The artist Grayson Perry seems to have become a not-so-implausible spokesman for our era in the UK – via the Turner prize, the Reith lectures, and now three television series. His public persona is a reconciliation of opposites: the ceramicist whose fine pots are scratched with shocking sexual graffiti; the shambling male who also dresses as a pantomime cutie with pink spots of colour in her cheeks; the opinionated art critic opening up to everyone about his teddy bear; the working-class sceptic happily married to a middle-class psychotherapist. He revels in the contradictions, inhabits them outrageously, sparks his wit and his art out of them.

Surely, even 20 years ago in our cultural history, such an artist could only have figured as an outsider, addressing himself to an avant garde; it is unimaginable that he’d have had his own serious show on mainstream TV. It’s encouraging and liberating that all these things which were impossible to imagine yesterday are suddenly easy today. His latest series was on the subject of masculinity, and now Perry has written a book on that topic, which makes some references to the TV programmes but is properly independent of them. It has funny illustrations too (a diagram of a floor mop, for instance, designed to appeal to men: a “Turbo 3000 high-performance horizontal surface hygiene system”).

I can’t make up my mind quite what I think about this book. Masculinity, that interesting subject, the bull elephant in the room! It’s about time we were all talking about it, not just inside university departments of gender studies. And Perry ought to be the man to take it on, just because he acts out so much contemporary masculine angst in his own performance of himself – and embodies the possibility of radical cultural change. His approach in his writing is Socratic, as it was when he talked in his Reith lectures about the contemporary art scene: using plain, almost blokey, language he plays naive, begins at the beginning, and asks the fundamental questions which are so obvious that we’ve forgotten they could be asked.

If we ask the right questions and answer them honestly, won’t the whole edifice of patriarchy come tumbling down? “Gender inequality is a huge issue for all of us and … the world would be a better place without it.” “I often look at men and think that they seem to be victims of this drive to perform their gender. What are they afraid of? Why do they play the man so extremely, whether with muscles or knowledge or wit?” “Boys are taught to be brave but in quite a specific way, mainly when facing physical danger on the sports field or in the playground. But what about emotional danger?” His interrogations are blunt, broad, even foolish – just as his alter ego Claire is a broad, foolish travesty of a girl. Bypassing sophistical subtlety, he may uncover some new truths.

Action Man toy figure: ‘Boys are taught to be brave but in quite a specific way’. Photograph: Alamy

Or may not. Half the time, as I read this book, I was thinking that it’s just too simplifying, or too generalising, or too obvious, to get us anywhere. For departments of gender studies and for feminists and probably for your average filmgoer or novel reader or citizen on the Clapham omnibus, much of this must just seem eye-wateringly familiar. So all too often men tend to need to “play out some kind of dominance”, they have a “complex love/fear relationship to the feminine”, and talk about football as a displacement activity instead of talking about their feelings. Well, who knew? And his subject slides away underneath him, becomes other things: in a chapter on power he seems to make his greedy, adrenaline-fuelled, besuited, crooked Default Man stand in for all men, which isn’t fair. The diligent taxman coming after the tax avoider is just as much of a male cliché, isn’t he? Or the dogged detective in pursuit of a sex killer, or the theorist framing blueprints for a better democracy, or the neurosurgeon perfecting an operation. You don’t have to be revving up your ill-gotten Porsche to be emotionally awkward at home and slow to help with the washing up.

Perry is coy on the subject of problems with masculinity in different cultures, and sometimes lumps “minorities” in together with women as the admirable Other: “sections of society that have developed good emotional intelligence and take their own and other people’s feelings seriously”. He believes that “a 50% female parliament would usher in a whole new culture of leadership, one not centred around noisy, bear-pit politics, but one of consensus, steady debate and empathy”; I don’t think he ought to pin his hopes on it. The grounds for wanting gender equality aren’t, actually, because women are better than men. And have men really universally practised the “stiff upper lip”, or worn grey suits, or not known how to cry? How about men in India, or Italy, or the Philippines; or Rastafarians? No doubt there are some significant near-universals, as well as significant variations, in cultural constructions of masculinity around the world, and a careful anthropological overview could elicit them: but this is not that overview. This is a book steeped in the specifics of the contemporary British male, though Perry doesn’t quite say so, and it’s on those specifics that he’s most illuminating.

His gift is for describing things, in all their rich contradictory detail. He’s an artist, not a theorist

He’s on his home terrain when he’s anatomising the intersections of class and gender in his own experience. His gift isn’t really for argument, or synthesis; his subject swamps him. It’s too all-encompassing, too multifarious, and takes him off in too many different directions, too casually – anthropology, prehistory, the industrial revolution. His gift is rather for describing things, in all their rich contradictory detail. He’s an artist, not a theorist. So his accounts of his own childhood and boyhood and his relationships with his mother and stepfather bristle with the particularities which make us feel his story of masculinity from the inside.

“I grew up with a violent man. My stepfather moved in when I was about five years old. He lashed out in temper … He threw furniture, and slammed doors so hard he bent the door handle. He picked us up and threw us … I held that experience of violence in my body for decades. If I found myself walking the streets alone at night, I would find myself weighing up my chances in a fight if attacked, visualising the moves. I could not countenance losing.” Perry almost went into the army, then first took up skateboarding and afterwards mountain biking, to give physical expression to his violent recoil from violence. He was prone to road rage, and once smashed a hole in a fibreglass bath because the shower was too hot. Stubbornly he wouldn’t compete in athletics, just because his stepfather had once encouraged him to do it.

As a teenager he obsessed about how to dress as a woman (“to put on a dress was to don a suit of lights,” he marvellously writes, “the forbidden other shocking my skin at every contact point”), but he “paid scant attention to the aesthetics of his male body”. Boys love the certainties of numbers, he says, so much easier than “messy creative judgment”: what mattered was how many lace holes your Dr Martens had, or what number your skinhead haircut was. If “you had the right number, even if it did not suit you, it was good”. His mother gave him her old sheepskin jacket to wear on his motorbike and he ruined it trying to swap the buttonholes over, because he couldn’t bear anyone to know he was wearing a woman’s jacket.

What mattered was how many holes your Dr Martens had... Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Art saved Perry from the “trunkful of angry masculinity” he lugged around with him – art school, that “home for alienated souls”, and other people’s art, and his own strange work which at first sight looks so diagrammatically simple, cartoon-like, as if its meaning is all out on the surface, underlined by scrolls of explanatory text. It’s only when you look closer that you see the texts in his tapestries or on his pots don’t explain anything. They’re just one part of the whole sensually luxuriant mix of signs and textures which overflows any reductive single interpretation. Perhaps, in the same way, this book isn’t really an analysis of its subject, or even a proposal for specific changes. It’s a meandering and freewheeling rumination, most satisfying wherever Perry digs deepest into the bemusing convoluted twists and folds of the culture he knows best.

And then again … Half the time while I was reading it I was thinking: some things are that simple. In the UK men commit 90% of violent crime, make up 77% of government and 92% of FTSE 100 executive directors. Only 7% of the top 150 Hollywood movies in 2015 were directed by women. Also, Donald Trump just got voted president. If to some people the news in this book comes as a surprise, then this book ought to fall into their hands, and perhaps it will. Sometimes if you ask the big obvious questions you can uncover truths waiting there in plain sight, for telling in ordinary language.

• The Past by Tessa Hadley is published by Vintage. The Descent of Man is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £13.04 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.