In Leed’s novel, an aspiring creative navigates the grim despair of trying to make it in Hollywood.

Jace Kron came to Hollywood to be a screenwriter, but on the cusp of his 30th birthday, he has yet to make an impression. A promising web series never took off, and he’s since bounced from one shallow, nerve-wracking party to the next, trying to forge the connections he needs to finally make the art he wants to make. Jace’s friend Shane got lucky with a Netflix show, and their relationship is now characterized by the intense differential of power: Shane has money and a social and professional network, and he throws parties for people whether they like it or not; Jace, meanwhile, is tormented by this proximity to success, ruminating bitterly on his choices while breathing deep of the materialism he desires but can’t afford. For him, this lifestyle is exhausting: “He has to be everything” in order to grab and hold people’s attention, a writer, an actor, a producer, and more. Every single interaction is an opportunity, and must be treated as such, and in the end every possible moment of life, from the most mundane meal to the most outrageous explosions of emotion, must become grist for the mill. Leed’s quiet, sad reflection on life, art, and the attention economy provides a well-drawn and recognizable modern take on a familiar story, with a protagonist who genuinely loves the arts but struggles to reconcile that love with the disaffected culture that surrounds it. His sexuality also offers a different emotional valence to the trade of sex for favors: In the classic model, a young woman submits to an older man who acts as a gatekeeper, but Jace sees peers and potential colleagues in the more successful men he encounters. Notes like these will strike a chord with any reader whose sense of self has ever been bound up in all-encompassing yearning.

A clear-eyed, cold, but nonetheless sympathetic fictional interrogation of what a person will sacrifice for success.