Taking a wide-eyed look at junk culture

THE protagonist in Walter Kirn’s savage satire “Mission to America” is that increasingly endangered species, the guileless American optimist. He could have sprung whole from Whitman’s leaves of grass, so wide-eyed and bushy-tailed is he, so full of great expectations for life on this good green Earth.

And why not? Mason Plato LaVerle doesn’t watch television, drive through McDonald’s for a McMuffin fix or check into the Paris Hilton. Mason was born and raised in a remote outpost in Bluff, Mont., among the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles, a separatist sect that’s part Amish, part Christian Science and part loony. Its supplicants adhere to a highly eccentric and disciplined regimen of self-abnegation to achieve maximum self-actualization.

“Death does not end us,” Mason says early on in the novel. “Birth does not begin us, and Life does not corrupt us. We stream on forever through the Etheric Flux, indestructible channels of vitality.”

But lately that vitality has been drained, and so Mason and another Apostle called Elder Stark are sent by the order’s grand pooh-bah, Mother Lucy, who is known as the Seeress, to draft some fresh women to strengthen the hermetic community’s weakened bloodlines.

Out in the great unknown world the Apostles call Terrestria, Mason squints into the fluorescent light of America and is amazed and astonished by all he surveys.

The Apostles have been taught to despise the wretched excesses of the outside world, but Mason and Stark drink it in like two prisoners on furlough. Unlike the dutifully conformist Apostles, the people of Terrestria preen -- their teeth pearly and gleaming, their constitutions hale, their hair immaculate.

After a week of trolling for converts in Wyoming, Mason and Stark begin to succumb to the seductions of consumer culture.

Mason, whose girlfriend Sarah spurned him back home because he couldn’t afford to buy her a Saab, suddenly finds himself in a state of perpetual want.

“Besides a nice smile,” he says, “I wanted some other things. A suntan that didn’t end partway up my arms and at my collar line. Hair that poked up a little, or puffed out, and didn’t just lie sideways and dead flat.”

Mason is pulled from the brink by Lara, a former soap opera star with thoughts of suicide rolling around in her pretty head. Mason baptizes Lara into the Apostle faith after she overdoses on allergy pills and becomes her de facto shepherd.

Stark, on the other hand, gives in to the allure of sticky buns, five-cheese pizzas and Benzedrine; he’s a junk-culture junkie now.

If all of this sounds a little too schematic -- using the unsullied outsider to critique the crudities of American culture -- well, it is. The problem is tone: Kirn can’t seem to decide whether he wants his novel to be a rollicking social satire or a sober polemic, and we are left with tepid observations about “windburned” women bearing water bottles, their calves showing “carpentered edges” as they walk, or teenage girls with “belly-baring T-shirts” eating “fried potato fingers glopped with iridescent-yellow cheese.”

Kirn’s strongest satirical jab comes when Mason and Stark decamp to Snowshoe Springs, an Aspen-like rich man’s rural enclave. The two encounter Errol Effingham, an ailing industrialist with eco-conscious pretensions who tries to shore up the dwindling wolf population by re-introducing a feral pack into the wild even as he shoots bison on his vast compound. Effingham is a stand-in for all those fur-booted folks who pledge allegiance to the environment while plundering it, who confuse “their transient, preening little empire with the mineral essence of the place itself.”

The conceit never quite works. Effingham is a fat fish in a barrel, but Kirn’s aim wavers. Kirn, a Montana resident and contributor to Time and GQ, is a protean writer whose previous novel, “Up in the Air,” skewered corporate America in delightfully scabrous fashion. In “Mission to America,” however, the battle lines are too neatly drawn, the themes glaringly self-evident. This subject might have been better suited as one of Kirn’s magazine essays.

Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution,” to be published in November.