So you think you know about men?

For many years now, the attractive, sympathetic tones of Anthony Clare have offered listeners to Radio 4's In the Psychiatrist's Chair and All In The Mind a cosy mix of edification and whatever is the auditory equivalent of voyeuristic satisfaction. In addition to being a prolific broadcaster, Professor Clare is medical director of St Patrick's Hospital and clinical professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin.

The subject he addresses in his latest radio series and in this book could scarcely be more grave, the apparent disintegration of a clearly defined set of behavioural standards for boys and men in contemporary society, a disintegration witnessed by unknown or absent fathers, unfathered boys, teenage gangs, youth disaffection, male drug- and alcohol-abuse and violence, and an increasing rate of suicide in men.

The questions are hard and pressing, the answers proposed here in the main, alas, fudgy. The book's vulgar title does not serve to do anything but alarm. At any rate, the book is considerably more assimilable than the radio programme, which is a bit of a mess, with professionals airily intervening and sundry "real" individuals (male) all hectically agreeing with one another and talking all at once almost as though they were women, all presided over by a somehow disconcertingly unworried though furrowedvoiced Professor Clare.

It is not easy to write a book of popular psychiatry that is genuinely intelligent and useful. Anthony Storr has done it with repeated insight and panache, and he's made it look a good deal simpler than it is, partly by leaving out material of the sort that bulks large in Masculinity in Crisis while having quite evidently undertaken much research.

Far too much of this book is taken up with statistics and surveys whose illustrative intent seems outweighed by the sensational or even makeweight. We learn of a Dutch survey on loneliness, of conferences attended, of startlingly obvious animadversions by evidently well-regarded professionals about the advisability of the presence of two parents for the nurturing of young males. We learn too some personal details of Professor Clare's own experience of being a man, that he was not allowed by the medical staff to be present at the birth of the first of his seven children, that despite the love and desire he feels for women he simultaneously acknowledges that he, like, as he contends, all men, hates and fears them.

In spite of the fearful statistic he adduces, that one in four British women has reported domestic violence and the countless harrowing reports of violence from man to woman, it seems to me regrettable at least that this well-intentioned and decent interpreter of the human should be so apparently devoid of human imagination as to be able to assert that all men hate women. What do women think? I intuit a further book will come.

Meanwhile, On Men feels idle and commercial. It ducks the crucial issues it sensationalises. It goes no distance towards healing the awful wounds it describes. Those who read it will no doubt be intelligent liberals or aligned agnostics as to the virtues of men. The writing is simultaneously loose and jocular, piteously at variance with the portentous tone and the urgency of the problem, at once so private and so apocalyptically mutual. Once or twice the clouds clear and we glimpse a truth, for example when Clare mentions that what the healthy human of either gender needs is life beyond the self.