Pity poor David Brancaccio. He hosts a radio program on National Public Radio about how to get rich, while struggling along on middle-class wages himself. If he were any good at what he did, you’d think, he’d be one of those rich folks, rather than merely interviewing them on his show.

In his book, Squandering Aimlessly: My Adventures in the American Marketplace, Brancaccio says he decided to figure out just what he would do if somehow he did become rich. He says that, until he figured out what he personally would do with wealth, he couldn’t "have anything meaningful to say about other people’s money." And, of course, he has to answer questions about others’ money all the time. He says that, during this time of great wealth for many, he gets so many questions about earning and spending money that he feels like "a chiropractor at a convention of contortionists."

So, like Dickens’s Samuel Pickwick, Brancaccio is off on a series of episodic adventures.

The account of that journey is so full of self-deprecating and often hilarious detail that Brancaccio may even find himself making a stack of money on the royalties.

Brancaccio first visits a "Business Opportunity Fair" in California, where he’s encouraged to invest in unlikely business propositions such as dispensers of no-fat snacks. He then hangs out in Las Vegas with "very serious older women, wearing fanny packs filled with coins, [who] sit at the machines grinding through their stashes with the grim faces of seamstresses in a sweatshop."

While his goal is purportedly to understand the uses of excess wealth, he ends up writing primarily about his encounters with people who have none. He touches down, chapter by chapter, everywhere from Long Island to Pasadena.

He waxes eloquent over a blue moon in Wyoming. He chats up a drifter named Wayne in the high desert of Nevada. He gets to know a custodian, also named Wayne, on the streets of Manhattan. He talks with a fiddler in Lubbock, Texas. He meets retirees in Tucson. He complains about the weather in Seattle. He even ventures to France, where he interviews a naked accountant.

Brancaccio never really gets around to answering the question with which he begins. In the end, it’s clear that what Brancaccio wanted to write is a road-trip book. He even sprawls himself across the front seat of a convertible for the book jacket photo, dimly evoking classics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or On the Road.

Not that that’s a bad thing. While his account of his visit to the largest indoor shopping mall in America will leave you as bored as Brancaccio evidently was, other chapters reflect his enthusiasm for a given place, particularly Las Vegas. You almost suspect he has written the book for the opportunity to drive through the California desert a la Hunter S. Thompson—minus the hallucinogens, of course.

"A trip to the capital of gambling—I’m sorry, gaming—was always a foregone conclusion," he writes. "I had never been there before, and the pilgrimage presented such a convenient excuse....I turn onto the highway and the wind shifts. As I hit the curve the pattern of turbulence courses over the windshield and into the Mustang’s cockpit. The burbling sounds like thousands of tiny voices screaming with joy, very much like the sound you hear between tracks on early live Beatles recordings. Sirens are luring me onto the rocks."

Like most books of this sort, Brancaccio tends to touch all-too-lightly on too many subjects, shifting midparagraph from conversations with the locals, to anecdotes about his childhood, to non sequiturs about the uses and abuses of wealth. But the effect is pleasant—a lot like listening to a skilled radio host fill up air time with interesting fluff.

If you want, you could get annoyed at Brancaccio’s obvious desire to be another Jack Kerouac. Surely, you’d get more thoughtful ideas about the uses of accumulated wealth if you were to rent Fiddler on the Roof and listen to Tevye singing "If I Were a Rich Man" to the chickens. But never mind: This trip with Brancaccio is so light and funny that it’s easier to forgive him for his self-absorption, and to just go along for the ride.

Tristram is a free-lance writer based in San Jose, Calif. She can be reached at claire@tristram.com.