A MASSIVE SWELLING

If you think the title is a naughty double entendre, you’re right, but there are few other subtleties in this flamboyantly profane lambasting of the “perverse deformity” of fame.

Salon and San Francisco Examiner columnist Wilson uses this collection of essays to lash out acidly and angrily at the culture that has made glittering stars of talentless musicians and plasticized performers. (She doesn’t think much of the people who love them or want to be them, either.) Her targets include baby-faced singers like New Kids on the Block and the producers who pander to their delirious preteen audiences, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Las Vegas, plastic surgery, the Academy Awards, and people like Bill Gates who have so much money that it’s hard to imagine how they might spend it. Easy marks? Yes, but that doesn’t make them less worthy of assault, not the least because it yields a good read. Wilson pushes far beyond the distant disdain or I’m-one-of-the-gang acceptance of most pop culture critics when it comes to phenomena such as Leonardo DiCaprio or Britney Spears. She pities the young artists who abandon dignity, generosity, and hard work for warped lives that lead them to believe their own press releases. In fact, celebrities are “just like other human beings, only advertised . . , into major leading brands, like dog food or shaving cream.” Some chapters are overwritten, the content swamped by the author’s gleefully outrageous metaphors (as ubiquitous here as black eyeliner among the Goths). Other chapters are profoundly disturbing; the one that peeks into the New Kids on the Block mailbox, for example, offers an experience something like discovering that your cookie-baking neighbor is a stalker. Fair warning: X-rated language throughout.

Rhinestone-studded prose, best taken in small doses, but with a backbone of rectitude that gives it substance.