BOOK REVIEW / HISTORY : A Perspective You Will Argue With : TERRIBLE HONESTY: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s <i> by Ann Douglas</i> , Farrar Straus & Giroux,$27.50, 606 pages

Ann Douglas, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, worked on this book for 15 years, and notes in the acknowledgments that at one time she abandoned the manuscript entirely. The problems she faced in writing “Terrible Honesty” are readily apparent: It’s an expansive, ambitious, unrestrained, voluminous gumbo in which few ingredients are essential and none can be summarily excluded. “Terrible Honesty” is the sort of book that is never really finished, only published, and whose faults are inextricably intertwined with its strengths.

The United States came of age in the 1920s, having escaped virtually unscathed the Great War that ravaged Europe. That’s uncontradicted history, and the starting point of “Terrible Honesty,” which attempts to account for the creative impulses that flourished in America during the Roaring ‘20s--the Jazz Age--alongside the nation’s economic and political maturation.

The meat of Douglas’ argument is that 1920s Manhattan led a revolt against dull, hypocritical, matriarchal Victorianism. Europe had had its day; the American Century had begun, and the postwar generation in New York City, “the shock troops of modernity,” their art “a dispatch from the front-lines concocted of adrenaline, bravado and cultural ESP,” was going to define the world in its own terms.

Douglas’ thesis, nevertheless, is problematic. She views history primarily through feminist and psychological lenses--”Terrible Honesty,” she says, is a sequel of sorts to her 1977 book “The Feminization of American Culture”--and the effect can be as distorting as it is illuminating. Sure, Americans rebelled against European culture--but why read the revolt as son against mother, rather than child against parent, when Victorian culture wasn’t really a matriarchy and some of the brightest American rebels were women? Yes, Gertrude Stein influenced American culture . . . but don’t her contributions pale dramatically when compared with Freud’s?

“Terrible Honesty,” in short, is a book you constantly want to argue with. But that’s a good thing, ultimately, for although the evidence Douglas marshals often doesn’t further her themes, and sometimes damages them, it provides singular pleasures of its own. Douglas must have read every book relating, however tangentially, to 1920s New York, and the result is that she can give depth and texture to standard historical glosses.

Americans proved better able to write about war than the British, in Douglas’ persuasive analysis, because the latter were boxed in by their extensive literary education; heavyweight Jack Johnson set off on a three-month vaudeville tour, singing and playing bass, immediately after becoming the first black world champion; Irving Berlin initially wrote “You’re a Grand Old Rag,” but changing the last word to “flag” when the reference to black music was deemed commercially risky.

One of my college teachers, while introducing students to “Ulysses,” forewarned us that “big books have big problems.” His counsel suits this volume as well, and underscores the notion that books that take risks are easy targets for brickbats. “Terrible Honesty” deserves a few, but praise as well, for like the unruly artists about which she writes, Douglas knows that accepted ways of seeing must be broken before new ways can take root.