As a non-expert in urban theory, I can hardly presume to marshal a surefooted command of postmodern and postcolonial analysis in critiquing Michael Dutton’s elaborate theoretical edifice. One thing, however, is certain: Beijing Time is a terrible read. Since misery loves company, perhaps I should inflict a bit of the prose upon our readers.

On the city’s Bajiacun garbage dump: “As religion moves between the sacred and the profane, garbage moves between city and country. Reincarnation is guaranteed, because trash never dies. Bajiacun becomes its version of limbo.” Fashion “is the embodiment of modernity. Ever deceptive in its telling of time, fashion teases and seduces death, but survives itself by reviving the corpse of garbage. Like fashion, trash is eternal. Garbage of fashion, and fashion of garbage, are phenomena of modernity, the signs of progress, and the objects of entertainment. …And both are doomed, rotating in the permanence that is the eternal return.”

What? If Mr. Dutton and his co-authors penned this for other academics, they ought to say so and save us the agony. If not, then Mr. Dutton sorely overestimates the lay reader’s familiarity with Hegel, Bataille, de Certeau, Benjamin and the word “mimetic.” And I suspect even some academics—to say nothing of the general public—would very much like a cogent, intelligently structured portrait of what makes Beijing tick.

Instead, Beijing Time wanders between dissociated vignettes that string together half-baked similes, impenetrable jargon, mixed metaphors and run-on sentences. Like Beijing’s temples, parks, palaces and museums, occasional flashes of interesting information dot the sprawling gray prose. But unlike Beijing’s cityscape, the book’s worthwhile nuggets of historical interest are hardly worth the slog.  

Of Beijing’s vast new “Egg”: “resembling something straight out of Mars Attacks!...[t]his spaceship is called the National Grand Theater. ‘We come in peace,’ say the Martians of the movie before blasting everything around them to smithereens. This building, just by its very presence, is one big blast at the political past.” Terrible.

The more concrete assertions are, the less correct they sound. The city’s “ring roads have established a new, open and ever-expansive, metaphor of the state, one built upon economic instead of military might.” This might be news to Taiwan. “Power, it seems, no longer grows out of the barrel of a gun but comes through property investment.” Been to Lhasa lately?

Neighborhoods like Jiaodaokou (just north of the Forbidden City) and Sanlitun (full of embassies, bars, business, and high rises) are repeatedly called “suburbs.”  This can only be unusual, unexplained jargon, or ignorance.

Words like “might,” “suggest,” “speculate,” “to a degree,” “comment,” and “in other words” infest the pages. Strange lapses into chattiness or profanity are painful to endure. At karaoke, “within half an hour we are just one more roomful of drunken…businessmen letting off steam by telling Frankie boy Sinatra that we did it our way.” Dusted by spring winds, the National Grand Theater looks “less like a source of dreams than a pile of shit.”

More’s the pity. Events in Beijing are exerting ever-greater pull around the globe, and in 2008 the public would be well served by a discussion of the city’s layout, geography, mentality and history. The architectural changes have been tremendous, and demand examinations wider in scope than the book’s focus on this highway overpass or that hotel. The few pages allotted to migrant workers is disproportionate to their huge role in shaping the city’s architectural and social landscape.

Between the karaoke parlors, the trash-heaps, the musicians, the old neighborhoods, the politics and the history tour, a readable and even fascinating book might have been written. In fact, some books have: Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones is deservedly praised as a page-turner that weaves together disparate stories about China in a compelling, readable fashion.  Moreover, Mr. Hessler manages to do so with tolerably decent similes and without losing a sense of the broader forces that unite the strands of his stories. And he’s trying to digest a whole country over thousands of years, whereas Beijing Time fails within a much narrower scope of space and time. It would be too easy to say that you couldn’t pay me to read Beijing Time. But, if you’re reading this, then you already have.

Mr. Frisch is a free-lance journalist who studied in Beijing.