Daddy's Little Snow Job

By BETH PINSKER

THE TREEHOUSE
Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See
By Naomi Wolf
288 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.

Having grown up an aspiring writer and budding feminist with an old-school English professor/poet dad, I was looking forward to Naomi Wolf's The Treehouse, about her relationship with Leonard Wolf, her old-school English professor/poet dad. I thought her tagline "Eccentric wisdom from my father on how to live, love, and see" was meant ironically, even with a twinge of derision, and that the book would be a juicy fight between the them over their approaches to life and writing. In other words, I thought it would be cathartic.

But Wolf, who spent her career up to this point writing screeds against male-dominated society, has no deep-seated issues with her father that she cares to share. She has even come to renounce her radicalism of the past, if not most of her feminist belief system, as the folly of youth. She's simply out to celebrate her father, but one clue that she's not quite over her issues with him is that she can't decide on how best to tout all his great features. This book has more hooks than a tackle box.

Her title comes from the premise that she's writing about the summer she and her father and several others spent building a treehouse for her daughter in upstate New York. Along the way, she lays out a biography of Leonard, delving into his Army days and his Bohemian life as a poet in San Francisco. As if that's not enough background, she provides a cursory and completely tangential run-down of other, much more important, intellectuals who figured in Leonard's life, if even for a moment. She also reports on her father as he exists today, including detailed descriptions of his outrageous outfits and his bizarre choices in beverages, all presented as cute, rather than annoyingly eccentric.

At the same time, she writes about herself and her thoughts during this summer, which includes her fears after September 11, her insecurities about parenthood, and her doubts about her teaching and writing.

That Tuesdays with Morrie approach has its benefits, but it works best with a writer who's going to be unrepentantly gushy in the telling of the story and a subject who's essentially huggable. Both Wolfs, however, are intellectually distant and cold. Leonard is an especially hard character to embrace even if his daughter casts his emotional indifference, his selfishness, and even his love affairs—she goes 200 pages before dealing with the half-brother Leonard introduces to them as adults—in a sunny light. "My father comes from the generation of roués, scoundrels, and womanizers. But [his relationship with his wife] is now like a four-decade-long third date: The two are alert to each other; their feelings are fresh," she writes. What kind of third-wave feminism is that?

What I really wanted to know about after reading Leonard's story was Naomi's mother. She hardly figures into the book and is not along for any of these summer jaunts to the country (Naomi's husband is also largely absent, or spared, as the case may be). It could be that Naomi has transferred all of her emotional baggage to her mom, and that the real book to wait for is her expose on the matriarchy.

All of this family stuff is merely pretext, however. Wolf's main purpose is to delineate her father's wisdom. She structures the book according to the 12 lessons that her father uses to teach his students how to write. This is where the portrait of Leonard as a brilliant hero comes across as the most false. What kind of teacher of a creative art sticks to the same 12 simple precepts for a whole career? Especially ones like "Speak in your own voice" and "Pay attention to the details"? It's as though Leonard were teaching poetry for the self-help crowd instead of intense graduate students who aspire to publish their verse in, say, The Paris Review.

My father, who dresses almost exclusively in chinos and blue Oxford shirts and drinks coffee, also passed along bits of wisdom to me when I was younger, and like Naomi Wolf, I mostly resented him for it until I was all grown up and realized how his words shaped me as a professional writer. His offerings were nothing like Leonard's bon mots, and in talking about this book with him, I came to realize that it's impossible to boil down real writing instruction to a few chapter headings like Wolf has done.

The kinds of lessons I picked up from my father over the years—like "if you don't want the truth, don't ask for my opinion" and "don't bother people when they're working"—are best learned the hard way, through life and experience. It takes shedding a few tears at the frustration of getting it wrong and having nowhere to turn but inside yourself to find the answers. After a while, you stop moaning and crying and just get to work. If I had Leonard as a teacher while I was learning to write, I would be a messy bundle of thwarted expectations now, crying at the first cross word about my work. But thanks to my dad, I got over that when I was eight, after the "learn how to use a freakin' comma" lesson. 

Naomi Wolf could have used those kinds of reality checks too, and a variation of the old "write what you know" adage (which Leonard has modified slightly to "Speak in your own voice"). It would go something like this: Don't sugarcoat the truth to make something sound pretty; readers can smell a fake a million miles away.