Though it embarrasses me to say so, I read with interest Steven Gaines’s “The Sky’s the Limit” (Little, Brown, 288 pages, $26.95). Yet even as I did so, I could not help recalling a question that Baudelaire famously posed in a different context: What man of honor would allow himself to be caught holding such a volume? In the act of reading it, and doing so with pleasure, I felt sucked into its tawdry orbit and sullied in the process.

Mr. Gaines’s theme is the top end of Manhattan’s residential real-estate market. It is a sign of the times that this subject, rather than being the focus of a wonkish policy report or a mere footnote in a larger work, now comes triumphantly into its own, gobbling up everything in its path. For a certain kind of New Yorker, you are where you live.

There has always been an element of this in Manhattan, but never raised to such a fever pitch as it is today, ignited by that combustible collision of scarcity and snobbery. As a consequence, the real-estate reflex, that inexhaustible curiosity about peoples’ dwellings and how much they paid for them and what the coop board was like, has entered into the genetic coding of New Yorkers in a way that is without parallel in any other city or at any other time.

When not fawning abjectly, Mr. Gaines gives us a useful rundown – rich in anecdotes – about the subtle or not-so-subtle differences among Fifth Avenue, Park, and East End, or between Central Park West above and below 82nd Street. A nod is even made to TriBeCa and Time Warner Center, but these are clearly less appealing to the author, since they have nothing to do with old money or the pretensions to it. Mr. Gaines also provides a useful discursus into the origins of the condominium, as well as the history of such prestigious buildings as the Dakota, the Ansonia, and 820 Fifth Avenue.

It would seem that, in Mr. Gaines’s worldview (since he has written a similar book about the Hamptons), everything in existence – from Alpha Centaurus to Pindar to the manatees of the Bayou – derives its crucial status from its relation or lack thereof to Manhattan real estate. The various realtors who sell the apartments (among them Edward Lee Cave, Linda Stein, and a character named A. Laurence Kaiser IV), are the intellects of this narrative, and are presented in tones better suited to the Swedish Academy on the bestowal of a Nobel Prize. Those who gain possession of a trophy apartment (Mr. Gaines discusses everyone from Henry Kissinger and Tommy Hilfiger to Sigourney Weaver and Jerry Seinfeld) are discussed in bleatings of awe that are frankly antithetical to the free state in which we live.

Worse still, you may be certain that there is a legion of people behind Mr. Gaines who have bought this worldview wholesale. When publishers commission books, they usually have some idea how many copies they can sell. In this case the people mentioned in this work and their hangers-on would, by themselves, be quite enough to turn a profit.

But then there are all those others who really are not in the game, the ones who live in the “classic sixes.” Thought they cannot aspire to the imperious altitudes of the Paleys or the Cronkites, at the very least they are higher up the evolutionary ladder than those studio-inhabiting bohemians of the East Village, Brooklyn, or – egad! – the outer boroughs. These readers will doubtless purchase this book with the greatest zeal, and, in consequence, see the last flicker of light vanish from their souls.

Mr. Gaines and many of his readers would have you think that, when all is said and done, they are merely fascinated by the parade of human folly, which they review with a philosophic detachment that exempts them from the stigma of caring about such things. Don’t believe it. For it is very much in the nature of postmodern snobbery to state outright what one is doing and to hope that that candor will disarm criticism.

In fact, there is at work here a far deeper shallowness, if you will, one you see especially in publications like New York and the Observer – for which Mr. Gaines writes – that are required reading for the animal in question. The core conviction of this creed is that the quest for status explains everything worth knowing about anyone worth knowing, that nothing of importance exists outside of status, that everyone wishes to obtain status, and that those who claim otherwise are either liars or lunatics. Indeed, one man, Tom Wolfe, has gone so far as to elevate the quest for status to a philosophy of life.

But in the course of reading this book and of being asked to fawn along with the author, there comes a moment when, at the highest pitch of adulation, the great world that Mr. Gaines describes begins to shrink into almost ineffable paltriness. One is reminded of a far earlier discussion of real estate, that scene in “Paradise Lost” in which the rebel angels, in all their pride, saunter into their sumptuous new palace of Pandaemonium. And then a marvel occurs:

They but now who seemed
In bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless – like that pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount…