The Official Guide to Official Handbooks

I spent the mid ’90s in a café called Limbo, smoking and trying to write a novel. A friend who worked at Henry Holt gave me a copy of The Field Guide to North American Males by Marjorie Ingall, and I saw that I’d been pegged: I was the “Acerbic Bipolar Novelist” cross-bred with the “Slacker Boy Toy.” Among the things that anger the Novelist are “a huge advance for… a writer he considers marginal” and “a price increase at Kinko’s.” Check and check. The mating call of the Boy Toy is: “Wanna come over and watch The Simpsons?” It was like reading my biography, or at least my FBI file. It was like reading the file of every guy I’d ever met between the ages of nineteen and forty. There’s the “Patriarchal Yet Nurturing College Professor” who “takes you to the one ‘fancy’ Italian restaurant in range of campus.” The “Witty Advertising Exec” can be found “in his ironic yet slavishly decorated apartment.” It’s an ingenious and sweeping exhibition of the female gaze—which turns out to be a lot sharper, wittier, and more considered than the male gaze. In the years since, I’ve given the book away a number of times. Having your quirks and values exposed in a venue like this is both thrilling and embarrassing. It’s comforting to be recognized and nestled into a category—and scary to realize you can be so easily reduced to a comic set of predictable gestures.

We’re all just ourselves. Nobody answers to Yuppie Scum, Jewish American Princess, or Gen-X Slacker when the census taker comes knocking. But it’s fun to put others in their cultural place. If a demographic with some cash gets enough momentum, it will likely get a handbook, one that hews plagiarizingly close to the template set out by 1980’s The Official Preppy Handbook, edited (and partly written) by Lisa Birnbach. The books are a tough sell because of their place in the humor-section ghetto; most of them are bought as gag gifts. While individual contributions to the handbook genre may have short life spans, the legacy is strong. The genre reinforces a way of dealing with class and status that is palatable in America—telling it like it is, but with an elbow in the ribs. And if a handbook really hits its mark, it may even attain the distinction of inspiring a style of consuming.

The J. Crew catalog was born in 1983, three years after the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook. J. Crew is the genderless, ageless retail saint of Prep, the Nantucket genie that emerged when the book’s pages were rubbed. The rules on appearance are...