The Boy Germaine Greer Thames & Hudson, 256pp, £29.95 ISBN 050023809X

Germaine Greer's purpose in producing this sumptuous and appealing coffee-table-only-more-so art history book is to "reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys". There has already been a chorus about the egregiousness of this aim - one side claims that women are already fancying boys all over mainstream culture (well, what's Leonardo DiCaprio? Not a man . . .); the other side (more malicious) felt moved to point out that "While teenage boys may think about sex a great deal, it is not usually sex with women over 50" (that was David Aaron-ovitch - as if you'd need to ask). All of this, rather than undermining Greer, simply proves how right she is - the dirty old woman, though less of a cliche, is far more widely derided than the dirty old man. This is not a writer who deludes herself. In describing cultural and literary traditions of the older woman/younger man love match, she observes: "Such relationships are only possible because the boy's sexual readiness does not rely on the efficacy of the stimulus that he is being offered, but is pre-existing and almost impersonal." In other words, "Oh dry up, you fools! I'm not calling myself a sex bomb!" Her pre-emption of that criticism is telling - she divines a stigma surrounding women appreciating young men, not because she has plucked it out of her polemical hat, but because there is one.

In fact, this book is as much about sexual topoi and ideals as it is about actual sex, and as much about aesthetics as it is about either. Greer is a terribly accomplished individual; I always forget that when I see her on the telly. It shows not so much in the great breadth of her knowledge as in her fearless confidence, as she wades into received academic wisdom and decides that they've got it all wrong. Discus- sing Caravaggio's Love Triumphant, she remarks that it "is seldom seen as anything but visual indulgence of homosexual paedophilia" (the young cupid is looking all coquettish and naked - "his pose has even been interpreted as climbing off his adult lover after anal penetration"). On the contrary, Greer decides that, from the haphazard placing of two instruments, abandoned on the floor, "a couple may have been playing and singing in consort and retired to make love, hence Cupid's victory". Any temptation to dismiss that as a warm, intuitive, unscholarly way to carry on is dispensed with as she cites five previous versions of that very pictorial schema.

This confidence with material fosters a very familiar and fond tone, especially in the captions, of which my favourite (and it had a lot of competition) was: "The maternal posture of Venus, who has taken temporary charge of Cupid's bow, adds to the feeling that somewhere a small god is in trouble." It also leads to some rather swashbuckling imaginative reconstructions: "In the days when adolescent boys were woken at dawn and packed off to labour beside their fathers in the fields or the mines, their mothers would sit by their beds for a few minutes gazing at their childish sleeping faces, savouring their sweetness and agonising over the privation that was making them old before their time . . ." I'm sure Greer is right - I just feel uncomfortable with the impression she gives that she was actually there. She blithely inhabits a good few of these impossible situations - the mind of a 16th-century eunuch; an alternative universe in which Raphael had lived a bit longer. She's a bit like the Holy Spirit, in this respect.

Besides the solid argument and the reclamation of teenage lovelies for ladykind, there is a lighter, more subtle achievement here - the book ranges capriciously between classical narratives, artistic interpretation, gender theory, grand historical assertions, cultural studies, little things the author has noticed and the works. While you could, if you fancied it, disagree with her about every seventh page, you could not resist the unpredictable completeness of each new paragraph. The writing seems simultaneously to flirt with and to subvert the very nature of a coffee-table book - each paragraph, like each image, designed to work as a complete entity, interacting with all the others only by a thread, finally coming together as an argument in the loosest, least didactic of ways.

That sounds a bit woolly, and certainly is not intended to hint at any lack of rigour on the author's part. The work just seems - in structure, not in style - uncharacteristically rangy, skittish, slightly dreamy. It must come from looking at all those boys.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the Guardian

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