JOHN Q. GOTHAM.(lif of average New Yorker)

According to Kevin O'Keefe, whose new book, "The Average American," chronicles his hunt for the most statistically typical person in the United States, the average American drives a car (eight years old, no vanity plates) and owns a home (permanent, freestanding, occupied by 2.62 people, with a washing machine, a dryer, an outdoor grill, and a private lawn requiring forty hours a year of mowing). He lives within fifty miles of the town where he grew up, has a listed phone number, and is regularly in bed before midnight. Fine enough for most of the country. But what about the average New Yorker?

To investigate this question, O'Keefe agreed, on a recent drizzly afternoon, to devise a sort of city census. His first stop was what passes, around here, for heartland--a Starbucks in Times Square. "O.K., let's start with what we know," O'Keefe said, poring over a sheaf of government records. "The average New Yorker has no owner-occupied dwelling, no car." O'Keefe's formula for pinpointing averageness is as follows: find statistics that reflect majority preferences and apply them to a given population, winnowing the pool until only one candidate remains--a perfect match. For his nationwide survey, he explained, he used only "affirmative" factors (for example, having a household pet, eating ice cream at least once a month) as criteria for advancement; no one could be advanced for something he or she didn't have or hadn't done. It was pointed out that, in New York, not having things is the norm. "In that case, let's do 'commute by bus or subway,' " O'Keefe said. "That will eliminate a lot of people in Queens who drive."

Another tenet of the O'Keefe method is subject participation, which makes for a demographic portrait that is distinctly bottom-up. "I decided that I would only be led to future criteria by people I met during my journey," he writes. Like many people given to tropes of questing and conversion, O'Keefe, a former marketing executive who lives in Murray Hill, was once unhappy with his life, which he approached, he writes, "with the blinders on toward maximum performance." He says that he wrote the book to overcome his fear of the average. (The project could also be seen as an elaborate apologia: O'Keefe, who is forty-four years old, recently married and is planning a move to the suburbs.) "I don't mind going to barbecues anymore. I associated them with being dull, and that's not the case," he said. "I really love the everyday." To the streets, then.

After a brief study of the statistics, it was decided that, along with not owning a home or a car, the average New Yorker would be single (56.6 per cent), live in a building that has more than ten units (53.9 per cent) and that was built before 1960 (67.2 per cent), and have been born in a different state ...