Real Men Don’t Write Bitty Books

My wife has become almost professional in her ability to celebrate holidays. With the intensity of an NFL team ramping up for the postseason, we go into our own version of training camp for Halloween and Christmas and even, if you can believe it, Valentine’s Day. In our basement we keep at least 10 heavy boxes marked “Xmas Decorations” and another five marked “Halloween.”

I didn’t quite realize how serious we’d become about being in the spirit until she finished doing the house up for Christmas. There, on the living room floor, lay several full boxes crammed with mistletoe, stuffed Santas and blinking reindeer.

“Oh, those are the extra decorations,” she said. The extra decorations? “You can’t put up the same decorations every year. You need to rotate them.”

My publisher calls to discuss the title of my next book. It’s a small book that grew out of a long, sentimental article about my high school baseball coach that was published last spring in the New York Times Magazine. I wouldn’t have thought there were enough words in it to make a book, and neither would the publishing house, but then Anna Quindlen’s publisher went and sold 600,000 or so copies of a graduation speech of hers, dressed up as a book called “A Short Guide to a Happy Life.” At 13 bucks a crack -- there’s a lot of happiness to be had out of that. My own publishers are not, by nature, crass opportunists. They are, by nature, what you might call “classy,” except that they have recently discovered the pleasures of grotesque profit margins and are trying hard, all of a sudden, to be less classy.

So out of their computers it comes, my next book, all 87 pages of it -- and that’s with big print and elaborate illustrations.

When I tell my editor that I was able to read the galleys in 27 minutes -- can anything be described as a “book” if it can be read in 27 minutes? -- he replies, “We see this as being big in the red states. Those people don’t read as fast.”

A fellow father of a 5-year-old daughter has provided me with fresh material. I lie on the floor doing sit-ups; Tallulah hovers, hoping to be entertained.

“Tallulah, I have a question.”

“What, Daddy?”

“What happened to the Indian who drank 40 cups of tea?”

“I don’t know.”

“He drowned in his tea pee.”

She laughs and laughs and then runs around the house looking for someone to tell. I return to my sit-ups. Not 30 seconds later I overhear her discover the baby-sitter -- who, as usual, has positioned herself as far as possible from the children and still remain inside our modest home.

“I have a question,” Tallulah asks.

“What?”

“What happens to the idiot who drank 48 cups of tea?”

“I don’t know. What?”

Long silence.

“Daddy!”

My editor calls to say he and his people have worked hard to find just the right title, the combination of words that will conspire to leap off the shelves of Wal-Mart and into shoppers’ mega-carts. The exercise didn’t come naturally, and so he was more than a little pleased at how well it went. Here, he says, is the title of your next book:

“What It Means to Be a Man.”

It’s horrifying. I can’t quite bring myself to say it, though I do bring myself to say that if they run with that title they are forever forbidden to mention it on the other-books-by-the-same-author page of future books. I don’t want to risk people thinking that anyone named Michael Lewis ever wrote something called “What It Means to Be a Man,” even if he has. One reason for my reticence is that I have no idea what, in fact, it does mean to be a man, other than that, if you happen to be one, you are likely to spend most of December trying to work out why the electric Santa no longer gyrates.

My editor calls again. They’ve changed their minds, thank God. They can’t call my book “What It Means to Be a Man.”

“Someone here pointed out,” he says, “that in our spring catalog we already have a book called ‘What It Means to Be a Man.’ ”