Land of plenty.

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25)

IT'S Big Map season again.

Art departments in every newspaper and TV station are humming with activity, as designers try to come up with this election's simplistic graphic metaphor. Red states and blue states, I think we'll all agree, have been done to death. The challenge now is to create something new, but equally pointless, in time for Election Night.

Because that night, in front of all of those Big Maps, in new suits and ties and smiling knowingly, will come the Parade of the Pretenders--experts and "strategists" and "consultants"--who will say things like, "Tom, Ohio is a state that's been hit hard by the reverse productivity boom of the past three years," or "Judy, West Virginia is a state in transition with a surprising number of progressive tendencies," or "Peter, Pennsylvania is really three states, each with its own problems adapting to the new global economy." It's all blather, of course. For most of those talking heads, a trip though the McDonald's drive-thru on the way to the summer house is about all the America they can handle. They toss around phrases like "soccer mom" and "new economy," but the patter rings hollow. America, for them, is a place you visit, like Costa Rica or Prague: colorful, complicated, surprisingly religious, interesting food, that sort of thing.

Still, they know that something is happening in America; something big. Population patterns, family structures, neighborhood aspirations--these are all shifting quietly and massively. Things are changing out there, west of Riverside Drive and east of Wilshire Boulevard, but the Big Maps don't show it. They depict--and the network windbags will wheeze about--what Donald Rumsfeld might call Old America.

For a discussion of New America, you've got to turn to David Brooks, whose new book, On Paradise Drive, is a lively, deft, and breezy answer to the question that vexes the Big Map Makers: Who are we? Who are we really?

On Paradise Drive has a lot of different answers to that question.

We're rich, first of all. In the fast-paced opening chapters, Brooks gives us a pretty comprehensive, and occasionally alarming, Big Map to savor. Fifteen percent of us, apparently, earn over $100,000 a year. Over 7 million households have a net worth of over $1 million. We spend a lot of money on shoes and enormous cups of soda.

And we're from somewhere else. "When I opened up the Loudoun County paper one day," Brooks writes in the first chapter, "and came across the National Scholar Award winners, these were some of the names that were listed: Kawai Cheung, Anastasia Cisneros Fraust, Dantam Do, Hugo Dubovy, and Maryanthe Malliaris." This probably isn't news to those of us who live on the East or the West coast, but then it probably isn't news either to readers who live in the South (Biloxi and Atlanta both boast large Vietnamese populations) or the North (think of the enormous Arab-American enclaves in Michigan).

And we're hard workers. We work more hours and take the shortest vacations of any First World country. Eight percent of us have started our own business. We devour self-help books, business biographies, and personal-management guides. Ahuge majority of us like our jobs, and an even bigger slice believe that the future is going to be better, happier, and more prosperous than the past.

And our kids are overscheduled, with 3 million of them playing youth soccer, and the rest--those whom Brooks calls "achievatrons"--doing something equally exhausting. By the time they get to college, they're focused, ambitious, and ... slutty. Sexual experimentation is at an all-time high on college campuses, apparently, and long-term relationships are at an all-time low. This is good news, I guess, for lonely high schoolers who now have something to look forward to, and bad news for social conservatives and everyone too old to re-enroll.

Along the way, Brooks takes some hilarious sideswipes at the clever urban types--you know the ones: hip, smart, reflexively liberal--the very people, presumably, who are tasked with the complicated and doomed Big Map projects in the first place: "Though [they] often can name the foreign minister of France, they tend to live in neighborhoods where everybody has a college degree (only about a quarter of adult Americans do) and they often don't know much about the rest of the country ... they often don't know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal, even though Pentecostalism is the most successful social movement of the 20th century ... They can't name five NASCAR drivers, though stock-car races are the best attended sporting events in the country. They can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at his insignia. They may not know what soy beans look like growing in the field ... and while few people in these neighborhoods have fought in wars, many have endured extensive home renovations."

Ouch. Because that's sort of, basically, when you get right down to it, me.

But a quick zip along a Los Angeles freeway, and I find myself in what Brooks calls an exurb--a spanking-new edge city built beyond the outer fringe of a traditional suburb, with big box retailers, brightly colored shopping plazas, a two-decker Starbucks, and wide, six-lane roads. This, according to Brooks, is the future of America. It's "Mayberry with BlackBerries."

It's here, and in the passages threaded throughout the book in which he talks about the exurb phenomenon, that Brooks loses some of his entertaining glibness and swims out into deeper waters. The exurbs are the great mystery of contemporary American life--beyond the descriptive skills of the Big Map Makers and the network know-it-alls--mostly because the people who live there have deliberately removed themselves from the complicated social pecking order. Drive north of my hip, scruffy, almost entirely left-wing Venice neighborhood, and you enter places like Woodland Hills, Westlake Village, and Fremont: too far from Los Angeles to be bedroom communities, too big to be traditional suburbs, and too expensive to be budget alternatives. The people who live in these places do so because they want to, to the bafflement of upscale urban opinion-makers who appear on television, or write for magazines, or stand in front of silly maps.

One senses in On Paradise Drive, as in his earlier book, Bobos in Paradise, that Brooks is circling around some pretty big stuff, about the kind of people we're becoming, about who we are, really. As entertaining and witty as this book is, it has a certain cotton-candy quality to it: sweet, sticky, fun but not filling. He's right to avoid the ponderous flatulence of the Big Map guys with their out-of-towner insights, but there's a lot going on out there, and some of it isn't too good, and a writer of Brooks's insight, skill, and obvious love of country is just the guy to help us sort it out. My hope is that in On Paradise Drive he's just clearing his throat.