A L S O +T O D A Y Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting T A B L E+T A L K Do you shop for books online or do you prefer old-fashioned book stores? Shelf and Web browsers discuss their shopping habits in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y I Know This Much Is True By Wally Lamb Fiction (05/26/98) Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing By Ved Mehta Nonfiction (05/22/98) A Monk Swimming By Malachy McCourt Nonfiction (05/21/98) Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea By Gary Kinder Nonfiction (05/20/98) The Unfinished Presidency By Douglas Brinkley Nonfiction (05/19/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Sentimental journey By Vince Passaro Shakespeare of the American West		the overspent american_____________ UPSCALING, DOWNSHIFTING, AND THE NEW CONSUMER BY JULIET B. SCHOR BASIC BOOKS NONFICTION 256 PAGES BY DANTE RAMOS | The next time you're at Copley Place in Boston, the Galleria in Dallas or any other upscale shopping mall, ask yourself who's buying all those $200 ties and $1,000 dresses. If it were just the very rich, plenty of these stores would have gone under a long time ago. But apparently Issey Miyake has a middle-class following, too, and Juliet Schor isn't happy about it. In her intriguing and frustrating new book, the Harvard economist and women's studies lecturer blames technology and advertising for the "new consumerism," a culture in which average Americans compete with much wealthier acquaintances -- or even characters on popular sitcoms -- to buy the hippest, highest-status items. "Gourmet cereal, a luxurious latte, or bathroom fixtures that make a statement, the right statement, are offered to people almost everywhere on the economic spectrum," she writes. "In fact, through the magic of plastic, anyone can buy designer anything, at the trendiest retail shop. Or at outlet prices. That's the new consumerism. And its siren call is hard to resist." She first tries to show how easily Americans, particularly middle- to upper-middle-class Americans, knuckle under to subtle pressures to spend. Peer groups matter: Analyzing a survey she conducted at a large southeastern telecommunications company, Schor determined that employees who hang out with less-well-off people tend to save more. Furthermore, each additional hour of television an employee watches in an average week reduces his or her savings by $208. In a separate study, Schor and a graduate student documented the power status consciousness has over makeup purchases. It turns out that women tend to buy cheap facial cleansers and premium lipstick. That's because facial cleansers stay at home in the bathroom, but lipstick is reapplied -- and its package is openly displayed -- several times a day. Schor's research is thorough and often ingenious, and her understanding of bourgeois tastes is keen. Much of her book is a lucid, entertaining argument against the evils of excessive consumption. But then again, does anybody really favor it? Meanwhile, other important premises go largely unexplored. For instance, Schor never draws meaningful distinctions between the "new" consumerism and the tired old kind. Again and again, she speaks of "keeping up with the Joneses," the classic formulation of 1950s consumerism, as if the metaphor meant competing only with one's geographic neighbors -- and as if workers at that time never thought to covet the expensive cars their better-paid bosses drove. More important, she never defines the point where sensible buying turns into misbegotten excess. Is it wrong to buy an expensive brand name instead of a cheaper product of the same quality? At one point, she confesses her own irrational weakness for Evian, even though she knows that all bottled waters are essentially identical. Elsewhere, she suggests that even high-quality items are suspect. "How do you separate the functional and status components of houses and their furnishings, or restaurant meals, or vacations?" she asks. "It's especially difficult in today's world, where quality has become a status item for upscale consumers." If you stretch the definition far enough, everybody who buys even a cheap, shoddy item without agonizing over it for weeks can be said to have an unhealthy relationship with money. "Consumerism" is as shifting and sprawling and amorphous in "The Overspent American" as "codependency" is in most self-help books. If you think you're afflicted, you probably are. And if you don't think so, you definitely are. Schor takes after the recovery movement in other ways. Just as tales of codependency and denial invariably end in acceptance and redemption, Schor devotes a chunk of "The Overspent American" to "downshifters," people who voluntarily take lower-paying jobs or leave the work force entirely. Downshifting, she writes, "often involves soul-searching and a coming to consciousness about a life that may well have been on automatic pilot." Instead of a 12-step program, Schor offers nine principles "to help individuals, and the nation, get off the consumer escalator." Among them are avoiding shopping malls, viewing commercials with skepticism and "making exclusivity uncool." Has Schor ever heard of grunge? SALON | May 27, 1998 Dante Ramos is an editorial writer for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.