martian would be right.

In the most affluent parts of the Western world, a historic transference of power has taken place that is greater than anything achieved by the trade-union movement, the women's movement or the civil-rights movement -- and it hasn't even been extended the courtesy of being called a movement. Fathers, who enjoyed absolute authority within the household for several millennia, now find themselves at the beck and call of their wives and children. Indeed, most of my male friends are not fathers in any traditional sense at all; they occupy roughly the same status in their households as the help. They don't guide their children through the moral quandaries of life -- they guide them to their extracurricular activities from behind the wheel of a Dodge minivan.

This is a subject crying out for book-length treatment and, on the face of it, Michael Lewis is just the man to provide it. Not only does he have a gift for nailing contemporary social trends -- "Liar's Poker" anticipated America's love affair with Wall Street that began in the early 1980s -- but he's also capable of writing about familiar material in a way that's fresh and exciting, as he proved in "Moneyball," his book about baseball. Who better to write a field guide to the modern American male and his struggle to cope with the fact that he has lost an empire and has not yet found a role?

"Home Game," Mr. Lewis's account of becoming a father to his three children, begins promisingly. "At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and -- let us be frank -- got fleeced," he writes.

The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks -- tasks that his own father was barely aware of -- and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken. According to Mr. Lewis: "Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight."

We landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport a couple of days before Christmas.

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5/20/2009http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124243950942426191.html

One dog, one infant, nine books on how to get along with the French, and eleven pieces of luggage, three of which had already gone missing.

Read an excerpt from "Home Game"

American men now find themselves in the same position as Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having done the decent thing, and ceded power without bloodshed, they are now looked on with good-humored disdain. (Full disclosure: I am a father of four living in London and can confirm that the situation for British men is no better.)

This is good stuff -- the American male is a pitiful creature -- and it is followed by plenty of examples from Mr. Lewis's own life. No sooner has his first daughter arrived than he is transformed into a surrendered husband, forced to take her to a succession of "Mommy and me" classes. At one point, while living in Paris, he ends up in a swimming pool with "a dozen scantily clad Frenchmen," all accompanied by their newborn babies. It isn't long before he has been thoroughly brainwashed by the politically correct mumbo-jumbo that passes for wisdom in "parenting courses." "I understood that my job was no longer to force the party line upon Quinn," he writes. "My job was to validate her feelings." His wife, who used to look up to him as a glamorous writer, begins to view him as an "unreliable employee."

Mr. Lewis writes beautifully about his fall in status, but what's missing from "Home Game" is the trenchant social and economic analysis that he brings to his other subjects. In the book's introduction, he hints at what this might consist of, comparing the absence of any agreed rules about the rights and responsibilities of modern fathers to a marketplace in which there's no acknowledged fair price for a particular good. "Obviously, we're in the midst of some long unhappy transition between the model of fatherhood as practiced by my father and some ideal model, approved by all, to be practiced with ease by the perfect fathers of the future," he writes.

That sounds like a good starting point for a Grand Theory of Fatherhood, but it never materializes. Instead, "Home Game" consists of an endless series of set pieces -- Mr. Lewis at a Gymboree class, Mr. Lewis in the obstetrical Delivery Suite, Mr. Lewis at a children's party. Funny though these vignettes are, you can't help wondering: Where's the intellectual meat?

It is only when you reach the acknowledgments that all becomes clear. "Much of this book appeared over the last eight years as part of a peripatetic series in Slate," he writes. So that's it: "Home Game" is not really a book at all but a series of regurgitated online columns. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose, but it seems a bit much to ask people to pay $23.95 for material they can read elsewhere for nothing.

"Home Game" ends with Mr. Lewis's description of getting a vasectomy -- at the request of his wife, naturally. Having submitted to metaphorical castration, he decides to go the whole nine yards. It reminded me of the final scene in "The Stepford Wives" in which we see the lobotomized Katharine Ross wandering down a supermarket aisle. Mr. Lewis laughs off the indignities of the surgical procedure, as he does all the other humiliations that his wife and children inflict on him, but beneath all the jokes there's a sense of loss, a nostalgia for the time when fathers weren't objects of ridicule. This is a profound and far-reaching change in American family life, and it deserves more serious consideration from one of America's finest writers.

Mr. Young is the author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People."

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W10

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