From nappies to Nabokov

Ian Sansom claims to have found, "from 2,000 years of western culture", virtually nothing positive about fathers. Sansom, once a Cambridge academic, now cares for his three children - "full-time", it is emphasised, as a boxer might be described as "heavyweight". On its back cover the book is hailed by alleged feminist Natasha Walter as "a great antidote to recent books that place motherhood way above fatherhood". The suggestion is that it is the fault of these recent books that the poisonous placement has occurred. Sansom, our antidote, reviewed my own recent book about motherhood unfavourably. That I, a middle-class woman who "had everything", should "complain" about having a baby - such self-revelation was, he said, unbearable.

All this would be of little relevance did it not serve to illustrate the extraordinary double standard that bedevils motherhood, and the resolutely bellicose attitudes that penetrate from the furthest fringes of the subject to the core of parenthood as it is lived. As for the lack of positive coverage - from God to Tony Parsons, 2,000 years of western culture have, it seems to me, treated fatherhood with respect; indeed, virtually all the many writers Sansom quotes on the subject of parenthood are men. If there is a problem, then it is the intellectual marginalisation of whoever remains at home, be it man, woman, or nanny.

What Sansom is describing is a common feature of caring for small children - the feeling of being isolated, which, in certain sensibilities, translates as the feeling that nothing has been written that is true to your own experience. In response, he has gone off and written a book himself, a book which, by his own standard, is as privileged and complaining and self-revealing and unbearable as any other.

My point is that you cannot judge a literary work about parenthood by this standard - it will always fail, unless you happened to write it. Sansom's book is also funny and touching and true to the experience not of fatherhood but of childcare: a job which recognises distinctions neither of gender, class nor intelligence; a job men have traditionally chosen not to do, full-time or any time, for all the obvious reasons.

Sansom does not, in fact, make heavy weather of the fact of his sex; but a clear assumption runs through the book, that as an intellectual male in a woman's world he can redeem the cultural sin of small concerns. "What is genius scared of ?" he asks.

"A fall into the feminine, the minor. The domestic." Sansom is a poet as well as a critic: the minor key suits his art. When he talks about changing his son's nappies or going to the chemist to buy SMA Gold, he speaks not as a lost soul but as an architect of culture renovating the bleak tenements of "the domestic".

The book's title may be a pastiche of the childcare manual it isn't, but its organisational overtones accurately reflect its purpose, which is to reattach parenthood piece by piece to "the truth", to transpose it to the masculine, the major. This is tricky work: for each of his own observations Sansom must find three or four capillaries to support it.

Nabokov, Nietzsche, Joyce, Beckett, Orwell, Roland Barthes (the result is almost convincing, until you realise the significance flows one way but not the other). Reflecting on Andres Serrano's use of urine in his artworks, he says: "I wonder about exhibiting your every nappy since birth - nailing each one to a gallery wall, dating them. And you know what? The exhibition would be a sell-out."

In his preface, Sansom talks about the baby book he wanted to read, the baby book he hoped he would write. "What I wanted was some kind of benediction, but I also wanted someone to tell me the truth." That book, he says, does not exist. It's a crazy kind of perfectionism, this desire for the definitive version.

Parenthood has provoked countless people to write the book they wanted to read - it's an expression, perhaps, of our forlorn desire as parents to be cared for ourselves, to be understood, to be treated mercifully, as we try to treat our children. It is sad that this desire for understanding is so often accompanied by ungenerous impulses, by the willed misunderstanding of others. "The domestic" remains our open wound, sore to the touch. There is much beauty and poetry in Sansom's account of it, but as in most of the discourse about parenthood, there is aggression too. Until we address its causes, there can be no benediction.