STALKING BRET EASTON ELLIS

How empty can the lives of young, rich, beautiful people be? Find out in this jaundiced novel of contemporary mores.

Hollow dissolution comes in East and West Coast flavors in these interleaved narratives of college-aged singletons with wealthy, indulgent parents. Part I takes place at a liberal arts college in New England where an incestuous tangle of undergrads–sarcastic would-be novelist Nicole, Byronic musician Dexter, upper-crust bastard Wes, little-girl-lost Lanie–pause occasionally in their random hookups and drug-fueled partying to mope, with sly literary allusions, about the meaninglessness of their random hookups and drug-fueled partying. Part II shifts the scene to Los Angeles, where a different but intersecting group of kids enjoy a long summer vacation. The lives of these well-heeled Californians are even shallower–the cocaine more copious, the couplings more transient, the life goals restricted to cosmetic surgery and a berth in the entertainment industry. As the title hints, the authors walk in the footsteps of the master of Consumer Realist sagas of post-Reagan gilded youth. Their characters inhabit a social universe defined by musical tastes and designer-brand accoutrements. The men are preening narcissists obsessed with their abs, the women desperate waifs who wispily remember an age of innocence before the sexual debaucheries of middle school, and everyone expresses an inarticulable unhappiness by quoting muzzy rock lyrics. Weiss and Wallace sketch this world with a polished prose style, a fine ear for dialogue and pop culture and a wicked satirical edge. Unfortunately, the story comes to seem as dazed, monotonous and lightweight as its interchangeable characters. The straight-A Cal-Tech physics major is as vapid as the aspiring Playboy bunny, and their Lohan-esque excesses seem correspondingly unserious. As the Sadies and Sarahs and Samanthas trudge blearily from one party and bed to the next, even their parents have trouble telling them apart. In the end it’s almost impossible to keep track of who’s snorting what and screwing whom or why–and harder still to care.

A glittering, accomplished, but rather callow tale of a latter-day Lost Generation.