A relentless self-publicist who is very lost

Is Naomi Wolf a relentless self-publicist who has attempted to take advantage of every cultural shift, albeit sometimes a tad late and bit clumsily? Or is she a smart, sincere woman genuinely seeking to discover the best way to live, and what values should guide us?

There is a lot of evidence for the theory that Naomi Wolf is a trend-hopper, as opposed to a trend-setter. Her first book, The Beauty Myth, like most of her later books, drew on her personal history.

She had suffered from anorexia, and given that she became a card-carrying left-wing feminist when a student at Yale and Oxford, it was not surprising that she chose to dissect the patriarchal influences underlying women's obsession with beauty, even to the extent of starving themselves.

Although little in the book is original, it generated a lot of publicity, not least because Wolf is very pretty. The next book, Fire with Fire, looked at women in the workforce. Promiscuities drew heavily on her liberal upbringing in Haight-Ashbury, and suggested that women had been short-changed by the sexual revolution. When she gave birth, she wrote Misconceptions, about the medicalisation of childbirth, and the way in which pregnancy and childbearing have been turned into an illness.

Despite some grumpy critiques, Wolf managed to hang on to her status as a golden girl for a long time. Articulate, attractive, sometimes abrasive, she was a media dream. Then, somehow, it began to go adrift. She wrote about abortion, suggesting that feminism could no longer pretend that a wanted foetus is a delightful, REM-dreaming, sentient, thumb-sucking baby, but an unwanted foetus is "uterine material" with no rights. Her solution to the problem, though, was to say that people could remain pro-choice, but simply frame the decision to abort differently. She suggested that it be seen as something between a woman and her God, and that a woman could usefully use the concept of Tikkun, that is, the Jewish concept of reparation for sin, as a means of coming to terms with the decision to abort. She managed to alienate both pro-life and pro-choice activists.

Pro-lifers hated the fact that she stopped short of the logical conclusions of her argument, that is, that pre-birth human life should have the same human rights as older people. Pro-choice activists hated her insistence on humanity of the foetus and that she seemed to imply that abortion was not so much a choice as a sin.

Then, she was blamed for advising Al Gore to act like an "alpha male" during his campaign for the presidency. (She says her advice was misconstrued.) For someone who once claimed to have invented the internet, one wonders why Al did not realise that a quick search on the words "alpha male" brings up a few scholarly articles about apes, and lots of links to sites suggesting ways to help men to get laid.

When a few years ago, she "came out" with the claim that a famous academic, Harold Bloom, had 20 years earlier placed his hand on her thigh, instead of receiving sympathy, she was accused of undermining the cause of those who had been sexually harassed, by playing the victim.

Now, Naomi Wolf has written another book, The Tree-House, about her father Leonard. She believes her relentless striving for success led her to neglect her heart and soul. She felt shame that she was only good with students who reminded her of herself, and that she reduced the rest to tears by hectoring them. Her Dad, apparently, was good at finding the inner artist in students, at turning their lives around, so they left high-paid jobs and went instead to teach children in the Andes, or left, boring safe relationships in order to find someone with whom they could share lifelong passion.

The book is not all bad. It espouses a kind of humanism that is definitely out of fashion in the academy; that believes, for example, in a canon of literature. She is touchingly fond of her father, and earnest in her desire to learn his lessons. That earnestness, and lack of critical spirit, is actually a key part of her personality. She tends to absorb an entire viewpoint, and only gradually become disillusioned. She might have been wiser to accept what her father has to say about the balance between discipline and creativity in the life of the writer, and leave his ideas on relationships firmly alone. He believes passion should be the touchstone of a relationship. It is an important part, but he takes it to the extent of leaving a relationship if one day you find that the person you once loved is no longer the centre of the universe for you.

Ever the good student, Naomi left her husband, the "excellent father" of her two children, just before doing a publicity tour for the book. She refuses to discuss why the marriage ended, and professes herself thrilled that while she could not give her children an intact family, she can give them the "most loving possible non-intact family", where they are surrounded by a "bubble of love". One wonders what the husband or the children make of this construction of events.

She may be a relentless self-publicist, but I believe that she is very lost. She has tried the intellectual fashions of the late 20th century, like dogmatic left-wing ideology, and feminism, and found they did not fit comfortably with human reality. Very late, when the rest of the world is beginning to dismiss it as thinly disguised narcissism, she has embraced the self-actualisation model of the 1960s, and the idea that the human happiness is best found by pursuing one's own interests, one's own bliss. She might have been better off paying attention to another old patriarch, and what he has to say about passion, rather than to her father.

"Love is not merely a sentiment. Sentiments come and go. A sentiment can be a marvellous first spark, but it is not the fullness of love." But then, it might be a bit much to expect her to listen to Pope Benedict, who, whatever he is, has never been a trend-hopper.