“Manhood In America: A Cultural History” By Michael Kimmel (Free Press, $30, 544 pp.)

Michael Kimmel opens his fifth book about men, “Manhood in America: A Cultural History,” with the words “American men have no history.” A nice, tight declarative sentence. Ernest Hemingway would have approved of the syntax, though maybe not the content, because manly old Ernest thought that nice, tight, declarative sentences should also be true. Of course American men have history; in fact, American men (especially if they are of European descent) own American history pretty completely. Kimmel trips around for several pages expressing these very doubts before explaining what he really means: “American men have no history of themselves as men.” Say what? Unfortunately, that’s about as clear as this book gets.

To set out to write the history of a hopelessly vague abstraction like manhood is to invite failure. The problem, of course, is that the definition of manhood lives in every man and is always in flux and will never and can never really mean much of anything useful. Images of manhood are always stereotypes and have always been, but that’s hardly enough of a thesis to hang a book on. That certain feminists are right to point out the dangers of American images of manliness is true, true, true, but after you’ve repeated that three times, where is your book to go?

Kimmel gets out his index cards and writes down every instance of the word “manhood” he comes across in a random and arbitrary survey of American history, literature, popular culture and unpopular culture. He then types up the references verbatim from the index cards (so it seems), and that’s pretty much the book: a list of examples of the stereotypes that American men suffer beneath, a list without much analysis, a list that groans with repetition and broken chronology, a list held together by the vaguest thesis, which goes something like this: American men have a need to be manly, unless they don’t have a need to be manly, and histories and movies and books and many studies show this, unless they don’t show this, in which case they might show something else, and some of this might apply to people of color or may not, and most feminists agree, unless they don’t.

But within Kimmel’s list are some marvelous tidbits, and you look for them like corn flakes in the sand (that is, without much enthusiasm); for example: J.H. Kellogg, the founder of the cereal company, was an anti-masturbation crusader and general crackpot. His methods to prevent the sin of Onan are appalling, sadistic, fascinating. But what beyond the fascination is the point of bringing a madman like Kellogg into the discussion? And what’s the point of bringing in the bizarre male-female test that was routinely administered in schools to root out sissydom back in the ‘30s and ‘40s? A sample M-F test (of many pages) is included in an appendix - and as a document is interesting - but what are we to make of it? Is there anyone driving this bus?

Let’s go to the text. Opening at random, we find ourselves in the notes. The truth is, a third of the bulk of this fat book is notes. Thank goodness: Notes you can skim. And don’t notes taken to this length make you wonder about the academic security of their noter?

Open at random again. Page 257. The end of a chapter called “Temporary About Myself”: “As the 1950s drew to a close, American men still felt temporary about themselves, even more restless in the midst of even greater abundance than Tocqueville ever imagined.” This absurd generalizing is the soul of the analysis in “Manhood in America.” What American men? And what on earth does it mean to feel temporary about yourself? Oh, and Tocqueville. Kimmel manages to drop that name 11 times in the course of the book, but even old Alexis de can’t save the sentence above or the chapter named therein from meaninglessness.

Flipping back in the chapter to see if we can get an explanation of some kind, we find none, but we do find talk about some of the randomly picked dozens of films encapsulated in the book: “Many films had muted both racial and ethnic tension and soldiers’ longing for home and family by reconstituting the infantry squad as a kind of surrogate multicultural family, as men named Goldstein, O’Reilly, Vanelli and Kowalski shared the same foxhole. But when men returned to their real families, life was not so simple.” These sentences point to the logical and rhetorical problems filling this tome: Racial tension? Is that what we’re talking about? Was there really a movie with those four Euro-cultural guys in a foxhole? Note the shift from the filmic to real (but generic) life. And what does “surrogate multicultural family” mean? Was life in a foxhole ever simple? What has this to do with manhood?

Let’s try a chapter called “Wimps, Whiners and Weekend Warriors.” It purports to be about the current scene as illuminated by Kimmel’s great flood of index cards from history, but it is about no current scene I’ve seen. The men I know are as various as snowflakes and as easy to melt. The stoic, rough-and-tumble, no-fear characters are few and very far between; they are exceptions or they are 18 years old or they are deluded like Rush Limbaugh. Kimmel is engaged in no greater exercise than illustrating conventional wisdom with examples of popular stereotypes.

In the end, “Manhood in America” is a list, a well-meaning but confusing catalog - deeply boring, stultifyingly unconnected - offered with only the smallest amount of analysis, all of it abstract and general in the extreme. It is jargon mixed with observation to create nonsense - all offered in a failed attempt to make meaning out of the preposterous juxtapositions a heap of index cards creates.