Out on a limb

Naomi WOLF has made a career from vituperation. She has labored to reveal and to condemn the sordid truths lurking within -- and sometimes supporting -- contemporary culture and its institutions.

In her previous books, she has revealed “The Beauty Myth” (subtitled “How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women”), “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood” (on how the West fears female sexuality) and “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood” (on the awfulness of childbirth). Last year, she published her most controversial writing to date, a New York magazine article alleging that she had been sexually harassed 20 years earlier by her former Yale professor, literary critic Harold Bloom. But in her new book, she promises a very different revelation: She claims to have discovered the keys to human happiness.

Each of the 12 chapters of “The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom From My Father on How to Live, Love, and See” takes as its subject a lesson Wolf learned from her father, Leonard Wolf, a retired literature professor and poet: “the happiest man I have ever known.” In her book’s introduction, Wolf claims that her father’s “faith in ordinary people’s innate artistry gives him a kind of magic touch,” that he “changes people’s lives because he believes that everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave behind a unique creative signature.” His presence overpowers the soberness of reason: “When people spend time around my dad, they are always quitting their sensible jobs with good benefits to become schoolteachers, or agitators, or lutenists.”

Fortunately for those loath to relinquish their pensions, the lessons that make up the heart of this book are hardly revolutionary. Indeed, they are almost stunningly uncontroversial: “Be Still and Listen” is the lesson of the first chapter. “Use Your Imagination,” “Pay Attention to the Details,” “Mistakes Are Part of the Draft” are others.

Naomi Wolf’s ingenuousness -- she presents one self-help cliche after another as though they were original insights -- might be charming if it weren’t so bizarre. “You should treat every loved one every day as if he or she will die the following day,” she intones, with the amazement of a child coming across such a bromide for the first time.

Wolf offers her father’s lessons in life fulfillment alongside descriptions of a summer she spent with him building a treehouse for her daughter, when his love of nature and his creativity infused her with admiration. Great writing, it has been said, has the capacity to make any topic seem interesting, but treehouse construction would be an unlikely subject for all but the most gifted stylists. This book’s descriptions of it reads little better than an IKEA instruction manual.

More promising is Leonard Wolf’s life story, snippets of which are offered throughout. One slowly gathers that he is a more complicated man than the persona his daughter creates for him. Unnerved by his military training during World War II, he was hospitalized for severe depression. A “brief tryst” led to a secret son, whom he would acknowledge only half a century later. The poet knew Allen Ginsberg and Delmore Schwartz, and he shared in their personal and literary struggles.

But Naomi Wolf has little interest in describing her father’s intellectual journey. One of the book’s chapters is titled “Speak in Your Own Voice,” but she uses only a platitude to describe her father’s artistry: “the words were pouring out of him.” She writes of her father’s belief that literature “is endlessly shredding our prejudices; revealing the expressions of one’s humanity,” but she does not show us how.

If people do indeed change their lives when they meet Leonard Wolf, from his daughter’s book it is difficult to know why. *