Home Depot heaven

Ultimately, though, Brooks cherishes these people. They epitomize something precious in and essential to our national character, our "energy and mobility and dreams of ascent." Unlike the residents of Bike-Messenger Land or the Crunchy Suburbs, they don't pretend to reject the American hankering for achievement and wealth while guiltily succumbing to it. They straightforwardly pursue their own dreams of paradise.

Brooks' expertise when it comes to exurbia is itself notably friction-free. Patio Man and Realtor Mom are paper dolls, composites of statistical information, like the digital inhabitants of SimCity. Unable to speak in their own voices (the book features no interviews with exurbanites), they express their inner Middle American virtue via their favorite brands, their aversion to traffic and the neatness of their lawns. It turns out that the source of Brooks' knowledge about them comes mostly from reading magazines like American Demographics and hanging out at big-box malls with a 3-by-5 memo pad. "On Paradise Drive" is crammed higgledy-piggledy with statistics, informing you here that "blacks spend more on poultry and telephones and less on furniture and books," and there that "a quarter of all women have considered breast-augmentation surgery."

Like a lot of demographic information, the data that Brooks uses is generated mostly by market research firms. And this, at heart, is why the cultural portraits in "On Paradise Drive" feel so thin. Market research firms only care about what people buy, or to be more precise, the aspects of people's lives that determine what they buy. By hanging out at Wal-Mart taking notes or by culling trade magazines for tidbits like the three things homebuyers most want (more counter space, basement space and closet space), Brooks endorses these parameters. After all, his own reputation is built on sharp little sketches of various cultural types based almost entirely on the products they consume. As far as Brooks is concerned, you are what you buy.

That characterization probably wouldn't trouble Brooks much, because the thesis behind "On Paradise Drive" is that Americans "are driven to realize grand and utopian ideals through material things." It's not that foreign and homegrown critics are wrong in pegging Americans as venal, it's that they're blind to the ways that we use venal things like whirlpool baths and Jeep Grand Cherokees to express our longing for transcendence. Home Depot and the PowerPoint presentation you put together to succeed at the business you start in order to shop there are both manifestations of "a spiritual impulse that is quite impressive and profound."

Since Brooks has spent the entire book, and much of his career, lampooning all the values we think we manifest through the stuff we own, this is a weirdly sanguine assertion. His point seems to be that the hope with which people chase their dreams of affluence somehow ennobles their goals: "The redeeming fact about American business life is that it is a stimulant. It calls forth boundless energy." Brooks envisions legions of would-be entrepreneurs, filing through what even he describes as the "sheer existential nothingness of an office-park lobby" in search of the one little idea they can promote into a fortune. (His ur-example is Ray Kroc's French fry, on which the empire of McDonald's was founded.) "The quest may be epic, but the goal is trivial," he writes. In other words, the means justifies the end.

And the end is shopping. Brooks assures us that, contrary to the theories of all those old, bearded, spoilsport social thinkers from centuries past, who claimed that people buy expensive stuff to lord it over their neighbors, American love to shop because they're just so imaginative. You see, even when they can't afford a Tiffany bracelet or a Lexus, they linger over the pages of glossy consumer magazines luxuriating in daydreams about the perfect future in which they might have it all. After diverting portraits of three such magazines (Real Simple, Easyriders and Cigar Aficionado), in all their pretension and vulgarity, Brooks suddenly veers into praise for the perpetual cycle of longing they inspire. It is not pathetic and misguided, he insists. It is "a realm of enchantment, anticipation and ecstasy."

Next Page: We WANT to look at magazine ads all the time, Brooks says. Well, yeah. We want candy and cigarettes and cocaine too

• View blog reactions