Magazine

Elizabeth Farrelly’s brief but wide-ranging Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness sounds a dire warning for a capitalist culture obsessed with gilding the lily. An eminent architectural critic in Australia, Farrelly indicts the full range of modern horrors that Western society has hidden in plain sight, from McMansions and mega-churches to dietary habits that induce diabetes. It’s not that the West is depraved — Farrelly is no prude — but by placing desire and commerce above all else, she argues, we have become ugly, demented and self-destructive.

American readers have been so inundated with critiques of postmodern dross that Australia as Farrelly describes it will come across as a suburb of Dallas. Because her descriptions are far from novel, Blubberland may prove no more than another ineffectual, snobby complaint. Or it may mark a watershed moment, in which the notion of purposeful restraint has crossed from intellectual zeitgeist to something far greater.