The taxi-fare hike was eight years in the making, but it arrived exactly as the dam was breaking-the one that, for a couple of years there, held prices in the city fairly steady. The result has been a new flood of price hikes in everything from a bagel and cream cheese at Murray's on Sixth Avenue (now $1.75, up 35 cents from a year ago), to a martini at Whiskey Park ($12, up from $10), to a pedicure at Avon Salon & Spa ($58 for the basic; last year it was $56).

As a city, New York is no longer upper-middle-class-it's übermiddleclass , and the shifting of the ground under our feet is just beginning to register.

"I noticed somebody in New York magazine, an organizer who was charging $450 an hour to organize your closet," said Tim Geary, a novelist who lives in the East Village. "That's when it hit me."

It was the new $10.25 movie ticket that jolted theatrical publicist Richard Kornberg. "It's that extra fucking quarter for a movie that just kills you. If $10 was bad enough, then they tack on another quarter ? Come on. You don't mind paying for tickets; it's that extra little thing that puts a capper on it."

"Everybody's talking about gas," chimed in Jeffrey Sachs, president of Sachs Consulting. "I filled up my car, and it was almost $50! That was pretty shocking."

Remember when it used to be annoying to get $50 bills from the A.T.M.? The price jump happened so suddenly, so stealthily, that we barely saw it coming. And now, we're just blithely, perhaps numbly, handing over 50's to the guys at the deli, the salon, the bar. Manhattan right now is a vicious fleecing machine, preying on the naïve and the status-minded in our sudden financial semi-recovery (a recovery that might, incidentally, be only a mirage or an echo).

And all those work freebies-the car service, those fashion-shoot clothes, books, drinks-that you count against your outgoing expenses: They don't mean you're living cheap, baby. They're merely a component of your sorry rationalizations as you quickly spend the money elsewhere.

Luxury Obsession Disorder

Of course, in many ways, the recent spate of price hikes couldn't have hit a more willing metropolis. In the übermiddleclass city, "luxury" is an ever-present enticement-a competitive sport, a reward and a salve. Nothing, it seems, is too petty a motivation to throw down that extra 10 bucks. "The Four Seasons, it's $25 for a burger and an appetizer. And then you have to buy the Pellegrino water," said David Duggan, a real-estate attorney with an office on Lexington Avenue, explaining the ever-escalating price of the status lunch. "Because you can't be that one person in the dining room who's drinking tap water."

You can't?

Mr. Duggan's dining partner, Catherine Spencer, a real-estate broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, knows why you can't. "We sat at the bar at the Four Seasons. We each ordered burgers. I had a tuna burger; David had a bison burger. It was the Julian Niccolini signature lunch. And by the time we got the bill, it was $100! I couldn't believe it. For lunch! But then when we walked out, we were standing right behind Edgar Bronfman. We turned to each other and said, 'It's so totally worth it.' When you sit in that perfect space and observe the waterfall of beaded curtains, it's why we live here. It's worth it."

But just like actual junkies, we're not victims-we're unthinking volunteers. The pisser is that once you step up to spending the extra cash New York life is now demanding of you, once you whiff the chum of the alleged high life, you won't stop, because the withdrawal sucks.

As Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, explained, "The psychological impact of losing something is about 2.5 times as great as the psychological impact of gaining the same thing." In other words, there's no turning back once you've signed on to the übermiddleclass economy. "Once you're accustomed to particular patterns of consumption, it's really hard to give them up," Mr. Schwartz continued. "You don't get as much of a kick out of trading up to Starbucks as you will get a kick in the ass for going back to whatever the low-priced alternative is." (At $3.86, a grande latte at a Manhattan Starbucks, by the way, costs 17 percent more than the same exact beverage in Princeton. But drink up!)

You might as well stop getting manicures and move to Dubuque.

Or, Mammon forfend, Dallas: "Average income in Manhattan is the highest in the country at $92,000," said W. Michael Cox, the senior vice president and chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. "A person earning $100,000 in Dallas needs to make $266,000 in New York just to maintain the same lifestyle. In New York, it's not the high cost of living. It's the cost of living high."

Mr. Cox actually seems to think Manhattanites have a sickness. He cites an issue of The American Economic Review of June 1991: "The authors compared consumers in New York and Moscow. In Russia, if you told two people they could both become richer, but one would become wealthier than the other, they would take the proposition, no problem. In New York, people surveyed rejected this scenario. Only in New York would people rather be poorer, if they knew that at the same time, someone else wasn't getting ahead either."

Well, exactly! How are the bankers going to plant their seed in the perfect blond receptacle if another man, who's got more hair and better cufflinks, has just bought a larger apartment?

"If you live in Dubuque, Iowa," said Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse , "you expect prices to be driven to rock bottom. It's the Wal-Mart phenomenon. But in New York, the opposite happens: You expect prices to rise. Now you order a glass of chardonnay and it's $12 and you're fine with that."

What are Manhattanites doing to cope with the rising expenses of the city? "Saving less money," said political consultant Howard Wolfson. Brilliant! Drinks all around.

Couture Jeans and the Million-Dollar Apartment

A few facts: Yes, the average cost of a Manhattan apartment is a million bucks, but the median price in all real-estate transactions in the first quarter of 2004 was only (only!) $625,000, as Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real-estate appraisal firm that, in April, released the first-quarter 2004 Douglas Elliman Manhattan Market Overview , pointed out.

It's the nice, round, misleading number that launched a thousand articles, with publications like Details and New York weighing in to tell you that as outrageous as a million-dollar two-bedroom with no view and two tiny closets sounds, you better buy one now, now, now . A million dollars, as a concept, is jading and terrifying and exhilarating. "There's a lot of activity above a million dollars that's pulling the numbers up," said Mr. Miller. "But people fixate on the one-million-dollar figure. It's about perception.

"The reality is, you have tight inventory, you have a small amount of apartments available, and as prices are rising, people are competing for them." In other words: Everything "normal" people can afford is unworthy crap.

Frantic buying took place all winter, leaving some disgusted.

"I looked at places. I don't want 800 square feet. I think it's an outrage," vented Adam Epstein, a producer of Hairspray . "Let's put it this way: I don't want to pay $1 million for an apartment. What am I getting? The price of everything in the last six months? It's out of control. I'm going to stay where I am. Wait for the air to clear. There's something about it in principle, I don't think it's worth it. I love Manhattan, but it's not worth it to spend that kind of money."

As apartments go, so go the pants, and you would be forgiven for confusing the prices of the jeans with the prices of the apartments.

"The designer jeans-I was shocked," said Kal Ruttenstein, fashion director of Bloomingdale's. "I believe we have 30 women's brands in our Soho store, and 16 for men. I remember when jeans were $78 retail, and that was considered designer jeans. If you go out in the evening, women are in a Chanel jacket, you see jeans and high-heeled shoes on everybody at Spice Market and Schiller's. It's like a uniform. They have to have it, and they're willing to spend for it. We have some at $88, but a lot between $100 and $150, and going up as high as $200. We're selling them especially in Soho, where I thought everybody was young, hip and poor." (Well, one or two out of three, Kal.)

"Our jeans start, I think, at $98," said Jeffrey Kalinsky of the terribly young and hip meatpacking-district store Jeffrey, "and they go up to Y-3 limited-edition jeans that are around $750, approximately."

Christ. "One benefit of creating outrageously high-priced goods is it makes other outrageously high-priced goods not seem so outrageous," Mr. Schwartz pointed out.

There will be few retail sales this year; the stores are moving inventory. "I would say that markdowns are a lot less," said Mr. Ruttenstein.

"I agree that things aren't as likely to go on sale," said The Jeffrey.

And the "bargains" that exist are studies in classic suckerdom. "Take Brooks Brothers," said the obviously-helpless-in-a-store Mr. Duggan. "They run these 'promos,' but you walk in to buy one tie and then you get the second at half-price. There's almost a bait-and-switch: You get caught up in the moment, but at the end of the day, you end up spending more money! The definition of the bargain has changed."

After Sept. 11, 2001, we had crisis sex, screwing as a sign of life and liveliness and fuck-it-all-ness. As the Iraq war-whoops, "engagement"-rolls on, with its related specter of more terrorism in the U.S., we've perfected crisis shopping.

Coupled with Luxury Obsession Disorder, this means that, as far as the retail and luxury industries can tell, the financial pall of 9/11 has finally lifted-at least in the minds of the Manhattan übermiddleclass. "Thank God, business just couldn't be better," said The Jeffrey.

"First of all, at retail, we're all experiencing a great period. Business has been terrific" for Bloomingdale's, said Mr. Ruttenstein.

"Business has been fantastic," said Eli Halliwell, of the high-end salon Bumble and bumble. "We usually raise prices twice a year; this year we did it a second time, because we opened a second salon."

"Our business is 30 percent ahead of last year," said Stefani Greenfield, co-owner of Scoop boutiques. "The only way I've seen it go up in my business is that we take very little cash, people live on credit-for example, when you see someone buying something and putting it on more than one credit card, you know they're a little strapped. When you see fewer people buying with cash, you see that they are willing to live for the moment and deal with it later."

Dealing with it later-because there won't be a later? "As an employer," said Paco Underhill, managing director and founder of Envirosell, a research and consulting firm, "I have had employees come crying in my office who are telling me that they are having trouble paying their bills here, and I was paying them $85,000 a year. I have a hard time not looking at them and going, 'What are you doing with yourself?'"

What they're doing is spending that cash on the staples of the übermiddleclass life: jeans and strappy shoes and cabs and cocktails and croissants. "It's more than they're trying to treat themselves," said Dr. Gail Saltz, an Upper East Side psychoanalyst. "They are looking for an escape from feeling a general sense of malaise and anxiety. I think it's not wanting to think about the future."

"At the end of March," said Stephanie Pesakoff, an agent for commercial illustrators, "I bought four pairs of summer shoes at Jeffrey, ranging from $320 to $500. I bought all four at full price-I'll let you figure out how much it came to. I haven't spent money in that mad way since 2000." ( Business just couldn't be better! )

"If you came into your adulthood in the late 80's here," Mr. Underhill said, "you had a 12- or 13-year run of just fabulous times. We have a whole bunch of people out there who have hit a wall over the past six years, and some of them are asking the question, 'If not now, when? Why postpone joy when there may not be a future?'"

$25 and way, way Over

Twelve years ago, The New York Times launched "$25 and Under," a weekly column cataloging good (or at least decent) restaurants for cheap. A spokesperson for The Times declined to comment on whether the paper would consider changing the column to reflect today's elevated prices.

On April 14, 2004, its writer, Eric Asimov, reviewed the meatpacking district's Barbuto: "Best of all," Mr. Asimov wrote, "the main courses are under $20 and almost all appetizers are under $10, providing a rare opportunity to try a celebrity chef's work without celebrity prices." Err, just what is our definition of "celebrity prices" these days?

Recently, Mr. Asimov hit Shore in Tribeca, which boasts a $29 steak, and La Nacional on 14th Street, with a $15-per-person paella and "tiny lamb chops," also for $15.

Some recalibration would seem to be in order. "It wouldn't be incorrect to say the literal meaning of '$25 and Under' doesn't always apply anymore," Mr. Asimov said. "It just so happens that in Manhattan, the neighborhood restaurant has greatly increased in price. In the 1990's, when the economy was cruising along, all these neighborhood restaurants started serving foie gras."

There are still cheap eats in Manhattan-but thrift isn't going to get you laid, better-regarded or temporarily emotionally content. Masa, the new hotness in the Time Warner Center, could conceivably get you all three, at least for 30 minutes and for only 800 bucks for two, with tip and drinks.

"At Masa restaurant, it's a flat prix-fixe menu at $300 per head," said maître d' Carolyn Wang. "We've been pretty much getting full houses since we opened. I'm sure if we do bump it up to $500, the ingredients will make it well worth it." At $500 a head, no doubt the place will be packed.

Let's not even mention the $1,000 omelet-a heady mix of eggs, lobster and caviar-that debuted this week at Le Parker Meridien.

Forget $25 and under: Once you go Masa, can you ever go back to Monster Sushi? "It's like coming out of a hot, humid New York day into an air-conditioned room, and for the first 10 minutes you just feel spectacular," said Mr. Schwartz. "And then you just feel neutral. You stop getting a kick out of being in air-conditioned comfort. And the same thing happens in general: As you adapt to things that give you pleasure, you need to find other things that give you pleasure. It's sometimes known as the hedonic treadmill-because you never get anywhere. All that happens is you keep spending more and more money to stay in place."

Happy Hour, Every Hour

Early in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , two F.B.I. agents walk into a diner. "Wanna hear about our specials?" asks the menacing waitress. They nod. She replies with scorn: "We don't have any specials!"

Take this piece of dialogue with Z. Smith, the office manager of Bryant Park Grill:

The Observer : Do you have a happy hour?

Z. Smith: Yes.

T.O. : How much are drinks?

Z.S. : Beers are $7-8.

T.O. : How much are drinks normally?

Z.S. Same price, $7-8.

T.O. : Well, how come it's called "happy hour" if it's not a better deal?

Z.S. : It's happy hour every hour here. The bartenders are very happy-hour-inclined, so if you ask the bartender, they'll say it's happy hour every hour. We don't have any special drink discount.

Manhattan, always its own Lynchian underworld, doesn't have any specials any more-so we've all agreed to keep pretending.

It's happy hour every hour here! And after the happy hour of the hedonic treadmill has finally ended here in the übermiddleclass metropolis, after you've grabbed a $15 taxi back up to your $865,000, 900-square-foot apartment, after you've slipped out of your $248 Notify jeans, you'll look around and realize you're not just in debt, you're not just hung over-you're also feeling decidedly … bloated. You recall that you nervously tossed back a full night's worth of forbidden carbs. You'll have to work them off on the actual treadmill: at Equinox, for a $545 "initiation fee," then $143 a month, up from $120 last year.

In the mental iconography of the New York culture junkie, the Netflix queue has joined the line of must-have life accouterments. The kind of person who fixates on arranging just the right titles on his built-in bookcases or artfully stacking back issues of Granta and The New York Review of Books now spends countless hours searching the Netflix Web site. His Netflix neuroses requires him to add to his queue all the high-end movies that he never got around to catching at the theater-if not necessarily to watch them.

The queue itself, according to many Netflix addicts, has its own existential pleasure. Sure, you can only have up to eight Netflix DVD's out at once-but with more than 18,000 movies beckoning you to click your mouse and virtually no limit to the number you can keep in your online queue, it's not hard to see why Netflix has inspired a citywide frenzy of cinematic aspiration. Never mind the mundane reality of actually finding the time to watch them.

"It's just so easy to keep a constant Netflix queue running in your head," said Jodi Kantor, the New York Times Arts and Leisure editor. "All day long at work, I hear about movies I want to see-some of them are new, though some of them are older, and I'm constantly going back to my computer to add yet another title to my Netflix queue."

Netflix also gives its cinephile subscribers the luxury of never setting foot in a Blockbuster again.

"I hector people to use it, kind of embarrassingly," said Robert Levine, a former senior editor at Wired , now a freelance writer. "A friend of mine was complaining she was late in returning a DVD to Blockbuster, and I was like, 'Why would you want someone charging you a late fee?' It's not like the late fees are so financially onerous, but they send you a notice that it's late in the mail. And then you have to go in and pay. If they could just take the fucking late fee from my credit card, it'd be fine. But then you have to go into the store and wait in line again. I mean, it's like getting in trouble with the library. I don't understand why anyone puts up with it."

Indeed, without the tyranny of a Blockbuster late fee, Netflix has two million users fervently clicking away, desperately trying to fill their cinematic void. New York, now practically devoid of art-house movie-theaters, has been fertile territory for the West Coast company: The New York subscriber base is now Netflix's third biggest, behind L.A. and San Francisco.

But is the Netflix obsession just a case of the right technology meeting the right neuroses at just the right, fleeting moment? Is it destined to be a brief affair once digital cable brings video-on-demand into every household?

"The ultimate destination, the end point of the trend, will be all movies available at any time. That's scarier, somehow. Which is where we're heading," said James Gleick, the author of Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything . "The right way to think about Netflix is as a way-station on the road to unlimited access to content. It's not the final solution. There's something inelegant about the idea of putting the movies in envelopes and sending them across the country, and burning jet fuel to deliver bits to you. It's still bits-and bits, in the long run, don't belong in envelopes with stamps on them ."

For their part, Netflix executives acknowledge the next digital age we're about to enter. Next year, they said, they will begin offering movies for download over their Web site.

"DVD's are like the internal-combustion engine-at some point they will be replaced with something new," Reed Hastings, Netflix's co-founder and C.E.O., said. "That's why we named the company Netflix and not DVD's By Mail."

For Elaine Chen, an ad copywriter at Wunderman, though, the problem is more mundane: When a friend at work suggested she add Netflix to her already overloaded entertainment smorgasbord, the thought made her cringe. "We all basically have a bottom-line amount of information we can handle, so I thought, 'I can't be spending any more money on this crap than I already am,'" Ms. Chen said. "If I already have a cable bill, you throw in my Internet and my TiVo, it's $100 a month!' So I'm like, 'If I pay another 20 bucks for Netflix, I'll just feel like I'm an asshole .' It's particularly bad because I really have an extremely frightening home theater system for a single woman. At some point, I really need a reason to leave the house."

"Does Netflix reduce the chaos? The answer is yes, within the domain of renting videos," said Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore College and the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. "But at the meta level, it's adding another means to access something which we already have access to, so that people are faced with a choice they were not faced with before. There's analysis paralysis-that's almost an inevitable consequence."

Some Netflix neurotics are painfully aware of their predicament. "I have Netflix, PlayStation and Nintendo, and Satellite Radio," said Mr. Levine, "so there are a lot of things competing for my time. If you thought stacked-up magazines were bad, now there's stacked-up TV."

"People feel-like with Netflix, for example-'It's one more complication in my life I don't need,'" said Mr. Schwartz. The problem is especially acute with people who feel the need to make the best decision all the time-the people Mr. Schwartz has dubbed "Maximizers." Extreme Maximizers are correlated with clinical depression, according to Mr.Schwartz. "Assume you're the kind of person that needs to get the best," he said. "So what does that mean? It means you have to examine all the possibilities, otherwise how do you know it was the best? The alternative is someone who is satisfied with 'just good enough.' You don't have to examine all the options-you only find the one that meets your standards and then you stop looking. But if you need to have the best, the search has to be exhaustive. But it can't be exhaustive in the world we live in. At some point, you stop and pull the trigger, and there's this doubt in your mind: 'If I'd looked a little longer or looked a little different, I'd have done better .'"

Like every technological trend, the Netflix queue has drawn the eye of Wall Street. Netflix's stock soared 250 percent in the past year and reached a market value of $2 billion as the company sought to snag an ever-growing portion of the $4.3 billion DVD rental market. Its success has spurred both Blockbuster and Wal-Mart to offer competing services.

But last week, faster than you can say "Betamax," the signs began pointing toward a more subdued future. On Thursday, April 15, the company released its first-quarter earnings report for 2004, and the numbers disappointed Wall Street. The stock plummeted 17 percent. That same day, in an e-mail sent en masse to subscribers, Netflix executives announced that starting in June, the company would increase its rates by 10 percent, from $19.95 to $21.99 per month for the basic subscription. Whispers were heard that older subscribers might begin to abandon the service just as new ones get harder and harder to hook.

For now, though, there's a weirdly, mutually profitable match between New Yorkers and their Netflix subscriptions. "The interesting thing about Netflix: It brings to entertainment some of the appeal of getting something accomplished," as Mr. Levine put it. "Like when I'm compelled to watch my Netflixes and mail them back and feel good about that. I shouldn't, though. It's not an achievement. It's a freaking movie."

If only every choice weren't so momentous. The waiter arrives, the menu is presented. The gnocchi will surely be delicious, but the spaghetti al limone suits your mood. And yet you're in Rome, it's winter and spaghetti al limone is really Amalfi's dish, best served in sunshine by the sea. What kind of rube will this fine waiter take you for? Your appetite is gone now, you feel doomed, and your date wishes he weren't stuck with such a loser.

The freedom to choose brings you little freedom. In fact, it fills you with unspeakable anguish. Can you be helped? Psychologist Barry Schwartz would like to think so. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less , Mr. Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore, offers 11 thoughtful steps toward relief from what he believes to be our national misery: too much choice. Want a cell phone? Well, this one is tri-band, this one sends pictures, and this one comes in a pretty box. Or maybe some new shampoo? Fine! Is your hair dry? Thick? Thin? Dull? Would you like it to smell like flowers or fruit? And then there are vital choices-about medical care, education, marriage, career, even faith-which arise nearly every day. If the abundance of options boggles the mind, Mr. Schwartz suggests, think what it's done to the soul.

So Mr. Schwartz sets out to "explore and explain this 'darker side' of freedom": Despite what we may think, "choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize." When the good doctor offers strategies "for fighting back against the tyranny of overwhelming choices," you believe he wants to help. Fortunately, Mr. Schwartz's sincerity is appealing and engaging-because as a writer, he's jargon-happy and mind-numbingly dull.

This is the kind of plodding paragraph you'll meet on nearly every page: "When considering a decision involving complex possibilities, the fact that there is no one option that is best in all respects will induce people to consider the opportunity costs associated with choosing the best option. And the more options there are, the more likely it is that there will be some that are better in some respects than the chosen one. So opportunity costs will mount as the number of options increases, and as opportunity costs mount, so will regret." Occasionally, he livens things up with hypothetical situations that provide exquisitely pure flashbacks to SAT anxiety: "If there are six hundred sick people, saving two hundred (choice A in the first problem) …. " Yikes.

Where do you read a book like this? At your favorite café? (I feel the dread building: cappuccino or a pot of tea?) By the pool? (Should I pack Tracy Chevalier or Barry Schwartz?) But readers of The Paradox of Choice won't choose this book-a profound task in itself, given the choices crowding the shelves in the Psychology section of most bookstores-so as to be entertained. They will, like me, come seeking advice on how to change their behavior.

Think of what you could accomplish, of the places you could visit and the love you could share if your mind were not consumed with the distinction between "aspirin … caplets, capsules, and tablets." Our televisions are equipped with "picture-in-picture" technology, so that we can choose to watch two shows at the same time. E-mail, always accessible, forces people to "face decisions every minute of every day about whether or not to be working." Mr. Schwartz provides detailed and depressing descriptions of the headaches and panic associated with buying a car, investing in the market or researching insurance providers.

And yet, despite the professor's nerdy delivery, The Paradox of Choice is genuine and useful. The book is well-reasoned and solidly researched. Mr. Schwartz considers Adam Smith, Camus and Plato in trying to determine when enough ought to be enough. But he relies most heavily on the Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon, who introduced the concept of "satisficing" in the 1950's. Satisficers, you will learn in this book, are the happier opposites of "maximizers." Huh? Simply put, Hamlet was a maximizer. Maximizers want only the very best option; their standards for what makes something "the very best" vary with public opinion; and they will second-guess their every decision for fear of making the wrong one. On the other side of the equation, there are characters like TV's Olivia Walton, the ur-satisficer: She had only reasonable expectations, understood what would meet her clearly defined high standards while also accepting the realities of her Depression-era world, and was delighted when things worked out better than she had hoped.

By nature, the satisficers have it easy; they welcome limits and rejoice in serendipity. The maximizers have a tougher time; Mr. Schwartz is writing for them. "I believe that learning how to satisfice is an important step not only in coping with a world of choice but in simply enjoying life." The problem, writes Mr. Schwartz, is that "our culture sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident."

Our constant hunger for individuality, Mr. Schwartz believes, has become a vexing social problem-far more distressing than our choice of salad dressings. Excessive individuality-imagine, for instance, a radical feminist Methodist with socialist leanings-distresses the social fabric; a self-defined "me" makes participation in a community of "us" less likely.

Mr. Schwartz demonstrates that we live in a "Can I get my deposit back?" world where few decisions are considered irreversible, where "the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall," and where "'religion consumers shop" in the "market" for a faith offering "just the form of community that gives us what we want out of religion." Even our notion of loyalty has been distorted by the blasé way in which we switch jobs: "individuals who have worked for the same employer for five years are regarded with suspicion." And what of tying the knot? "Whereas delaying marriage … would seem to promote self-discovery, this freedom and self-exploration seems to leave many people feeling more lost than found."

So, fellow Hamlets, to read or not to read? I say skip to the last chapter, in which Mr. Schwartz offers some useful suggestions on how to think about choice. ("Choose when to choose" is my favorite.)

For all his wisdom, Mr. Schwartz can be too simplistic. "If you adopt the rule," he writes, "that you will never cheat on your partner, you will eliminate countless painful and tempting decisions that might confront you later on." Whatever. Despite the occasional lapse into nonsense, there's value here.

I guarantee it: On the very night I finished The Paradox of Choice -feeling like a laboratory rat too long in the maze-something happened which made me realize the value of the book. I met friends for dinner at a trattoria where Ada, the proprietor, chooses what you eat. Out came the white wine (we wanted red) and then the pasta (I'd had pasta for lunch). As my friends began to complain, I gleefully tucked into my penne. The newly born satisficer in me thought, "What the hell? Let her choose! No way will Ada do me wrong."

Josh Patner contributes to Elle and Slate from Rome.

Consider the extraordinary story of Calvin Klein. His father was a grocer; his best friend Barry's father was a grocer. Barry was a good boy, but Calvin had the devil in him. He hung out in the Big City and didn't even show up to get his picture taken for the yearbook. Barry graduated from high school and worked in his father's store. But Calvin had no interest in that schlubby life; Calvin wanted to be a fashion star. So he went to F.I.T., got a chump job in some dress house on Seventh Avenue, and moved his young bride from the bubbeleh Bronx to the more fashionable Forrest Hills. Calvin, who can seduce anyone, convinced his old buddy to give him 10 grand to make a few coats and dresses of his own. Then-here's where it starts to get really good-this in-debt pisher wheeled a rack of clothes up Seventh Avenue one morning and wheeled it back down that same afternoon with a $50,000 order from Bonwit Teller. And that's all before we even get to the sex, the drugs, the underwear, the kidnapping, the bailout, Linda Wachner, Kate Moss, Marky Mark, Carolyn, Kelly, Latrell Sprewell and the greatest fragrance campaign since Catherine Deneuve pushed Chanel No. 5.

If Calvin Klein was mortified by the scandals revealed in Obsession: The Life and Times of Calvin Klein (1994), he'll be bored to death by The House of Klein: Fashion, Controversy, and a Business Obsession . Lisa Marsh, fashion and retail reporter for the New York Post , has an inexplicable zeal for making the monumental life of Calvin Klein a biographical wasteland. Why would any writer take on this project? After all, the juicy bits about Klein's personal life were already well covered in Obsession nearly a decade ago. Perhaps, with the recent purchase of Calvin Klein Inc. by Phillips Van-Heusen for some $430 million, the time seemed right for a summing-up. But ah, the bore of it. House of Klein has all the gravitas and insight of one of those insta-bios that appear on bookstore shelves following the death of a celebrity. "Klein's self-doubt," Ms. Marsh writes in an epilogue, "most likely fuels his desire to drink and indulge in recreational drugs, a habit that has tragically resurfaced in Klein's daily life." Nearly the same empty words could be found in books on Princess Di, Johnny Cash or a zillion other celebrities.

Ms. Marsh warns us early on that she is "writing a business biography"-the italics are hers-as though downplaying personal scandal has an inherent nobility that exempts her from writing anything of interest. And what about writing well? I can't resist sharing a few choice lines: "However, not all was ducky in the Klein household." Or how's this for an image: "Once the fragrances hit the stores, the shit hit the fan." And is this next one even a sentence? "Andrew Rosen fit the stereotypical dilettante." This writer loves a cute phrase. Deals come "fast and furious"; a frustrated mogul has "bigger fish to fry"; consumers learn they don't have to spend "beaucoup bucks" on designer fashions. Perhaps Ms. Marsh's favorite-and most annoying-tic is to refer to Messrs. Klein and Schwartz as some variation of "scrappy men from the Bronx," "the duo from Mosholu Parkway" or "the duo from the Bronx" on nearly every page.

Back to business: Ms. Marsh spells out in straightforward language that anyone can understand the cash-flow problems facing garment-makers, the basics of licensing deals and the tumultuous transition of Klein's business from manufacturer to licenser. But so what? Conveying any true sense of a life-even the life of a business-demands more than summary. When the bumpy story of Calvin Klein's roller-coaster ride of a career cries out for action or drama, Ms. Marsh buckles. We learn, in this book's schoolgirl tone, that with the mega-launch of Obsession, executive Robin Burns "was not fooling around. She hired Ann Gottlieb, a fragrance consultant, sometimes referred to as a 'nose,' and asked fragrance houses for samples." Imagine that. The woman was spending $10 million dollars to launch a perfume and she asked for a few samples. Or how about this: When there was a discrepancy in the acceptable parameters of the term "jeans-related products" in an offer from Fruit-of-the-Loom to buy Mr. Klein's jeans business for $50 million, Ms. Marsh writes with gee-whiz wonder that "Klein and Schwartz, sticklers for details, preferred a narrow interpretation, and this deal also unraveled." One hopes Ms. Marsh had a lawyer look at her book contract.

Remarkable as it may seem, House of Klein is not merely terrible; the book is downright implausible. Are we really expected to believe the stories in here? Former design assistant Jeffrey Banks has a T-shirt made with the young company's soon-to-be-famous logo silk-screened on the sleeve. Barry Schwartz sees the thing and wonders if it's for sale. "No," Mr. Klein is quoted as saying. "Who'd want to wear my name?" Come on! But it gets better. Mr. Banks-perhaps the only Klein "insider" who would agree to talk to Ms. Marsh-goes on to say that designing men's wear was his idea. Ms. Marsh has model Janice Dickinson claiming that she once said to Mr. Klein, "Why don't you do a line of underwear …. Just put your name on it. I bet it'll sell." Why wait for Barry Diller and David Geffen to come running to the rescue when Mr. Banks and Ms. Dickinson could have sorted things out? The absurdities go on and on. Superstar stylist Joe McKenna is mentioned as one of the "hot photographers" Mr. Klein collaborated with; Fran Liebowitz is a "conversationalist"; the Obsession campaign introduces "the idea of ambisexuality"; the designer's notorious advertising is "credited with … showing nudity and pushing sex and its various hetero-homo variations into the mainstream for all to deal with." It's too exhausting to go on.

Ever splashed on some Obsession? Compared your weight to Kate Moss' or your chest to Travis Fimmel's? Are you one of the millions of people who have pulled on a pair of Calvin Klein underwear? Then for God's sake, you already know more about this legendary man than you'll ever learn from reading this book. Sure, you won't know about the takeover attempts and the backroom deals that nearly toppled the house of Klein on numerous occasions. You won't know how a jeans-wear deal is ideally structured, or why the launch of CK One was so radically different from any other fragrance launch. You won't know why Mr. Klein's morning cup of coffee had to be matched to a Pantone chip or about his preference in paper clips. You won't know the story a "former insider" shares about the "loyalty-testing" demands Mr. Klein put on the guy sealing the cement floor of his Madison Avenue store.

Now consider this: In the end, Calvin Klein's clothes are completely irrelevant. This man built a brand-name empire with no significant contribution to the craft of fashion. He had no patience for scissors and pins. Calvin Klein could see only one thing: a future charged with sex. The next time you pull on those basket-enhancing briefs or spritz yourself with an illicitly marketed perfume, you will have become a part of Calvin Klein's obsession. He manipulates us with a hustler's secret: Make people feel desirable, and they will spend. As the elastic band from that underwear slides up your leg or the scent of a good shag fills the air, Calvin Klein will have won you over. Lisa Marsh, business biographer, will have left you cold.

Josh Patner writes about fashion for Slate .