Curtis White sprays bullets at the Middle Mind.

Early in The Middle Mind, Curtis White informs us that this strange, sloppy book "is of uncertain genre and may in fact itself be a novel of some kind." Let’s play along.

The hero of this "novel"—also named Curtis White—is a fiftyish academic stranded in pancake-flat downstate Illinois, the very middle of Middle America. Curt teaches at the local state university, located in a town called Normal. The book is a record of his fulminations against the title syndrome, a miasmic form of mental paralysis that afflicts millions of his compatriots, making them incapable of thinking for themselves and thus easy to manipulate.

The Middle Mind is platitudinous, afraid to make distinctions and poor in imagination. Thus, it is helpless before the corporate entertainment industry, our "techno-rationalized" economy and the sleepwalk-into-disaster of our foreign policy. Curt aims to defeat the Middle Mind and reach what he calls (borrowing from Wallace Stevens) "The Next American Sublime," where the imagination is incorporated into our social life in a productive way.

Curt gets off to a fumbling start. The first chapter is the worst. Our hero, assaulting trivial targets with a rhetorical AK-47, becomes trivial himself. He blasts talk-show hosts for their intellectual shortcomings. That’s like complaining that Olympic weightlifters don’t have the physiques of ballet dancers. In a rather cynical reading of Saving Private Ryan (he considers Steven Spielberg a giant of middle-minded artistry), he tries to squeeze meaning from such ephemera as the DreamWorks logo and the breast sizes of the title character’s granddaughters ("Ooh, they are well-titted, these little American wonders"). It’s a good thing Curt didn’t review the video release—he might have gone wild on that FBI warning.

Things improve from there, but a pattern is set: Startling insights alternate with sloppy misfires. It’s like watching Babe Ruth at bat—he either homers or strikes out. In the chapter on politics (which is mostly concerned with foreign policy), Curt delivers this gem: "We must make war to ensure the continuance of a social and economic system that dehumanizes people by making them dependent upon machines."

But he also gives us statements like this: "The idea that there is any sense in which the American public could be said not to know what we do [in our foreign relations] is finally not credible." Can Curt, stalking the Middle Mind through those Normal streets, really be unaware of the vast American ignorance of the outside world?

Another problem is that Curt, like a lot of academics, is more comfortable dealing with "texts" than with people. Instead of asking his Normal neighbors what they think, he relies on such authorities as "Mr. John Q. Public of Anytown, USA." A lot of space is devoted to speculation and imaginary conversations. There is, for instance, a made-up exchange between a scientist and a "concerned citizen" in which the scientist is made to look like an immoral dunce. (That’s the advantage of fake scientists: Not only can’t they think for themselves, they can’t speak for themselves either.) You’ve got to hand it to Curt: His imagination is pretty rich. But is it helping him or hurting him?

The text-based approach, however, pays off when dealing with art and esthetics. It’s always a pleasure to watch a craftsman do what he’s best at, and Curt cuts, cleans and cooks the platitudes of both the "cultural studies" and "great books" approaches to art like a skilled Japanese chef. His insistence on the transformational power of art is refreshing, even if it’s hard to see what that means in real-world terms. There’s also a healthy appreciation of what it takes to make good art. Curt knows that prescriptions about what artists "should" do are pointless, because real artists ignore such hectoring. Yet even here, clumsy posturing gets in the way. We are informed that art "reminds us that change is real and the possible is possible." Far out, dude!

The discussion of technology is marked by similar virtues and flaws. Curt argues convincingly that we are slaves to technology and that things are likely to get worse; but all he can counterpoise is an "intellectually nomadic North American mind that situates itself between technology and its opposition." Whether this means we ought to live in a cave and grow our own vegetables, he doesn’t say.

And so it goes, as the horrors of modern life give rise to an opposition composed of vague longings. What’s more, in some ways, Curt is behind the curve. He takes pot shots at the stale target of SUVs. He uses words like "authenticity" and "transgressive." Among his culture heroes are such fading pomo icons as Adorno and Derrida, and Curt fails to convince me that the latter is not a charlatan. Can Curt reach the Sublime with such tools? The book’s last chapter, "About the Author," is coy about his fate.

For all its irritations, Curt’s quest is a serious one. Meanwhile, Business Week blames the recent Northeast blackout on a failure of imagination. Evidence, perhaps, that the Middle Mind has the power to keep us in the dark in more ways than one.