A mediocre Chuck Klosterman book is a lot like a Woody Allen film from ten years ago: delightful in parts, disappointing as a whole but still sadly superior to the greater dessert tray of cultural offerings.

This is no longer true of Allen, whose occasional mediocrity gets elevated to near genius by an army of nostalgic critics, but it's very much the case with Klosterman's third book, Killing Yourself To Live. Born of an assignment from Spin Magazine, its premise is as gimmicky as any of that organ's "Greatest Albums of All Time (Part VIII)" cover pieces and yet it speaks to the heart of rock folklore.

Here's the gist: Put your star writer behind the wheel of a rental car and dispatch him to the places where American music has died. That is, the way music dies in this country: young and hard. From the Rhode Island nightclub where nearly 100 fans of the band Great White perished in a freak fire to the Macon, Ga., intersection where two Allman brothers died in motorcycle accidents, Klosterman is on hand to, as he puts it, "get his death on."

However, this is no solemn cemetery crawl but an irreverent investigation into why death alters the music canon. For in the vicissitudes of the pop music hierarchy, where 1999's headliner is lucky to be VH1's talking head, what separates the ephemeral from the iconic is often a pulse. As the author notes: "Somewhere, at some point, somehow, someone decided death equals credibility."

So whether it's overdosing on the narcotic of the day or the poor stewardship of planes, automobiles and tour buses, death offers what every artist strives to attain, but can't really appear to be trying for: perpetual authenticity.

Klosterman has a reputation for being less an arbiter of pop culture cool (he's 33, after all) than an advocate for its profundity. He came on the scene in 2001 with a heavy metal memoir, Fargo Rock City, and two years later followed up with Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, an essay collection that argues, among other things, that Pamela Anderson has been crucified for our sins.

It's not so much that he tries to hoist his cultural icons up the flagpole, but that he infuses them with more personal and social significance than you could have imagined. Especially when it comes to, say, Motley Crue. In effect, Klosterman canonizes his record collection.

It's also worth mentioning that the guy is a geek of staggering magnitude. It's to the point where one has to occasionally wonder if it hasn't devolved into shtick. Witness this bit on his music archive: ". . . I bought all 26 Kiss releases on tape, and then I bought them all on disc, and then I bought them all on disc again when they were digitally remastered in 1999, which really just means somebody went back into the studio and made them louder."

So it seems like a feat of puritanical restraint that he contained his road trip CD library to a mere 600.

Wait, there's more in the geek department. At one point he declares he can only understand his relationships with women as they relate to Kiss albums. Even more inanely, this unfortunate passage describes three former girlfriends:

"If Diane is Dolly Parton's Jolene and Lenore is a fusion of the Big Bopper's Libido with Nikki Sixx's scariest (erotic) dream, Quincy is akin to the girl in Ben Fold Five's Kate, multiplied by the woman described in Sloan's Underwhelmed, divided by the person Evan Dando sings about in The Lemonheads' slacked up, Raymond Carver-esque dope ballad, Buddy."

Makes you glad he took the trip alone.

As for the larger point to this contrived odyssey, well, there really isn't one. While it's indeed ironic that the Mississippi crossroads where blues legend Robert Johnson claimed to sell his soul to the devil can be located via GPS, well, so what? It's still just a road. And the Iowa field where the plane carrying the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly crashed is a field.

And Klosterman knows it.

To make up for a paucity of there there, Klosterman treats us to countless diversions. One minute we're snorting coke in West Warwick, R.I., with a guy who lost his uncle in the Great White conflagration, the next we're exploring why the author no longer spends each afternoon watching Saved By The Bell.

Travel writing can be a wonderful genre because every journey comes equipped with a built-in narrative. However, it can also facilitate lazy writing. In his essays, Klosterman focused on a single idea (like the cultural impact ofReal World) and mined its every implication. Too often in Killing Yourself he puts his finger on something quite meaty - like the idea that Graceland represents "the religiosity of garbage culture" - only to abandon it because, hey, the road beckons.

And even for a professional rock critic, much of his ramblings are oppressively indulgent. Take the 3 1/2 pages on why Radiohead's Kid A was actually a vision that foretold the Sept. 11 attacks. If that's merely awful, the scenario in which he imagines how his Spin colleagues, including his unrequited love, would react to his hypothetical death is nearly unreadable.

Klosterman may not kill us with his insight this time around, but his humor is the book's saving grace. Even on tired subjects like the cultural sludge that is Los Angeles, he manages to find a new twist. Stay too long in L.A., he writes, and "you start to see an integrity in networking." Spend too long in Killing Yourself To Live and you start to see a book in what should've clearly stayed a magazine article.

At least the ride offers a few laughs, which is more than I can say for most Woody Allen projects.

John Dicker's book, "The United States of Wal-Mart," was recently released from Tarcher. He lives in Denver.