BOOK REVIEW : The Lowdown on Lotus Eaters : WHITEOUT Lost in Aspen<i> by Ted Conover</i> Random House $20; 269 pages

Brought up middle class in Denver, and with a chip on his shoulder about the megabucks that turned a perfectly splendid Rocky Mountain into the sociological equivalent of a mountain of foie gras, Ted Conover got himself a job as an Aspen taxi driver.

Surely, that was the way to see what was really going on, to get the lowdown on the lotus eaters.

Aspen had swollen up beyond that. Even its lowdown was far higher than the purview of a taxi driver, who found himself mainly shuttling around the drunken tourists and the town’s hired help.

Even when there was a stranded celebrity--he picked up part of Fleetwood Mac from a bar at 3 a.m.--it amounted to a few exhausted and out-of-condition bodies waiting while he tried to get his cab to start. Not much insight there; one cold, tired body is like another.

So Conover, a writer by trade and talent, gave up the prole pose and took a job on the Aspen Times. For the celebrity world in holiday mode, a local journalist is as much a part of the scheme of things as the caterer and has equivalent entree.

Conover found himself at the right bars and hangouts. He covered the Planning Board meetings, where people fell all over themselves to approve Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar’s scheme for a 26-bathroom rustic cottage and all but assaulted an opponent who sang a funny song about it.

He found himself interviewing a pudding-like John Denver, attending an announced UFO landing and talking to a recalcitrant silver miner who had staked a claim in the middle of a ski run.

He house-sat mansions--there were servants, but the owners must have worried that they would get rusty. He attended New Age meetings, tried to talk to Hunter Thompson, who mumbled and whose runny nose had to be regularly wiped by a companion. He went to parties, parties and parties.

The most rewarding, for the reader, is an early one, given by Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith at a local hotel. Conover was still taxi driving and he had to sneak in. He did it by claiming to be a local celebrity.

The security guard looked at the list and told him he was already inside. So he approached a different guard, claimed to be Tom Cleaver and was waved in. Goldie Hawn said hello, and after a while, Tom Cleaver came over and also said hello.

It didn’t matter, he realized. They were all acting their roles, just as he was. The furniture had been trucked in from a film studio in Hollywood. Even the furniture was acting.

Originally a silver-boom town, then deserted, Aspen was developed after World War II by Walter Paepcke, a cultivated businessman, as a place that stressed high culture along with a modest if well-heeled style of life in a splendid natural setting.

Skiers and hippies came in the ‘60s, and so did the celebrities and the more recently rich.

There was a balance, though, Conover tells us, among wealth, fame and a real human diversity. Now, one old-timer remarks, “Money has come out of the closet” and the balance is gone. The ski-bums have been replaced by full-time immigrant servants.

There are any number of revealing looks at Aspen’s sumptuary hypertrophy.

Conover writes of multimillion-dollar “log cabins on steroids,” of a giant plastic trout trucked in to ornament a millionaire’s trout pond.

He writes of the paradoxical ghost-town effect caused by all the conspicuous wealth. The mansions that displaced smaller year-round houses mostly stand empty. There are closets full of designer casual clothes, unused and in their original wrappings, waiting for their owners to drop in.

There is Joanna, wife of a real estate developer, who mostly occupies her lavish house by herself. She feels guilty, sometimes, at having so much.

“But I think when the big judge up there looks at me, he’ll be asking ‘Did she make good use of it?’ ” she tells Conover.

“The crime, in her eyes, would be having all of this and not enjoying it; she believed that was her role, even her responsibility,” he comments.

Major spending is not simply a patriotic duty, as President Bush has been telling us, but a religious one as well.

Conover is a talented writer, but his talent overmatches his subject.

When he tells of the real mountain under the phoniness, of its beauty, exhilaration and dangers, his book can be stunning. After a team has dug up the frozen body of a young woman killed in an avalanche, one of its young members tells him: “People forget about the roughness of the world.”

“Whiteout” genuinely attempts to find a balance among the roughness, the beauty and the glitz. But the glitz overbalances it; it intrigues for a while, and then it cloys.

Conover falls into the “Vanity Fair” trap: He propagates celebrity and fatty consumption by coating it with the thinnest film of satire; making the sugar pill go down by serving it with a teaspoon of bitterness.

Ultimately, he cannot decide whether he is muckraking Aspen’s high-moneyed seductiveness or retailing it. He confesses the ambiguity, but it remains. The muckrake turns into a back-scratcher.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Hug Dancing” by Shelby Hearon (Alfred A. Knopf).